As the year turns cold and bare, the speaker grieves for the flowers that once filled the meadows and woods. He names them tenderly—the violet, the wind-flower, the goldenrod—and watches as frost, like a sudden sickness, wipes their brightness from the hills and glens. Even the south wind returns on milder days, searching in vain for their lost fragrance. The feeling is one of quiet, helpless longing, deepened by the gray November rain. Then the sorrow shifts: the speaker remembers a young woman, gentle and lovely, who died in her youth just as the forests dropped their leaves. Her burial in the cold earth echoes the flowers’ vanishing, and he finds a sad comfort in the thought that someone so fair and fleeting should perish with the blossoms. Throughout, the mood is wistful and elegiac—a calm, intimate ache that braids together the death of the growing world and the loss of a friend.
The Death of the Flowers — Summary
The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere. Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead; They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread; The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs the jay, And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day.
Where are the flowers, the fair young flowers, that lately sprang and stood In brighter light and softer airs, a beauteous sisterhood? Alas! they all are in their graves, the gentle race of flowers Are lying in their lowly beds, with the fair and good of ours. The rain is falling where they lie, but the cold November rain Calls not from out the gloomy earth the lovely ones again.
The wind-flower and the violet, they perished long ago, And the brier-rose and the orchis died amid the summer glow; But on the hills the golden-rod, and the aster in the wood, And the yellow sun-flower by the brook in autumn beauty stood, Till fell the frost from the clear cold heaven, as falls the plague on men, And the brightness of their smile was gone, from upland, glade, and glen.
And now, when comes the calm mild day, as still such days will come, To call the squirrel and the bee from out their winter home; When the sound of dropping nuts is heard, though all the trees are still, And twinkle in the smoky light the waters of the rill, The south wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he bore, And sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more.
And then I think of one who in her youthful beauty died, The fair meek blossom that grew up and faded by my side. In the cold moist earth we laid her, when the forests cast the leaf, And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief: Yet not unmeet it was that one, like that young friend of ours, So gentle and so beautiful, should perish with the flowers.