Autumn is usually treated as a funeral, but Owen gives it an afterlife. In the first stanza the "browns, the olives, and the yellows" do not simply rot. They die and are "swept up to heaven," as though colours had souls. Up there they keep working, glowing "each dawn and set of sun" until Christmastide. When snow leaves the land "pale for them," they "fell back," pouring "down the snow-drifts" in a last flare of fire and water. The stanza is a small invented myth explaining why winter sunsets blaze across snow. Nature's loss turns out to be a loan to the sky.
The second stanza turns that myth toward a person. The "sun-brown and the summer-gold" now blow from "your face" into the winter winds. The poem doesn't say whether this is a fading tan, greying hair or a simple change of season in someone's looks, and the openness helps it. "Paler beauty" falls on the brows "snowing," so the beloved is treated like the landscape. The consolation comes in a single word, "But." What fades will "gleam with spiritual glinter," just as the dead autumn colours did. The final line, "through those snows my looks shall be soft-going," gives the speaker a role. Judging by the wording, the glow is partly a matter of how he looks at her, and his gaze passes gently over the paleness rather than flinching from it.
The form quietly supports this turn. Each stanza has five lines rhymed ABABB, and each ends on three lines sharing one sound. Count the syllables and a difference appears. Every line of the first stanza has ten, while every line of the second has eleven. The extra unstressed syllable gives the second stanza its soft, falling endings: "winter" and "glinter," then "blowing," "snowing" and "soft-going." The poem gets gentler as it moves from story to address.
The rhymes also change in kind. The first stanza closes on "glowed," "pale-snowed" and "flowed," all past tense and all finished, with the vowel stretching so the lines seem to run downhill like the colour on the drifts. The second stanza closes on present participles, so the action never completes. The colours are "blowing," the beauty is "snowing," the looks are "going." The myth was a story that ended, but the promise is still under way.
Owen's vocabulary is handmade. "Pale-snowed," "snow-drifts," "sun-brown," "summer-gold" and "soft-going" are compounds that feel pressed together rather than borrowed from ordinary speech. Many of them carry both colour and touch, as with "soft-going." "Glinter" is a rarer, glossier cousin of "glitter," and it sits beside the abstract "spiritual" so that something intangible seems to sparkle. Alliteration threads the ear throughout: "flamed and flowed," "sun-brown and summer-gold," "spiritual glinter." The repeated "pale" is a quieter link. It describes the land in stanza one ("pale for them, pale-snowed") and returns as "paler beauty" on the beloved's brow. The same word crosses from landscape to person, so the argument is built into the vocabulary as well as stated.
Readers who know Owen mainly through his war poems, such as "Dulce et Decorum Est," may be surprised by this one. There is no battlefield here, only a lyric of colour and sound. Its concern with what survives loss is still recognisable, though the tone is tender rather than angry. The poem is also tightly argued for ten lines. It moves from a myth, through a turn, to a promise, and it keeps the promise modest. The verbs are "shall gleam" and "shall be," not "will be restored." Nothing returns unchanged. The summer colours do not come back to the face. They become light, and the poem suggests that being seen lovingly is how that transformation happens.