Anyone who has walked through a place in a happy mood, then gone back to it heartbroken, will recognise the experience Thomas Warton fits into fourteen lines. A traveller crosses Surrey in summer, "blithe", and returns in autumn, "full pensive". The route is the same, with Epsom's meadows and Hascombe's wooded hill, but the traveller is not. The poem is really about how much of any landscape we bring with us.
The opening is built to feel like a leisurely summer ride. One long sentence unrolls across the first five lines, and its inverted word order ("where Epsom spread / 'Mid intermingling elms her flowery meads") delays the main verb until the journey is well under way. The vocabulary is all light and softness: suns that "play'd", "verdant scenes", elms mingling, groves "array'd". Even the "romantic steep" of the hill, a phrase probably nearer "picturesque" than "amorous" in this period, belongs to a place made for pleasure. Nature is dressed up and on show, and the speaker, with "mind serene", barely notices.
Then comes the turn, and it arrives mid-line, not where a sonnet usually pivots. "I journey'd blithe. Full pensive I return'd;" is two moods on either side of a full stop, with the sentence rhythm snapping short after all that spreading. The reason follows at once: "hopeless passion". The rhyme helps, since "return'd" and "burn'd" bind the homeward trip to the fire in his breast. That fire sits oddly against the weather, because the scene is now "Wet with hoar mists".
The word "gaudy" is a nice touch. It could simply mean brightly coloured, but beside the mists it carries a faint disapproval, as if autumn's finery looked showy and false to someone in grief. The speaker also admits he passed this scenery "in careless indolence". Three "-less" words quietly map his change of state: "careless" before, "hopeless" now, and "cheerless" at the close. He sees the place more sharply than he ever did, but unhappily. Line 11 compresses the idea: the autumn colours are where "past delight my recent grief might trace". "Trace" works two ways. Grief can follow the outlines of the old pleasure, and it can retrace its steps over the same ground. "Past" and "recent" stand on either side of the line, with delight and grief held between them.
The ending is what makes the poem more than a tidy case of the landscape matching the mood. We might expect the speaker to be consoled that Nature shares his sorrow. Instead he calls it a "Sad change" that she wears "a congenial gloom". "Congenial" means kindred or in sympathy, and he finds this sympathy useless. He wanted her to "chase" his mood away, as if cheerfulness were something the world could drive out of him, and so he wishes for "her green attire, and wonted bloom". The personification has run through the whole poem: Epsom spreads "her" meads, and Nature has clothes. Now she is a friend who has dressed to match his misery when he needed a contrast. The poem suggests that a grieving person does not always want agreement, and sometimes wants to be argued out of the feeling.
The form supports this. The rhyme scheme runs ABBA CDDC EEFGFG, which follows neither the Petrarchan nor the Shakespearean pattern exactly. The rhyme of "spread" and "meads" is only approximate to the ear. The last four lines alternate their rhymes, so "gloom" in line 12 is answered by "bloom" in line 14. What he has and what he wants are forced into a rhyming pair, close enough to touch yet opposite in meaning. The exclamation mark makes the line sound half like a sigh and half like a complaint. The iambic pentameter stays steady throughout, but the long sentences and Latinate word order make the grief sound composed and almost formal, as if the speaker is holding himself together by being elegant.
Warton was an eighteenth-century poet and scholar who later became Poet Laureate. This sonnet shows why a short poem can matter. It takes the familiar idea that landscape reflects feeling and then questions it, since mirroring a mood does not mean consoling it. In fourteen lines, a summer scene and an autumn scene sit on top of each other like two transparent sheets, and what shows through is the speaker's heartbreak.