Few poems capture the particular melancholy of an evening spent alone with the past as neatly as "The Blowing of Leaves" by Daniel Whitehead Hicky. A speaker sits before a fire on a November night, and the sound of wind-driven leaves stirs up every autumn he has ever lived through. What begins as a mood of loss ends as something more defiant: a decision to stop mourning and throw the door open to memory instead.
The opening line sets the terms. The blowing of leaves is not outside the speaker but "in my heart," and the sound belongs to "all Novembers I have known." Time collapses here. One night's weather becomes a gathering of many years, and the image that carries this is striking: the leaves cross "remembered skies like comets' light," flaring and dying. Comets are brilliant and brief, and by comparing dead leaves to them the poem quietly makes the point that the years, too, were bright before they vanished.
The second stanza turns the same idea toward the fireplace. The logs "give up each smoldering jewel," a lovely phrase that makes burning wood feel like a slow handing-over of treasure. The comparison is explicit: the embers fall away "one by one, like years." The stanza ends on a harsher note, with ashes that are "cold and cruel" and that "Anonymize the fires they were today." The verb is unusual and a little chilling. Anonymize means to strip away identity, and that is exactly what the poem fears about time: not merely that things end, but that they become indistinguishable, a gray heap in which no individual flame can be recognized. The word also has a clinical, modern ring that sits oddly among the poem's older images, and the oddness adds to the coldness.
In the third stanza the speaker looks away from the past. Outside, "the new leaves fall, / Leaves of an autumn far too new to know." These are the present and future, and he refuses them: "I shall not traffic with them, hear their call, / Nor turn to watch the first swift flake of snow." The word "traffic" makes his refusal sound almost like a refusal of trade. He will not do business with the new season. It is a stubborn, slightly proud stance, and it prepares the ground for the poem's turn.
That turn arrives in the final stanza with a burst of exclamation marks and imperatives: "Kindle the fire again! Let it leap bright!" The gloom of the middle stanzas gives way to a kind of toast. The speaker tells himself to return to his wine, calling himself "proud host / To all the autumns out of Time tonight." The final line is the poem's most memorable: "Swing wide the door, let in each straggling ghost!" Instead of fearing the vanished years, he treats them as guests, even stragglers arriving late to a party. Memory is no longer something that haunts him; it is something he chooses to entertain.
The poem's construction supports this movement. It is written in four quatrains with an alternating rhyme scheme (ABAB), using a steady, roughly ten-syllable line that reads in the manner of iambic pentameter. That evenness gives the opening stanzas a measured, brooding quality, like a slow pulse. Some of the rhymes are full and satisfying, such as "known" and "alone," while others are looser, and the line "Slowly one by one, like years, they fall away" stretches out in a way that mimics the slow dying of the fire. The final stanza's short commands break that stillness and make the ending feel like a decision rather than a drift.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about a common human reaction. Many people feel the pull of the past on autumn nights, and many poems simply sink into it. Here the speaker feels the sorrow fully, admits the cruelty of time, and then answers it with hospitality. The ghosts are not banished. They are let in, and the fire is built up to welcome them.