Fall foliage is spring flowers in a different form

When leaves fall with a chilly fall breeze, people tend to find it eerie and restless. However, the fall breeze also has a magical touch to turn leaves red and yellow as if the spring breeze brings a shower of petals. Nature truly brings a new gift for each season. The poet tells people not to prejudge the eerie and desolate feeling of fall mountains.

With such a relaxed mindset to accept the changes of all things as how nature harmoniously works, it won’t be difficult to find the beauty of spring flowers in autumn leaves. Life may seem easier to deal with and warmer. While the spring breeze and fall frost seem conflicting – the first symbolizes warmth and the latter coldness – from the perspective of the poet, the two have common ground as fall leaves represent a different type of spring brought upon by the fall breeze and frost.

Yang Wanli is a prolific poet of the Southern Song Dynasty with over 4,200 poems. His landscape poems were especially great as a result of his belief that writing a poem is not about looking for phrases behind locked doors – a poem naturally occurs as one wanders around. “Flowers and the moon have no time to be idle every year and mountains and rivers are afraid to be found by you,” younger poet Jiang Kui wrote in praise for Yang Wanli who never neglected natural features and included them in his poems.