Autumn arrives in this poem as an instruction rather than a description. "Go, sit upon the lofty hill," Elizabeth Barrett Browning begins, and the first stanza tells the reader where to stand, where to look and how to hold the body: "Sit still -- as all transform'd to stone, / Except your musing heart." The landscape is full of movement, with waving woods, wild waters, a fading sun and departing flowers. Against all that, the watcher's stillness is striking. Only the heart stirs, and "musing" lets it do two jobs at once, thinking and feeling.
What it muses on is loss. The second stanza sets memory against the present. You once heard "the green woods sing / Beneath the freshening wind," but now the same wind is a destroyer, since "every breath that stirs the trees, / Doth cause a leaf to fall." The wind has not changed, only the season and the listener, and the poem is quietly about how identical things feel different once change has set in. From here it widens from landscape to human life. Mirth is "like that wind," a visitor we "cannot bear" when "change is on the heart." The repetition in "Gay words and jests may make us smile, / When Sorrow is asleep; / But other things must make us smile, / When Sorrow bids us weep!" shows that real comfort must be a different kind of thing from entertainment. Sorrow is capitalised and personified, first asleep and then giving orders.
The fourth stanza is the most intimate. "The dearest hands... The dearest voice" is a parallel pair, and the exclamation "no more!" breaks the calm of the verse. The poem never says whose hands or voice these are, and that vagueness lets any reader supply their own. The stanza closes by bringing the wind back. When youth fades, its joys will arrive "as, on those sighing woods, / The chilling autumn wind." The sentence is knotty, but it seems to suggest that remembered happiness itself turns cold. The word "refresh'd" quietly echoes the earlier "freshening wind," so the same vocabulary is used for the pleasure and for its undoing.
The form helps this along. The poem is in ballad measure, with longer and shorter iambic lines alternating and rhyme on the second and fourth lines of each quatrain (around/sound, depart/heart). It sounds plain and hymn-like, which suits a poem that has the waters "hymn an autumn sound." Rhymes also echo across the poem. "Mind" and "wind" rhyme in both the second and fourth stanzas, tying memory to the thing that wrecks it, and "heart" closes both the first and third stanzas. The frequent dashes act like held breaths, giving the speaker a halting, thinking-aloud quality.
The final stanza is a turn, and it is a change of direction for the eyes. The commands become negative: "Hear not the wind -- view not the woods." Instead the reader is told to look "o'er vale and hill," and then up. "In spring, the sky encircled them -- / The sky is round them still." The sky is the one part of the scene autumn cannot touch. The opening "Go" is now answered by a defiant "Come": "Come autumn's scathe -- come winter's cold -- / Come change -- and human fate!" The speaker invites the worst, and can do so because of the last couplet, "Whatever prospect Heaven doth bound, / Can ne'er be desolate." Here the sky and Heaven become one image. The frame around the landscape is also the frame around a life.
The poem is worth reading because it earns its consolation. It spends four stanzas on fading summers, absent voices and the chill of memory before it offers any comfort, and the comfort works by changing where the speaker looks, not by denying grief. Barrett Browning is remembered as a major Victorian poet, and this poem, judging by its plain diction and steady meter, shows how simple means can carry a large idea. Seasons change and people are lost, but what contains them does not.