September Castles

First hints of our condition manifest:
Spite in the wind, mist-gauze across the moon,
Light chill, the spider’s filaments, blanched grass,
And two days as warm as the south change nothing at all.
A morning comes when you know this cannot end well.
Soon it will be no time for gathering in gardens
All too soon, my dears, it will be the weather
For Brahms quintets, for leaves drifting triste past the windows
Of those in their rooms alone for the duration,
For whom this is no time to build. Those now alone
Are going to remain so through this estranging season
Of reading, of writing emails as detailed as letters,
Of watching dry leaves grow sodden on empty pavements.
Rilke said this in lines that I last read in Edinburgh
With my most beautiful aunt in her later age
When, many things gone, she remembered those verses in German.

The Scottish writer and scholar, Peter Davidson, in his note to September Castles, describes his poem as “a variation on Rilke’s Herbsttag”. Perhaps variation is too modest a word for Davidson’s complex enterprise. Not a version or free translation of Herbstttag (Autumn Day), September Castles paraphrases a little of Rilke’s poem, relocates it to a Scottish setting and a digital age near ours (see those “emails detailed as letters”) and seems to intensify the impending loss, before resisting it. Rilke begins his poem expectant, ready to celebrate the fulfilments of summer before broaching the sadder season where, in John Felstiner’s translation, “[w]hoever has no house now will build none”. He prays (in Felstiner’s words again), “Command the last fruits to be full in time;/ grant them even two more southerly days, / press them toward fulfilment soon …” Davidson begins with sterner, northerly portents (“First hints of our condition manifest”) and asserts that “… two days as warm as the south change nothing at all”.

“Soon it will be no time for gathering in gardens,” Davidson warns, and the urgency of the voice is suggested by the lack of end-of-line punctuation before he goes on, “All too soon, my dears …” It seems possible that the poem is set during the Covid-19 pandemic, and its wintry view includes a future lockdown. The “castles” of the title, though associated, of course, with Edinburgh and with the Duino Castle of Rilke’s Elegies, might suggest a more domestic fortification.

The address “my dears” is hard to put a voice to: the tone is surely not ironical, though knowingly familiar. Does it suggest a privileged circle of people other than “those in their rooms alone for the duration …”? The aesthetic consolations, however, even of Brahms, will thin: the leaves, romantically “drifting triste past the windows” will, even for the readers and email writers, “grow sodden on empty pavements”. Davidson’s rhythms expand as if to emphasise the expanding time for those “alone for the duration”. The portents are read more fatally than in Herbsttag.

And then, with beautiful ease, Rilke, in line 14, enters the autobiography of the poem, and the speaker becomes newly present. It is his private memory which has enfolded the poem’s procedure. He remembers the occasion when he and his “most beautiful aunt” (the aunt who is more beautiful than other aunts, or simply – as I think – someone extremely beautiful?) shared Rilke’s verses. His remembering is owed to something remarkable in her failing memory, “[w]hen, many things gone, she remembered those verse in German”. Memory is the summer that flares in the gathering autumn shadows of September Castles.

I admire the way this poem expands regional and familial intimacy with a timeless European cultural environment. It took me unexpectedly to Paul Celan’s Corona, a poem which, as Felstiner points out in his critical biography of Celan, echoes in conclusion the beginning of Autumn Day: “Lord: it is time.” Celan is almost joyous as he evokes the lovers’ autumn. Davidson redeems a bitter season with the story of a personal encounter that is also an encounter with poetry.

September Castles is from Arctic Elegies, published in 2022 by Carcanet Press. For a sense of the whole collection, Derek Turner’s review published on The Brazen Head is worth exploring. You may also be interested in reading more about Davidson and his writing in the Guardian’s review of The Last of the Light.

• This article was amended on 5 September 2023. An earlier version had “verse” instead of “verses” in the final line of the poem.