Most poems about autumn go looking for gold leaves and melancholy. This one begins by announcing, flatly, that "The season is over," and then proceeds to treat the end of summer less as a tragedy than as a relief. What the poem is really about is the moment when a shared illusion collapses: the pretence that holiday life could go on indefinitely. Its central idea is that autumn arrives not only as weather but as a change of mood, a collective decision to stop performing leisure and return to the ordinary, more honest business of living.
The first half of the poem is a small catalogue of wear and tear, and it is very funny. "Brown people are beginning to look yellow" turns the suntan, that badge of summer success, into something faintly sickly as it fades. The shoes and clothes get a neat comic symmetry: the white shoes "have been cleaned too often" while the white clothes "have not been cleaned often enough." Both are signs of exhaustion, one from fussing, the other from neglect. Nobody in this poem is glamorous any more, and the speaker seems to find that comforting.
Then comes the pivot: "It is no use pretending / the summer can last forever; / no one wants it to." That last clause is the poem's quiet surprise. We expect nostalgia and get a confession instead. The repeated "we are tired of" that follows ("the sea and sailboats," "cold consommé / on terraces," "wearing shorts / and of sleeping after lunch") sounds like a group of people finally admitting what they have all been thinking. The details are carefully chosen. Consommé served cold on a terrace, sailboats, an afternoon nap: these suggest a comfortable, leisured world, so the boredom is the particular boredom of people who have had too much pleasure. The anaphora gives the passage the rhythm of a list of grievances, mild but cumulative.
The poem's form supports this tone. It is written in free verse, with no rhyme and no regular metre, and the lines vary in length from the clipped "and white clothes" to the longer, more conversational stretches. This looseness makes the voice sound like someone talking, a dry, sensible observer rather than a lyric poet. The short lines slow the reading and let the jokes land, as when the break after "cold consommé" leaves "on terraces" hanging for a beat, as if the speaker were pulling a face.
The second half shifts in both mood and vocabulary. "Let us face the fact" is the language of a committee, and the facts are gentle ones: shorter days, cooler evenings. Then the poem turns practical, and the verbs change from complaint to resolution. "It is time now to think of / trains, old tunes, blankets, and friends." Notice what this list does. Summer's objects were public and outdoors (terraces, sailboats); autumn's are enclosed and intimate. Trains suggest a return to routine and travel with a purpose, old tunes suggest memory, blankets suggest warmth, and friends, placed last, feel like the point of the whole list. Autumn here means a contraction of life into something smaller and closer.
The final lines are the boldest in their plainness: "It is time to write letters / and balance accounts." The poem ends not on an image of falling leaves but on correspondence and bookkeeping. "Balance accounts" works on two levels. Literally it means sorting out money after a spendthrift season. Figuratively it suggests taking stock of one's life, settling what is owed. The ending withholds any grand emotional release, and that restraint is exactly its power. The reader is left with a sense of quiet seriousness underneath the wit.
What makes the poem significant is this refusal of the expected. It takes a season usually draped in sentiment and treats it with irony, tenderness and a little steel. It suggests that endings can be welcome, and that real life begins again when the party stops.