October is the cruellest month?

Is Autumn "Herbst" in German because it's the most herbacious time of year? Evidently not, but it's still nice to think so. (Nor a backformation. Shame.)

While I still believe that the beginning of A Canticle to the Waterbirds is betrayed by its ending, which become too forthright and wordy (compare the first and second-to-last stanzas!), giving the whole the feel of an even less subtle nature poem of Robinson Jeffers, that is perhaps a minor flaw compared to the one just discovered to me: namely, that this is a Christian, and I believe even Catholic, poem, yet waterbirds are nearly all heretics, and followers of one of the older and most perennially popular heresies at that: they are deniers of Original Sin and affirmers of the perfectibility of man.