Poetrybounding: How Should You Dress Based on Margaret Cole’s The Falling Leaves Poem?
Poetry has an aesthetic power that can transcend many boundaries. The influence of imagery in the appreciation of a poem gives the audience a more pronounced and impactful emotional understanding of its contents. Illustrations and paintings can go ways to mastering the visual appeal of poetry, breaking the boundaries of words. In the same vein, fashion has the potential to be an interpretative medium for the internalization and personal emotional expression of this literary form. Different colors, garment shapes, and accessories are cards that can be combined in various ways to form the image and main message behind a particular idea, which in this case, derives from a poem. This article will explore the visual appeal of Margaret Postgate Cole’s The Falling Leaves.
While specific interpretations linger on the parallel between leaves and soldiers, the poem presents a connection between fall and winter that serves a more aesthetic purpose and permeates the melancholy of its contents. The Falling Leaves is singularly powerful when nature becomes an extension of the poetic persona, representing their feelings as if both the outside and the inside influenced one another. The conversation between how visceral feelings influence the perception of an outer scape and then how the presentation of such environment feedbacks into the initial emotional state is also very prominent in fashion. The poem is as follows:
“Today, as I rode by,
I saw the brown leaves dropping from their tree
In a still afternoon,
When no wind whirled them whistling to the sky,
But thickly, silently,
They fell, like snowflakes wiping out the noon;
And wandered slowly thence
For thinking of a gallant multitude
Which now all withering lay,
Slain by no wind of age or pestilence,
But in their beauty strewed
Like snowflakes falling on the Flemish clay.”
The poem’s central message relates to the tragedy of WWI. Its epigraph mentions November 1915 as its setting, connecting the idea of autumn’s falling leaves with the soldiers’ death as the “gallant multitude.” But the way Cole inserts this essential detail is so subtle, coming from an outside perspective, a detached yet heartfelt position, that it lingers in the background as a clue to the poem’s real context and a manifestation of its melancholic undertones. Still, it does not provide The Falling Leaves its ultimate aesthetic prowess, as poetry can be read separately from its original setting. Cole’s descriptions about nature define its visual appeal as the autumn colors give away to the snow of coming winter. She peppers her writing with strong descriptive words to give weight to the idea of fall as a transitional period of farewells and endings, which concludes in the transformation of leaves into snowflakes, a force that is all-encompassing as it covers the floor and transforms it into a uniform white mass. Nature is inevitable, so the poetic persona can only feel and mourn its effects.
Colors bring forth conceptual propositions that can represent both a physical state and an emotional connotation, illustrating those forces of nature. Autumn has a whole palette of warm colors related to it, ranging from red to yellow to orange, but orange seems to be the best option because it is an intermediary color, it contrasts nicely with the cold blues of winter, and because clay usually is orange-tinted. Burnt orange is an even better shade since it more accurately depicts the leaves’ decaying quality, their brown light. Due to its connection with the act of falling and the Flemish soil, both a burnt orange pair of shoes and layered silk wide-leg pants fit well with the article’s proposition, with silk displaying the leave’s fragile nature. Winter, in turn, is mostly made of whites, greys, and blues and, as pointed out before, features snow that covers the fallen bodies. The best option to depict snow’s thick, “wiping out” lyrical representation is a white wool cardigan styled with a white beanie. That would then form a white upper-half to contrast with the orange bottom-half, depicting a stationary motion with white falling over the orange; snowflakes covering up the leaves.
However, even though the war motif is not as central to the poem, it still has a significance that propels the need for its depiction in the outfit. From what I have already built, the model is still missing a shirt. It is in a t-shirt that the “Galant multitude” can be featured in the overall look. I found a blue-grey garment from the Kansas City National WWI Museum and Memorial, which follows the winter color pallet, but any t-shirt depicting soldiers could fit the proposal. And to finally establish the connection between soldier and leaf, a silver leaf-patterned bracelet finalizes the look as it is the ultimate blend between winter and fall: the silver of snow wraps the petal, located in the arm, a position that is near and horizontal to the t-shirt.
In sum, the look I designed based on The Falling Leaves encompasses bold dark colors that dialogue with bright whites and greys, a conversation in motion that is very reminiscent of a transitional November period between Autumn and Winter, but that also address the metaphor of war. However, poetry aside, the outfit can lose its white parts and remain blue and orange to be worn in a summer environment, where the white doesn’t overshadow the opposition between the contrasting colors. In the end, a poem can be, and many times should be interpreted differently by each reader, so my guide is only a glimpse into the realm that connects both fashion and poetry.
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