And he that will to bed go sober
Falls with the leaf in October.

The couplet is a comic, proverbial-sounding warning: going to bed “sober” (i.e., without drink or conviviality) is whimsically linked to “falling with the leaf in October,” an image of autumnal decline and mortality. The joke depends on exaggerated cause-and-effect—abstinence is treated as a kind of premature withering—so the lines read less as moral counsel than as satirical inversion of it. The seasonal metaphor (“leaf in October”) evokes inevitable falling/aging, suggesting that joyless restraint is akin to giving in to life’s autumn too soon. In Fletcher’s dramatic milieu, such rhymes often function as songs or snatches of popular wisdom used to characterize a speaker’s wit or worldliness.