Before "Leaves" says anything about trees, it plays a trick on the ear. The opening stanza splits the word into two meanings: one kind of leaf "means to go away from something forever," while the other "is just a pretty thing to look at." The noun and the verb sound identical, and the poem uses that coincidence to follow a single leaf from bud to soil. It asks whether something that is admired for a season and then lost has really gone, or whether beauty is only half of what a leaf is.
The form suits that questioning. There is no rhyme and no steady metre. The lines run as long as the thought does, and commas often stand where full stops might be expected, so the poem feels like someone thinking aloud. The stanza lengths follow the leaf's life. The decline stanzas shrink from six lines to four to three, as if the poem is losing material along with the leaf. Then the last stanza grows back to five lines, which suggests that something has been returned.
The imagery is plain but sometimes surprising. Young leaves are "thin like paper, / But strong like glass, / Yet still breakable." The second simile begins as praise and then corrects itself. Glass is strong and also the most easily shattered thing the poet could have named, and the line ends on "breakable" to make the point. The stanza about growing up is cleverer. "Many things end up a metaphorical green, / and a literal young," the speaker says, thinking of how people are "green" in the sense of inexperienced. Then the phrasing flips: leaves are "a literal green, / and a metaphorical young." The mirrored wording is a small piece of wordplay, and it shows that the speaker sees leaves as stand-ins for human life.
Colour then does the work of time. "Their green turns red, / Their stems harden up," and finally comes "the crinkling brown." Hardening stems read almost like stiffening joints, and "the affects of the world" casts the world itself as a slow, wearing force. (The poem spells it "affect," though "effect" is what the sense calls for.) The key phrase "pretty to look at" appears at the start and returns in the fourth stanza as a shrug: "At least they are still pretty to look at." Two stanzas later, that consolation is withdrawn: "nobody looks at them on the trees anymore." The sentence is the poem's sharpest moment. It suggests that a leaf's worth, in human eyes, depends on being watched, and that the watching stops once the beauty goes.
The ending then changes direction. "The leaves leave the tree" is a pun that closes the loop opened in line one, but the departure is no longer "forever." The leaves "enter the soil," and "everything decomposes, / They leave the physical world, / Only to feed the physical word." The last word there is probably a slip for "world," though the accident is a fitting one, because the leaf does end up as something like a word, a message passed on. The closing lines, "So I guess the leaves are different in fate, / After all," are tentative, and the phrase "I guess" is the first time the speaker appears. The meaning is open. The two kinds of leaf from the opening may turn out to differ after all. Or leaves may differ from the things that simply vanish. Either way, the poem has quietly contradicted its own first stanza: leaving here is not final, because the leaf goes on to feed new growth.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it reaches this consoling idea without sounding sure of it. It starts from a familiar autumn subject and a bit of wordplay, and it is honest about how little we value what has stopped being pretty. Then it offers a different kind of worth, the leaf's usefulness to the ground, almost as an afterthought. For students, the poem shows how simple vocabulary and a single pun can carry a real argument about beauty, attention and death, and how a poem's structure can mirror the cycle it describes.