Heat (Motif)
Although we probably associate fall with cooler weather, in “Autumn” Clare repeatedly emphasizes the presence of heat in the landscape. Sometimes that heat is purely physical, as in the boiling hot spring in the first stanza and the “burning hot” ground in the penultimate line. Elsewhere, it is a holdover from summer, as when he writes of the parched ground and the dried up grass: relics of the hot, dry season that still mark the cooler autumnal landscape. Finally, heat appears in figurative language, when Clare writes of the “hill-tops like hot iron.” The hill-tops themselves are not hot, but by associating them with heat, the poet further centers heat within the world of the poem.
Gold (Motif)
In the final stanza, Clare describes the rivers burning “to gold” and the “liquid gold” in the air. Sunlight is often described as golden, because of its warm color, and because we see both gold and sunlight as beautiful. Clare, however, does not simply use gold as an adjective, but employs the comparison more literally, as though the light has literally turned water and river to molten gold. The effect is a surreal landscape, where reality gives way to something strange and awe-inspiring.
