Fall, leaves, fall
BY EMILY BRONTË

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;
Lengthen night and shorten day;
Every leaf speaks bliss to me
Fluttering from the autumn tree.
I shall smile when wreaths of snow
Blossom where the rose should grow;
I shall sing when night’s decay
Ushers on a drearier day.

Emily Brontë’s ‘Fall, Leaves, Fall’ explores powerful enough visual themes. For the narrator of the piece, probably a voice for Brontë’s consciousness, the evolution from the autumnal equinox to the winter solstice is one of the best times of the year, when the days grow increasingly shorter, and the nights, of course, grow longer. As though the speaker is petitioning winter to come faster. They want the leaves to fall, they want the flowers to go away. The repetition of “fall” and not of “die” is an interesting choice that underscores the changing season over the actual death of the natural phenomena. The use of personification here brings the speaker’s perspective into the leaves so often associated with the fall season. The final two lines are a strong way of closing off the poem by reiterating its most important theme. The “drearier day” is the most striking aspect of winter that the speaker cares so much for. This is the heaviest implication yet that the yearning for winter, so heavily evident in the rest of the poem, is tied to an intrinsic element of the speaker’s personality.

Source: Poem Analysis