Throwback Thursdays” at ClimbingSky feature posts I wrote over a 15 year period for various blogs. This was first posted on October 22, 2011.

When I lived in Chicago I would occasionally go to a little bar to read and study over a pint of Guinness. And to watch Cubs games in the spring and fall. One of the waitresses, who was young and pretty and very much in love with a med student at the University of Chicago, was an on-again off-again French Literature student. Seeing me reading Yeats one day she said, “You should read Belloc. Everybody in Chicago reads too much Irish Literature. Irish poetry is depressing, just like Irish music.”

“October” is fine example of what Belloc in his poetry does best. It is certainly a fine poem for an October day.

Enjoy!

October
Look, how those steep woods on the mountain’s face
Burn, burn against the sunset; now the cold
Invades our very noon: the year’s grown old,
Mornings are dark, and evenings come apace.
The vines below have lost their purple grace,
And in Forreze the white wrack backward rolled,
Hangs to the hills tempestuous, fold on fold,
And moaning gusts make desolate all the place.

Mine host the month, at thy good hostelry,
Tired limbs I’ll stretch and steaming beast I’ll tether;
Pile on great logs with Gascon hand and free,
And pour the Gascon stuff that laughs at weather;
Swell your tough lungs, north wind, no whit care we,
Singing old songs and drinking wine together.