Autumn arrives in Rolfe Humphries's poem as a loss that the speaker half enjoys mourning, and then, in the second stanza, as an argument he refuses to join. The poem begins by watching summer go and ends by sneering, gently, at the people who insist that winter is no big deal. Between those two moments sits its real subject: the temptation to be consoled too quickly.
The title does some quiet work before the poem even starts. "Song from the Gaelic, Maybe" announces a borrowed, folk-like voice, and the hedge of "maybe" is both modest and a little sly. Whether or not any Gaelic original stands behind it, the poem sounds like an old lament: short lines, plain words, a refrain-like repetition. The "maybe" lets Humphries wear that voice without quite claiming it.
The first stanza is built from the language of fading. Summer's "numbers" (an old word for verses or music, so the season is imagined as a song) "fade from eye and ear," and the angler simply "is no more there." Notice how the sentences thin out as the stanza goes. The sigh comes "easy," then becomes "the long-drawn sigh," and the lines themselves seem to exhale: "Going by, gone by." The shift from present participle to past tense is a tiny drama in itself, summer caught mid-departure and then already over. Then comes the neat, chiming reversal, "Dream and illusion, / Illusion and dream," where the words swap places like a pair of mirrors, as if the speaker can't decide which comes first. The closing image is the cleverest: the fisherman gone "like the fly from the stream." The man vanishes the way the thing he was fishing with vanishes, which makes the human figure as brief and light as an insect. Nothing here is violent or tragic. Summer isn't destroyed; it just slips away, and the verb "gone by" has the mildness of something passing in the street.
The second stanza moves from nature to the town, and the tone changes at once. The rhythm grows brisker and the diction more talkative, almost gossipy: "So many good creatures!" The speaker seems fond of these people and faintly amused by them, in jackets and sweaters, "dressed for the season." But the cheerful ones, "cheery / Out of all reason," get a sharper treatment. Their verbs pile up in a mock-legal heap, "Stoutly maintain, / Avow and aver / And insist on declaring," three near-synonyms where one would do, and the piling-up is the joke. Protesting that much suggests they aren't entirely convinced. What they declare is that "the white wall of winter / Is also a lie." The word "also" is the hinge of the whole poem: if summer was "dream and illusion," they say, then winter is illusion too, so there is nothing to mourn. It is a bracing, even clever consolation, and the speaker will have none of it.
The parenthesis tells us so: "(Oh, not you! And not I!)". It is the most intimate moment in the poem, a stage whisper to a companion, and it quietly forms a pair of two people who refuse to pretend. Their refusal isn't gloomy. It is honest. Winter's "white wall" is a striking image, blank, solid, something you hit rather than walk through, and the speaker seems to feel its weight too clearly to wave it away.
The poem's rhyme is loose and unobtrusive. There is no rigid scheme, only scattered echoes such as "ear" and "there," or "stream" and "dream," that give it a song-like ease without making it sing-song. That restraint suits a poem about not forcing consolation. Its significance lies in this balance: it lets sadness be sadness, tenderly and with a light touch of humor, while gently puncturing the habit of talking ourselves out of feeling it.