When I finished painting the indistinct outlines of autumn-colored trees along the distant foothills, he suggested, “Why don’t you add a small house there? It would bring the scene to life.”
“Here life, would be represented by him,” I replied, pointing to the tiny, solitary, orange-tinged grasshopper perched on a fragile twig among the harvest stalks on the right side of my painting. “As summer slips away, even the birds have flown far beyond… but he remains…” I emphasized.
An autumn landscape awakens a faint, unfamiliar sense of solitude, something carried on the quiet departure of summer. Yet it does not feel sorrowful. It carries a depth—an ever-present truth that one lives with, without fully naming or recognizing. With the turn of the season, nature too, seems to partake in this cosmic sense of contemplative loneliness.
And yet, with the colors of the landscape, the soundscape changes too. The birdsongs fade but are replaced by the sounds of insects, like grasshoppers, and rustling of falling leaves. The poetry and music in nature continues in these new sounds – a small, fragile persistence, yet no less eternal – after all, it takes us towards the spiritual stillness of autumn.
Though it did not inspire my art, I was exhilarated to find a poem by Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830–May 15, 1886) that celebrates exactly this loneliness that I have attempted to capture in it.
As she always does, in her famous, succinct, puzzling arrangement of words, Dickinson reflects on one more enduring paradox in existence – noticing what is rarely noticed—the expansion of loneliness and the deepening of what remains unspoiled. She suggests that such a moment, while tinged with solitude, draws one into a sense of identification that opens onto eternity. And there comes a moment – both flawless, and complete.
Further In Summer Than The Birds
Further in Summer than the Birds
Pathetic from the Grass
A minor Nation celebrates
It’s unobtrusive Mass.No Ordinance be seen
So gradual the Grace
A gentle Custom it becomes
Enlarging LonelinessAntiquest felt at Noon
When August burning low
Arise this spectral Canticle
Repose to typifyRemit as yet no Grace
No furrow on the Glow,
But a Druidic Difference
Enhances Nature now
Complement this with another gem of a poem by Emily Dickinson, “Bloom“.
Article & Art ©2025 Gyaneshwari Dave
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