Frederick Philip Grove in November

Frederick Philip Grove begins his autobiography, In Search of Myself (1946), with a prologue that was originally a separate essay, also entitled "In Search of Myself". In this essay Grove captures perfectly the essence of a November day in Canada, which is also the essence of November, a month of shadows and cold. Indeed, the month of November begins the Celtic season of Samhain, a time when the spirits of the dead walk and communicate with us. This is my experience of November, always profoundly experienced, and something I tried to communicate in my poem, "November", published in Girouard Avenue (2009).

I would have included the quotation below from Grove's introduction in my poem had I remembered it from when I used to teach the book back in the late 1970s in Canadian Literature. I remember much discussion of Grove's literary deception--his falsifying the events of his life, and also reading D.O. Spettigue's marvelous FPG in which Spettigue exposes the truth of Grove's life--in Louis Dudek's graduate seminar at McGill back in the early 1970s.

Here's the passage I'm referring to from Grove's introduction:

It was a dismal November day, with a raw wind blowing from the north-west and cold, iron-grey clouds flying low--one of those [Ontario] days which, on the lake-shores or in a country of rock and swamp, seem to bring visions of an ageless time after the emergence of the earth from chaos, or a foreboding of the end of a world about to die from entropy.