How bravely Autumn paints upon the sky The gorgeous fame of Summer which is fled!

Thomas Hood (1799–1845), best known for his wit and social satire, also wrote lyric nature poems that dwell on transience and loss. These lines come from his poem “Autumn,” a meditation on the season as a kind of afterglow—when summer’s vitality has departed but its “fame” lingers in the richly colored skies and landscapes. Written in the Romantic-era tradition of seasonal reflection, the poem uses autumnal imagery to evoke memory and the poignancy of change, a theme that resonated in Hood’s own life marked by recurring illness and financial strain. The couplet captures the moment when nature seems most splendid precisely as it is passing away.

The couplet personifies Autumn as an artist who “paints upon the sky,” turning the season into an act of deliberate, even courageous, creation. “Bravely” suggests both bold color and a kind of defiance: autumn dares to display beauty in the face of decline. The “gorgeous fame of Summer” frames summer as a departed glory whose reputation survives in autumn’s pageantry—sunsets, russet leaves, and luminous haze. Hood’s phrasing implies that beauty can be retrospective: what we admire may be the lingering trace of what has already gone. The lines thus compress a larger meditation on impermanence, memory, and the bittersweet splendor of endings.