by Heather A. Fowler

Created on: September 22, 2011   Last Updated: September 28, 2011

In parts of the world where autumn brings a change of seasons and nature begins to go dormant in preparation for winter, the symbolism of things such as leaves turning and falling from the trees often stands for deterioration, death, and dying.  Living things that flourished in winter wither, die, and begin to decompose in the earth. It is also a time when people come in from outside and hunker down in preparation for the cold and storms of winter. For humanity in general, autumn symbolizes the evolution from youth to a more mature part of life, full of wisdom and knowledge over enthusiasm and innocence.

Fall is the harvest season as well, when the spoils of the year’s labor are gathered and plenty becomes visible for all eyes to see before much of it is put away in preparation for the leaner months. This is why the horn of plenty and Thanksgiving are such central symbols of autumn. Emotionally, the fall can be symbolic of melancholy – after the bright, warm, active days of summer, sunlight grows shorter, days cooler, and those fun times are gone for another year.

Autumn symbolism is a natural dichotomy. It is both beautiful and sad. Depending on how a person feels about winter, it may be the best time of year, containing as it does the beginning of the holidays with the joy of Halloween. It’s the return to school, the edge of excitement. It’s returning to sports teams (or at least watching football and basketball) and other after school activities. Playing in piles of raked leaves and watching squirrels and chipmunks gather their stores for winter. The stunning display of foliage turning and falling is a spectacular site, so popular that some regions can count on a huge tourist influx during this brief, colorful period in the fall.

Writers have always been fascinated with both sides of this dualistic symbolism, and used it in all kinds of literature. Poetry, of course, is the most obvious source of literary symbolism. Poets such as  Whitman, Browning, Frost and Yeats use autumn extensively in a variety of ways. Yeats, for example, has a famous poem named ‘To Autumn, ’ which follows the season in detail from beginning to end. Yeats anthropomorphizes aspects of fall such as the harvest, and the overall effect of the article stands as an allegory for aging and death.

Classic literature contains many uses of fall as symbolism. For example, in ‘Great Gatsby,’ after Gatsby realizes that ‘his’

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