"I saw old Autumn in the misty morn stand shadowless like silence, listening to silence"
About this Quote
Autumn arrives here not as a pretty backdrop but as a presence so drained of contour it becomes a kind of weather for the mind. Hood’s “old Autumn” is personified, yes, yet he’s deliberately robbed of the usual props: no harvest gold, no crisp apples, not even a clear body. “Stand shadowless” makes the season feel unmoored from ordinary physics, as if the sun itself has withdrawn. It’s a spectral image, but not gothic for spectacle’s sake; it’s gothic as a technique for expressing emotional suspension.
The line turns on an audacious paradox: “like silence, listening to silence.” Hood stages a scene where there’s nothing left to hear except the fact of not hearing. That doubling is the subtext. It suggests a world emptied out - not dramatic grief, but the quieter, more modern feeling of numbness, when even nature seems to pause and wait for something it can’t name. The misty morning matters: fog doesn’t just obscure; it flattens distance and erases edges, making time feel thick. Autumn becomes “old” not simply because it comes late in the year, but because it carries fatigue, a bodily knowledge of endings.
Contextually, Hood wrote in a Romantic-to-Victorian hinge moment, when lyric nature imagery increasingly had to coexist with social strain and urban melancholy. This isn’t Wordsworthian communion. It’s the season as a listening figure - a watcher at the threshold - embodying the uneasy stillness before decline hardens into winter.
The line turns on an audacious paradox: “like silence, listening to silence.” Hood stages a scene where there’s nothing left to hear except the fact of not hearing. That doubling is the subtext. It suggests a world emptied out - not dramatic grief, but the quieter, more modern feeling of numbness, when even nature seems to pause and wait for something it can’t name. The misty morning matters: fog doesn’t just obscure; it flattens distance and erases edges, making time feel thick. Autumn becomes “old” not simply because it comes late in the year, but because it carries fatigue, a bodily knowledge of endings.
Contextually, Hood wrote in a Romantic-to-Victorian hinge moment, when lyric nature imagery increasingly had to coexist with social strain and urban melancholy. This isn’t Wordsworthian communion. It’s the season as a listening figure - a watcher at the threshold - embodying the uneasy stillness before decline hardens into winter.
Quote Details
| Topic | Autumn |
|---|---|
| Source | Line from the poem "Autumn" by Thomas Hood, as printed in collected editions of his poetry (appears in 19th-century collected works of Thomas Hood). |
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