Autumn, in this poem, is not a season but a person: a giant who descends a mountain in the first stanza and is dust by the last. Maude Davis Crosno gives the whole turn of the year the shape of a single life, bright and striding in the beginning, slow and tired at the end. What she wants us to feel is how quickly splendor passes, and how strangely hard it is to hold on to once it has.
The portrait of the giant is the poem's showpiece. He wears a costume that reads almost like a child's drawing: blue at the head, lavender at the throat, yellow and green for shirt and shoes, red for a vest. The colors are pure and unblended, which makes them feel loud and a little theatrical, and the phrase "gypsy colors" gives them a flavor of festival and wandering. Notice that the giant is dressed from the top down, the way a mountain's color would run from sky to slope. The poem gets its landscape and its character in one gesture, so that the clothing and the scenery are the same thing.
The language of the middle stanza is all generosity. He "scatters gold" and "scarlet," he walks "painting with vibrant hues," and the poem names specific trees, willow, boxelder, and cottonwood, as if each one were receiving an individual brushstroke. The specificity matters. These are the real trees of a river valley in the Southwest, and the poem trusts them to carry the reader's eye along the water. The giant is both walker and artist, and the verbs keep the two roles side by side.
Then the energy drains out. "Dreaming by the river / The giant grows older / Forgetting his great golden steps." The word "great" and the word "golden" returned from the first stanza, but now they are something the giant himself has lost track of. The poem repeats the phrase three times in all, and each repetition changes its job: first a vivid image, then something forgotten, finally something remembered only by us. The river slows him, the dreaming softens him, and the stanza's short, unhurried lines mimic that drifting.
The fifth stanza is the quietest and perhaps the best. Every color from the opening is taken back down a shade: yellow becomes "straw color," scarlet becomes "umber," and green turns "silken with gray." The brilliant costume has become dull and worn, and the final blow is the plainest line in the poem: "he is dusty and old." After so much lavender and scarlet, the vocabulary itself seems to fade. The poem performs its subject by running out of color.
Structurally, Crosno uses free verse with no rhyme scheme, and the freedom suits her. Line lengths stretch and contract with the action: the long, rolling lines describing the giant's costume and his scattering of color give way to short ones as he grows old. The stanzas are uneven too, as though the poem were not bound to a tidy pattern any more than the season is. The one stray bit of punctuation, a space before the semicolon in the third stanza, is just a typographical quirk, but it reminds us that this is a poem that feels spoken more than engineered.
The ending turns on a parenthesis: "(Though you have not forgotten) / Is gone." That aside answers the opening, where the giant is "dressed in gypsy colors / You do not forget." The poem addresses "you" twice, at the start and at the close, and in between the giant has to go. The parenthetical gives the loss a consoling edge: the season is gone, but the memory of it stays with the reader, so something survives.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It treats autumn as a story with a character who has an arrival, a prime, a decline, and a disappearance, and it does so in plain words and clear color. Beauty here does not endure, but the poem suggests it need not be permanent to be unforgettable, and that the act of remembering is the last thing the giant leaves behind.