A band concert in a park breaks up as a storm approaches, and by the end of «Willow Grove» the music has been replaced by rain. That is the whole event, but Rolfe Humphries makes it carry a good deal more: the poem is about the end of a season, and about the way pleasure is always closing down just before we are ready to let it go.
The opening line sets the terms. The music is "dissembling," "corrupt, deciduous, and gay." Dissembling means pretending, so the cheerfulness of the band is a mask, and the poem seems to know already that something is wrong. "Deciduous" is the surprising word, a botanical term applied to sound, and it prepares the poem's central trick in the third line: "The leaves come down like notes, the notes / Like leaves." The comparison runs in both directions, so that music and foliage become one substance, both bright, both falling, both about to be swept away. It is a small chiasmus (the phrasing reverses itself mid-line), and the sentence itself seems to tumble.
The form is plain and tight: seven quatrains of iambic tetrameter, rhymed ABAB. The regularity suits the subject, since a band concert is itself an orderly, metred affair, but Humphries lets the pressure show. The second stanza's "they hurry, / Faster than usual" is nearly self-describing, as the sentence hurries over its line-break. Rhymes are sometimes slightly strained or slant, as with "gay" and "away" in the first stanza, "park" and "dark" nearby, and "gone" and "overtaken" in the fifth. The effect is of a tidy surface with a little unease underneath, much like the "dissembling" music.
The poem's attention narrows beautifully. First there is the whole crowd and the weather ("the air is prematurely dark"), then the wind clearing the square of "litter, leaves, and leaflets." Then Humphries picks out one figure, a musician who lingers "reluctant, from his scene / Of triumph." The word "triumph" is quietly funny and moving at once, because a park bandstand is hardly a grand stage, yet to him it was one. He "snaps his case" and leaves "unhappy at the season's close," and the next stanza turns him into a small tragedy: "By his own sorrow overtaken." The storm is catching up with everyone, but he is overtaken by something that was already inside him. The poem never tells us who he is, which makes him stand for anyone who dislikes endings.
Then the bandstand itself, the "ugly kiosk," is left standing like a "frail island in a desert lawn." Here the imagery shifts from leaves to emptiness. The park, which a moment ago was full of sound, becomes a wasteland with a shipwrecked structure in the middle of it. The word "forsaken" has a religious weight that the poem then develops: light breaks through the cloud and falls on "a golden shrine behind a crowd," and it comes "too late." The sun arrives as if to bless the scene, but the people are already running for the "outer iron gate," beyond hearing, beyond recall. Reading the kiosk as a shrine is an inference, but the vocabulary of "shrine" and "forsaken" makes it hard to avoid. What was a place of light entertainment is briefly glimpsed as something sacred, only after everyone has stopped looking.
The final couplet-like image pulls the threads together: "The final drops of music fall / With the first single notes of rain." The verb "fall" belongs to the leaves of the opening, and now rain, the instrument of autumn and of ending, takes over the music's vocabulary. Music becomes weather and weather becomes music. Nothing is lost, only transformed, though the crowd, hurrying and nervous, is too far away to notice.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. Humphries describes an ordinary, slightly comic scene and lets the larger feeling of loss gather without announcing it. The sadness is in the adjectives, the hurrying syntax, and the exact timing of the light, which arrives, like so much in life, just after we have stopped to notice it.