An elm with only one bough turned to gold is a fitting place for a poem about mixed feelings to begin. The tree is neither summer-green nor bare, and Edward Thomas's "October" stays in that in-between state. The first stanza is a patient inventory of a hillside: leaves slipping into the grass, small white mushrooms, harebell, scabious and tormentil, blackberry and gorse, drifting gossamer, scolding squirrels. The second stanza turns inward. The speaker says the scene is so lovely that he might be as happy as the earth is beautiful, but only "Were I some other." He cannot quite claim the feeling. Yet he leaves the question open: "Some day I shall think this a happy day." The central idea is that we often recognise happiness only afterwards, and the names we give our moods, here "melancholy", may be wrong.
The first stanza holds a lot of calm attention. There is no "I" in it, only things being looked at. The syntax slows the reader down. "Lets leaves into the grass slip, one by one" puts the verb "slip" last, after the leaves have been let into the grass, so the sentence falls the way a leaf does. The next sentence piles up its list of grass, mushrooms and flowers and holds back its verb until "Bow down to", so the pause feels like the stillness it describes. Thomas gives the landscape small wills of its own: the gossamers "wander at their own will", the wind "travels too light" to disturb the birch leaves. Then comes the comic note of the squirrels, who "scold" with steps "heavier than birds'". The rhyme ties that homely word to the stanza's grandest image, so "scold" answers "gold" and a little domestic grumbling punctures the splendour.
The rhyme scheme is quietly clever. In the first stanza, "fern" is the one line left without a partner. Its rhyme arrives only in the second stanza, in "turn", the very word where the speaker imagines joining the earth's cycle. "Might" also echoes the stanza's earlier "white" and "light", as if the speaker's hesitant "now I might" were being drawn back toward the scene he is watching. The rhymes are not always exact. "Cool" and "beautiful" only half-match, and "melancholy" is rhymed with a bare "be", a faint, unemphatic ending that suits the mood. The metre is loosely iambic pentameter, but it stays close to speech, with sentences running across line-breaks and the voice stopping to think.
The second stanza begins with a paradox of the senses: the scene is "to the touch" no more cool than it is "warm to the gaze". It is fresh "As Spring", so autumn looks like a second beginning. Then the grammar changes from observed fact to hypothesis ("might", "Were I", "But if"). The speaker looks at a list of flowers, "violet and rose, / Harebell and snowdrop", each coming "at their season due", and sees that the earth changes without effort. Then he thinks of the gorse "that has no time not to be gay", a plant so constant in its brightness that he is almost its opposite. "Turn" carries two meanings here: the turning of the seasons and a turning of mood. Nature manages both without strain, and he does not.
The last three lines hold the poem's real feeling. "Who knows?" is a plain question, and the dash before it shows him stopping himself. The promise that follows is in the future tense, and the verbs "blackened and obscured" are used against the word "melancholy", not the day. His mood, he suggests, may be a kind of stain on the name rather than on the experience. The final line is bent into an awkward inversion, "Shall no more blackened and obscured be", which sounds like a voice reaching for a reassurance it cannot quite phrase.
Thomas, who was killed at Arras in 1917, came to poetry late, after years as a prose writer and reviewer. I won't claim the poem is about war, since nothing in the text says so, but a reader who knows how little time he had may feel "some day" more sharply. What makes the poem matter is its honesty. It refuses both easy cheer and easy gloom, and it gives an autumn afternoon the same uncertain, hopeful attention that most of us give our own moods without noticing.