Apoptosis / Art: A Relative Digression?

The notion of leaves falling from trees or petals falling from flowers, is, like the images on Keats’ Grecian urn, forever in the act of destination but never reaching an end. Leaves in the act of falling in autumn have never been quite the same since reading Dante’s famous lines from Inferno (Canto 3). The allusion is different in Dante because he gives the leaves the momentum of movement—they are making the choice (“the leaves remove themselves”)—and their source, the branch, is conscious of the loss:

   Charon the demon, with eyes like glowing coals,
making signs to them, gathers them all in; he beats
with his oar whoever lingers.
   As in autumn the leaves remove themselves one
after the other, until the branch sees all its raiment on
the ground . . . . (Durling, trans. III.109-113)

Dante, of course, drew from Virgil’s scene in Book VI of The Aeneid, where the cold morning air cause leaves “to yield their hold” in a less decisive struggle:

                                 . . . as many souls
As leaves that yield their hold on boughs and fall
Through forests in the early frost of autumn,
Or as migrating birds from the open sea
That darken heaven when the cold season comes
And drives them overseas to sunlit lands. (Fitzgerald, trans. VI.418-423)

And Shelley, who perhaps drew from Virgil, Dante, and Milton, among others, in his “Ode to the West Wind”, replaces branches and boughs with the autumn wind, which is an invisible breath that bears a wildness that enchants leaves away from a source of life:

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes . . . . (1-5)