Six lines, one falling motion: that is the whole architecture of "Green Leaves." It begins in a moment of display and ends in a moment of loss, and the hinge between them is a single word, "Only." The central idea is an old but durable one, that beauty and fragility travel together. The more brilliantly something shines, the more exposed it is. The poem never states this outright, and that restraint is much of its appeal.
The grammar carries the meaning. The first two lines have no main verb: "The leaves flowing in the wind / Displaying their green elegance." We get only participles, "flowing" and "displaying," which keep the leaves in unfinished motion. A true verb arrives only in line four: "They glisten." The effect is of admiration held in a long breath. Then the grammar turns passive: "to be brought down." The leaves, who were doing the flowing and displaying, become things acted upon, and the one acting is withheld until the very last line. The wind appears twice. In line one it is scenery ("in the wind"). In line six it is the agent, the thing that decides. The word is the same but its role has changed completely.
The word choices support this. "Flowing" is what water does, so the leaves seem liquid and weightless. "Displaying" suggests a performance, and "elegance" is a human, almost social word, so the leaves come across as poised and slightly aware of being watched. The poem doesn't scold them for it, but a display implies an audience, and the ending suggests that the audience makes no difference.
The two similes work in a similar way. A "shard of colored glass" is a strange comparison for a leaf. A shard is a broken piece with a sharp edge, so the brilliance is already tied to breakage, which quietly prepares the ending. Judging by the imagery, the comparison also captures how light passes through a thin green leaf and makes it glow. The second simile, "stars in the sunlight," is slightly impossible, since stars cannot be seen in daylight. A generous reading is that the leaves borrow a night-sky sparkle and carry it into the day, a brightness that doesn't quite belong and so can't last. Both images also lift the eye upward, from glass to stars. "Brought down" reverses that direction, and the poem's movement runs from high shimmer to ground.
There is no rhyme and no regular meter, but the lines have a shape. They lengthen from about seven syllables to nine by line four, the fullest and most musical line, with its soft, hissing sounds in "glisten," "stars" and "sunlight." Then the lines shorten abruptly to six syllables each. The final line is made of heavy, slow stresses: "By the winds solemn touch." The text omits the apostrophe in "winds," but the sense is plainly "the wind's," and the sound is unchanged. "Solemn" is a word we associate with funerals and oaths, which is an odd choice for a breeze. "Touch" is gentle rather than violent. The wind doesn't tear or rip. The fall feels ceremonial and inevitable, not cruel. The poem also ends without a full stop, so the sentence trails off and the falling doesn't quite finish.
Notably, the poem never names autumn, death or time. It leaves the reader to supply them, and that restraint is where its force comes from. A critical reader could say that the comparisons, glass and stars, are fairly familiar, and that "green elegance" is more abstract than vivid. The poem's strength lies less in fresh images than in how it arranges them: the delayed verb, the pivot on "Only," the shrinking lines, the wind's change of role.
For a school reader, that is the poem's real value. In six short lines it shows how grammar, line length and word order can carry an idea about transience without a single explanatory statement. It asks us to notice how the shimmer is built, and then to feel what it costs when the wind arrives.