Source identified
“The morns are meeker than they were, The nuts are getting brown; The berry's cheek is plumper, The rose is out of town.”
Small changes in morning, nuts, berries and roses make the season legible through close observation rather than through an abstract announcement that autumn has arrived.
Source note: “Autumn,” Poems: First Series (1890), Project Gutenberg #12242. The title and punctuation follow the represented early printed edition rather than a modern manuscript-based Dickinson edition.
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“Think not of them, thou hast thy music too”
Instead of measuring autumn only against spring, the poem redirects attention to the distinct music of the season that is actually present.
Source note: “To Autumn,” final stanza, in Keats: Poems Published in 1820; Project Gutenberg #23684. The line follows the question “Where are the songs of Spring?” and answers by valuing autumn’s own sounds.
Source identified
“A light exists in spring Not present on the year At any other period.”
Dickinson isolates a quality of spring light that feels distinct from ordinary seasonal brightness, making perception itself part of the encounter with nature.
Source note: “A Light Exists in Spring,” in Poems: Third Series (1896), represented through Project Gutenberg #12242. The Gutenberg text reproduces an early edited Dickinson edition, so punctuation and the editorial title are edition-specific rather than claimed as manuscript-final.
Source identified
“Waking but now, when leaves like corpses fall, And saps all retrocede.”
The late-blooming flower appears precisely as the rest of the season retreats, combining natural decline with an image of delayed emergence rather than simple renewal.
Source note: “The Last Chrysanthemum,” Project Gutenberg #3168. The corpse comparison is figurative seasonal language inside the poem.
Source identified
“Now is the time of plaintive robin-song, When flowers are in their tombs.”
Seasonal decline is compressed into robin-song and buried flowers, giving late autumn an explicitly elegiac atmosphere before the poem turns to the surviving chrysanthemum.
Source note: “The Last Chrysanthemum,” Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), Project Gutenberg #3168. Floral death is poetic seasonal imagery, not literal human bereavement.
Source identified
“Thus meet we five, in this still place, At this point of time, at this point in space.”
The speaker's quiet encounter with small nocturnal creatures is fixed to one precise moment and place, making attention itself the poem's central event.
Source note: “An August Midnight,” Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), Project Gutenberg #3168. The five include the speaker and small creatures gathered around his writing table.