The bittersweet’s balls o’ gold
To show the coal-red berries packed within.
Autumn is apparently, however, little to his liking, and in his attitude toward it he reveals the Southerner; for it is not only Kentucky flora and fauna, but Kentucky climate which Mr. Cawein celebrates, treating Autumn not with the buoyancy that to a Northerner renders it a season of lusty infection, but almost wholly in its aspect of sadness. In his volume called Undertones he has a group of poems upon
the withdrawing year, sounding only this note, which is the prevalent one when touching upon the same theme in his other volumes. He glimpses
… the Fall
Like some lone woman in a ruined hall
Dreaming of desolation and the shroud;
Or through decaying woodlands goes, down-bowed,
Hugging the tatters of her gipsy shawl;
and speaks elsewhere of