Vagabond Song

There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood. So begins one of the most haunting invitations in Canadian poetry. In just a few radiant stanzas, Bliss Carman captures the season's secret pull on the human spirit, that uncontrollable urge to abandon the known world and wander into the wild as the leaves turn. The poem pulses with an almost physical longing, every sight and sound of autumn becoming a summons to leave behind the little cares of civilization. Yet this is no gloomy meditation. Rather, Carman finds in the season's passage a kind of liberation, a permission to be untethered, to move with the turning year. The poem has endured for over a century because it names an emotion most people feel but few can articulate: that autumn is not merely a season but a feeling, a wildness in the blood that calls us outward and onward. For readers who have ever felt the urge to drop everything and follow the road where it leads, this is the poem that understands.