In late August, everything near the speaker is still alive and fragrant—grass renews its green, flower beds wave with colour morning and evening. But one distant lime tree has already begun to yellow. That first hint of autumn feels comfortless and premature, like a quiet warning the rest of the landscape refuses to hear. The speaker reads it as a personal warning too, a reminder that change and decay arrive before we are ready. By the poem’s end, the other trees stand perfectly still under a purple and white sky, yet that lime tree trembles as if it cannot rest. The mood is unsettled and elegiac: a calm summer scene shadowed by an early intimation of mortality.
The Lime Tree — Summary
That lime tree on the distant rising ground (If it was a lime tree) showed her yellow leaves Above the renewed green of wet August grass-- First Autumn yellow that on first Autumn eves Too soon was found.
Comfortless lime tree! Scarce an aspen leaf Like a green butterfly flitted to the ground; There was no sign of Autumn in the grass. Even the long garden beds their beauty brief-- Their mignonette,
Nasturtium and sweet-william and red stocks, And clover crouching in the border grass, And blood-like fuschia, eve's primrose and white phlox And honeysuckle--waved all their smell and hue Morn and eve anew.
But that far lime tree yellowing by the oak, Warning oak, elm and poplar and each fresh tree Shaking in the south wind delightedly, And clover in the closeness of the grass, Warns also me.
And now when all the trees are standing still Beneath the purple and white of the west sky, And time is standing still--as stand it will-- That early yellowing lime with palsied fingers Cannot be still.