Autumn is a season that wraps us in its warm embrace and paints the world in vibrant hues.
There’s something magical about the crisp air, falling leaves, and the gentle shift in light that inspires poets to capture its essence.
Dive into the collection of 10 stunning poems about autumn that celebrate the beauty and melancholy of this enchanting season.
Let’s get started!
#1 “Autumn” by Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
The morns are meeker than they were,
The nuts are getting brown;
The berry’s cheek is plumper,
The rose is out of town.
The maple wears a gayer scarf,
The field a scarlet gown.
Lest I should be old-fashioned,
I’ll put a trinket on.
Emily Dickinson’s poem about autumn is my top choice because it perfectly captures the season’s essence.
The vivid imagery in her poem captures the gentle transition of the season and the warmth and nostalgia it brings together with it.
It also makes me reminisce of those autumn mornings that fill me with wonderful sounds of nature and the rich and vibrant hues all around me.
#2 “Autumn” by Walter Savage Landor
Mild is the parting year, and sweet
The odour of the falling spray;
Life passes on more rudely fleet,
And balmless is its closing day.
I wait its close, I court its gloom,
But mourn that never must there fall
Or on my breast or on my tomb
The tear that would have soothed it all.
#3 “Autumn Sonnet” by Charles Baudelaire
I hear them say to me, your crystal eyes,
‘Strange love, what merit do you find in me?’
Be charming and be still! My heart, disturbed
By all except the candour of the flesh
Prefers to hide the secret of its hell
From you whose hand would rock me into sleep,
Nor will it show the legend writ with flame.
Passion I hate, and spirit plays me false!
Let us love gently. Eros in his den,
Hiding in sombre ambush, bends his bow.
I know his arsenal, his worn-out bolts,
Crime, madness, horror-oh pale marguerite,
Are we not both like the autumnal sun,
My o so cool, my fading Marguerite?
#4 “Autumn Wild-Flowers” by Madison Julius Cawein
Like colored lanterns swung in Elfin towers,
Wild morning-glories light the tangled ways,
And, like the rosy rockets of the Fays,
Burns the sloped crimson of the cardinal-flowers.
#5 “Autumn” by Walter De La Mare
There is a wind where the rose was;
Cold rain where sweet grass was;
And clouds like sheep
Stream o’er the steep
Grey skies where the lark was.
Nought gold where your hair was;
Nought warm where your hand was;
But phantom, forlorn,
Beneath the thorn,
Your ghost where your face was.
Sad winds where your voice was;
Tears, tears where my heart was;
And ever with me,
Child, ever with me,
Silence where hope was.
#6 “Autumn” by John Clare
Autumn comes laden with her ripened load
Of fruitage and so scatters them abroad
That each fern-smothered heath and mole-hill waste
Are black with bramble berries–where in haste
The chubby urchins from the village hie
To feast them there, stained with the purple dye;
While painted woods around my rambles be
In draperies worthy of eternity.
Yet will the leaves soon patter on the ground,
And death’s deaf voice awake at every sound:
One drops–then others–and the last that fell
Rings for those left behind their passing bell.
Thus memory every where her tidings brings
How sad death robs us of life’s dearest things.
#7 “To Autumn” by Madison Cawein
I feel thee as one feels a flower’s,
A dead flower’s fragrance in a room,—
A dim, gray grief that haunts the hours
With sad perfume.
Thou charm’st me as a ghostly lily
Might charm a garden’s withered space,
With the pale pathos and the chilly
Hush of thy face.
I hearken in thy fogs; I hearken
When, like the phantom of dead Night,
With immaterial limbs they darken
The day with white.
With wrecks of rain and mad winds, heaping
Red ruins of riven rose and leaf,
Make sad my heart, O Autumn! sweeping
The world with grief.
#8 “Autumn Violets” by Christina Georgina Rossetti
Keep love for youth, and violets for the spring:
Of if these bloom when worn-out autumn grieves,
Let them lie hid in double shade of leaves,
Their own, and others dropped down withering;
For violets suit when home birds build and sing,
Not when the outbound bird a passage cleaves;
Not with dry stubble of mown harvest sheaves,
But when the green world buds to blossoming.
Keep violets for the spring, and love for youth,
Love that should dwell with beauty, mirth, and hope:
Or if a later sadder love be born,
Let this not look for grace beyond its scope,
But give itself, nor plead for answering truth –
A grateful Ruth tho’ gleaning scanty corn.
#9 “Autumn Treasure” by Richard Le Gallienne
Who will gather with me the fallen year,
This drift of forgotten forsaken leaves,
Ah! who give ear
To the sigh October heaves
At summer’s passing by!
Who will come walk with me
On this Persian carpet of purple and gold
The weary autumn weaves,
And be as sad as I?
Gather the wealth of the fallen rose,
And watch how the memoried south wind blows
Old dreams and old faces upon the air,
And all things fair.
#10 “Autumn Rain” by D. H. Lawrence (David Herbert Richards)
The plane leaves
fall black and wet
on the lawn;
The cloud sheaves
in heaven’s fields set
droop and are drawn
in falling seeds of rain;
the seed of heaven
on my face
falling – I hear again
like echoes even
that softly pace
Heaven’s muffled floor,
the winds that tread
out all the grain
of tears, the store
harvested
in the sheaves of pain
caught up aloft:
the sheaves of dead
men that are slain
now winnowed soft
on the floor of heaven;
manna invisible
of all the pain
here to us given;
finely divisible
falling as rain.