For centuries, poets have turned to autumn as a mirror for the human condition, a season oscillating between abundance and decline, beauty and loss. In earlier traditions, from Shakespeare to Keats, autumn symbolised the grandeur of nature’s cycle. It was the season of ripeness, harvest, and melancholic reflection.
However, with the arrival of the twentieth century, autumn in poetry took on a more complex, often darker hue. The industrial age, world wars, and shifting social realities stripped the season of its purely pastoral associations. The falling leaf became a symbol not only of time passing, but of cultural and personal disintegration.
Post-1900, autumn poems began to move away from nature’s literal landscape toward the internal, emotional, psychological, and social. Poets such as Rainer Maria Rilke and James Wright found in autumn the vocabulary of solitude, alienation, autumn's beauty tinged with irony or quiet despair.
Here are a few poems that depict how the season evolved with the change in time.
Autumn Song (1870)
By Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Know'st thou not at the fall of the leaf
How the heart feels a languid grief
Laid on it for a covering,
And how sleep seems a goodly thing
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?
And how the swift beat of the brain
Falters because it is in vain,
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf
Knowest thou not? and how the chief
Of joys seems—not to suffer pain?
Know'st thou not at the fall of the leaf
How the soul feels like a dried sheaf
Bound up at length for harvesting,
And how death seems a comely thing
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?
About the peom:
Rossetti’s Autumn Song is an elegy of fading love and life. The repeated phrase “at the fall of the leaf” talks about mortality’s inevitability. The tone is languid, dreamlike, and steeped in melancholy. Autumn becomes a symbol of decline, yet the beauty of rhythm softens sorrow. The poem’s introspective music conveys exhaustion and acceptance. The imagery of sheaves and harvests transforms death into completion. It’s autumn as spiritual twilight, still, sorrowful, serene.
About the poet:
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) was an English poet, painter, and co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. His art blended sensuality with mysticism, bridging medieval and modern aesthetics. Rossetti’s poetry explores beauty, memory, and loss, often in lush musical language. His dual devotion to word and image made him a pioneer of aestheticism.
Autumn Fires (1885)
By Robert Louis Stevenson
In the other gardens
And all up the vale,
From the autumn bonfires
See the smoke trail!
Pleasant summer over
And all the summer flowers,
The red fire blazes,
The grey smoke towers.
Sing a song of seasons!
Something bright in all!
Flowers in the summer,
Fires in the fall!
About the poem:
Stevenson’s Autumn Fires changes the seasonal chores into a child’s celebration. The burning of fallen leaves becomes an act of joy, marking the year’s turning. His simple diction and rhythmic structure capture youthful wonder. The poem contrasts summer’s flowers with autumn’s bright flames, suggesting continuity in change. It evokes warmth, community, and acceptance of time’s cycle. The “song of seasons” celebrates renewal amid decline.
About the poet:
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) was a Scottish novelist, poet, and essayist whose works blend adventure and introspection. Best known for Treasure Island and Jekyll and Hyde, he also wrote lyrical verse for children and travellers. His works reflect a deep love for storytelling and the natural world. Stevenson’s clarity and humanity make his poetry enduringly appealing.
The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)
By WB Yeats
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.
The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?
About the poem:
Written in middle age, this poem contrasts the eternal grace of the swans with the poet’s own sense of loss and change. The “nineteenth autumn” symbolises time’s passing and the ache of mortality. The swans, untouched by age, embody beauty’s permanence. Their flight across the still water becomes a vision of transcendence. Yeats transforms nostalgia into art, finding solace in the persistence of beauty. The stillness of Coole Park mirrors his inward stillness and longing.
About the poet:
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), Irish poet, dramatist, and Nobel Laureate, was a towering figure of 20th-century literature. His early works fused Irish myth with romantic mysticism; his later poetry grew austere and modernist. As co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, he shaped Ireland’s cultural revival. Yeats’s verse marries passion and intellect with haunting lyricism.
Autumn (1902)
By Rainer Maria Rilke
The leaves fall, fall as from far,
Like distant gardens withered in the heavens;
They fall with slow and lingering descent.
And in the nights the heavy Earth, too, falls
From out the stars into the Solitude.
Thus all doth fall. This hand of mine must fall
And lo! the other one:—it is the law.
But there is One who holds this falling
Infinitely softly in His hands.
About the poem:
Rilke’s Autumn portrays the quiet inevitability of falling, of leaves, of earth, of life. Yet, beneath that descent lies divine tenderness: everything is held “infinitely softly” in God’s hands. The imagery of falling becomes an emblem of trust. The poem’s simplicity conceals vast spiritual depth. It transforms melancholy into faith. The rhythm is slow, like drifting leaves. Autumn becomes a revelation of divine gentleness amid impermanence.
About the poet:
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), born in Prague, was one of Europe’s most profound lyric poets. His works, Duino Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus, explore art, mortality, and transcendence. Rilke’s language fuses mysticism with psychological insight. He wrote in both German and French, influencing generations of poets and thinkers. His vision of existence as a sacred transformation remains unmatched.
Autumn Song (1937)
By WH Auden
Now the leaves are falling fast,
Nurse's flowers will not last;
Nurses to the graves are gone,
And the prams go rolling on.
Whispering neighbours, left and right,
Pluck us from the real delight;
And the active hands must freeze
Lonely on the separate knees.
Dead in hundreds at the back
Follow wooden in our track,
Arms raised stiffly to reprove
In false attitudes of love.
Starving through the leafless wood
Trolls run scolding for their food;
And the nightingale is dumb,
And the angel will not come.
Cold, impossible, ahead
Lifts the mountain's lovely head
Whose white waterfall could bless
Travellers in their last distress.
About the poem:
Auden’s autumn is stark and modern, filled with alienation and decay. The falling leaves mirror social and moral collapse. Images of nurses, prams, and wooden figures evoke a mechanised, loveless world. The rhythm, clipped and cold, reflects despair in an age of anxiety. Yet the mountain’s “lovely head” at the end offers faint hope, beauty still exists, though distant. The poem captures the modernist mood: ironic, disillusioned, yet searching.
About the poet:
Wystan Hugh Auden (1907–1973) was an Anglo-American poet whose intellect and technical mastery defined 20th-century verse. His early works reflected political unease; later, he turned to faith and ethics. A master of form and irony, Auden’s influence on postwar poetry was immense. His lines combine emotional restraint with philosophical depth.
Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio (1963)
By James Wright
In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.
All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home,
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.
Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.
About the poem:
James Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” is one of the most haunting and concise portrayals of working-class despair in American poetry. Set against the backdrop of a small Ohio town’s high school football game, the poem captures the weariness of mill workers, the emotional emptiness of their homes. Autumn here symbolises more than seasonal change: it is the time of year when the community’s emotional and physical exhaustion becomes most visible. The poem compresses an entire social history of labour, masculinity, class, and mortality, into twelve lines of fierce, tragic grace.
About the poet
James Arlington Wright (1927–1980) was an American poet renowned for his spare, luminous portrayals of the Midwest and its people. Born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, the setting of this poem, Wright often wrote about industrial decay, alienation, and the quiet endurance of working-class lives. His early work was formal, influenced by classical meters, but his later collections, especially Above the River and Shall We Gather at the River, embraced a freer, more personal style marked by emotional intensity and vivid imagery.
