Autumn Pastoral begins with a gentle, almost comic picture and ends with a flock of geese thundering overhead. That swing from cosiness to menace is the poem's whole argument. On the surface it describes a golden afternoon in the countryside, but underneath it is about time: how quickly it moves, and how little the young notice it moving.
The opening simile sets the tone. Leaves "are tasting autumn in the air" like "old men smacking dry lips over cider." The comparison is affectionate and slightly absurd, and it does two jobs at once. It makes the season a matter of appetite and pleasure, something to be savoured. But it also brings old age into the poem in the very first line. Dry lips, cider, a slow relish for what is left: autumn is being presented as the season of the old before we have met a single young person. Readers who miss this early hint will feel it return, sharper, by the end.
The middle of the poem builds a world of sound and smell and slowness. Woodsmoke "spirals slow and clear," orchards "yawn into the wind," and in "the dangling silence a lone bee's lute / Stitches a yellow seam across the day." That last image is the most inventive in the poem. A single bee is a musician, then a seamstress, its flight line becoming a thread of yellow across the sky. It is a lovely image of repair, of holding the day together, and the loneliness of "lone" quietly undercuts the comfort. Meanwhile the orchards' fruit is "spent swiftly as the years have dropped away." The simile reverses our expectations: we usually say years pass like falling fruit, but here the fruit falls like years, so the natural world is made to illustrate human time rather than the other way round.
The colour palette tightens as the poem goes on. Sumac "ripens redder," goldenrod drifts as "pale, reluctant dust," and by the sestet's close the year is turning "to rust." Notice how the colours cool and corrode: red and yellow become dust, and dust becomes rust. Even the goldenrod is "reluctant," a human feeling given to a plant, as if the whole landscape were sorry to be letting go.
Then come the lovers, who "rise and walk the fields as one, / Pledging eternal love with eager eyes." The word "eternal" is the poem's irony, set down right next to the evidence against it. They are "Blind to the swift year turning now to rust," and the poem refuses to look away on their behalf. There is no sneer in this, though. "Eager eyes" is sympathetic, and the blindness is presented as the natural condition of being in love rather than as stupidity. We are invited to feel tenderness and dread together.
The form supports all of this. The poem is fourteen lines, a sonnet, in largely iambic pentameter, and the rhymes run in a pattern (air/clear, wider/cider, fruit/lute, away/day, sun/one, dust/rust) that is mostly regular but not strictly so. Some rhymes are exact and some, like "air" and "clear," are only near-rhymes, so the poem feels settled without feeling mechanical. The sentences stretch across line breaks, which gives the first twelve lines an unhurried, drifting quality, like the walk itself. Then the final couplet-like pairing of "rust" and "skies" arrives with a heavier beat. "Thundering" and "blackening" are the loudest, darkest words in the poem, and they are saved for last, so the cosy cider-drinking mood is overrun by something vast and migratory.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It never announces that love will fade or that life is short; it lets a bee, a seam of colour and a line of geese do the saying. The pastoral tradition usually offers an idealised countryside as an escape. Here the countryside is lovely and also a clock, and the lovers are walking across its face without hearing it tick.