In ‘Each Year’, autumn becomes a kind of writing. The opening simile turns falling leaves into “words / on a page,” then extends the comparison: those scattered leaves are “punctuations / in time.” That double claim—leaf as word, leaf as punctuation mark—lies at the poem’s heart. Stewart’s speaker looks at a familiar seasonal movement and finds a grammar of endings and releases. The poem’s central idea is not simply that autumn is beautiful, but that the same fluttering motion can carry two opposite meanings: one thing falls and withers, another finds freedom and flight.
The poem is built from four short tercets. The lines are clipped, rarely longer than a few words, and there is no regular rhyme; the rhythm rises and halts as if the poem itself is shedding leaves. Enjambment matters throughout. “Leaves fall like words / on a page” drops the thought from one line to the next, imitating the fall it describes. In the second stanza, “flights / of geese, the / loosening of ties,” the word “the” dangles at the line’s edge, delaying the noun and making the phrase feel loosened. Each tercet ends with a full stop, so the poem’s own punctuation mirrors the “punctuations in time” it names. The stanzas become separate sentences or breaths, and the white space between them is itself a kind of pause. Without a fixed metre, the poem stays close to speech, but its short tercets give it an epigrammatic shape, as if each thought were a leaf settling.
The opening image of leaves as words is not decorative. It makes the year into a page that is written on and then turned. “Summers passing, flights / of geese” shift the focus from falling to departure—geese leave, summer ends, ties loosen. The present participle in “Summers passing” keeps the movement unfinished, as if the season is always in the act of departing. “Ties” works on more than one level: leaves detach from branches, human attachments slacken, the season lets go. The poem does not explain these connections; it places them side by side, letting the reader feel the shared grammar of release.
The pivotal phrase is “Orange ambiguity,” which joins a colour to an abstraction. Autumn leaves and butterflies can share the same orange, and their movements can look almost identical: both are “fluttering.” The collision of the concrete “Orange” with the conceptual “ambiguity” makes an idea visible in colour. That visual confusion matters because the poem has spent three stanzas blurring endings and freedoms. Are falling leaves a loss or a kind of flight? Is a butterfly fleeing the cold or simply dancing? The word “fluttering” hovers between the two possibilities.
The final tercet separates the pair: “One to fall, crinkle / and wither, the other / freedom and flight.” Notice that Stewart does not simply say the leaf withers and the butterfly flies. The words “one” and “the other” keep the pair slightly fluid, so the distinction is earned rather than imposed. “One to fall, crinkle / and wither” compresses a whole process of decay into three verbs, each harder and drier than the last. The crunch of “crinkle” and the dry sound of “wither” oppose the soft alliteration of “freedom and flight.” By the end, the poem has given decay and release equal weight.
What makes ‘Each Year’ significant is its compression. It uses very little language to hold a large tension: autumn as an annual death and as an annual opening into flight. The title, “Each Year,” reminds us that this ambiguity is not a one-time event. Leaves will fall, geese will pass, ties will loosen again. The poem asks us to read the season closely, to hear its punctuation, and to accept that the same fluttering image may be, at once, an ending and an escape.