Fifty Shades of October: 50 of the best poems about the month of October

The tenth month of the Gregorian calendar in now upon us and the land prepares to give us more of its colorful coverings as a landscape of thrilling promise and gorgeous colour provides a sumptuous feast as only nature can.
Autumn or Fall, the final crescendo of the natural landscape whirls and cascades herself before our eyes.

Across fifty poems our classic poets including Christina Georgina Rossetti, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Thomas Hardy & Dante Gabriel Rossetti find verse and tender words to match the occasion.

Their descriptions of nature’s ever-evolving landscape and humanity’s ever-changing lives emblazon the page with the lively ink that shapes us all.

1 - Fifty Shades of October - An Introduction

2 - October by Paul Laurence Dunbar

3 - October by Lucy Hamilton Hooper

4 - October Musings 1866 by Janet Hamilton

5 - October by John Jay Chapman

6 - October's Bright Blue Weather by Helen Hunt Jackson

7 - October by George Arnold

8 - An Ode, Written October 1819 Before the Spaniards Had Recovered Their Liberty by Shelley

9 - Song of the Democratic Review of it's Birthday, October the 1st 1857 by William Ross Wallace

10 - Hymm for the Celebration at the Laying of the Cornerstone of Harvard Memorial Hall, Cambridge, October the 6th 1870 by Oliver Wendell Holmes

11 - In Westminster Abbey, October 12th 1892 by John Todhunter

12 - Anticipation, October 1803 by William Wordsworth

13 - Autumn, 1914 by Mary Webb

14 - Rain by Edward Thomas

15 - Autumn Within by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

16 - Embarcation (Southampton Docks, October 1899) by Thomas Hardy

17 - In Autumn by Alice Meynell

18 - The Falling of Leaves by W B Yeats

19 - The Autumn by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

20 - An October Evening by William Wilfred Campbell

21 - Mist in the Valley by Edna St Vincent Millay

22 - All Day It Has Rained by Alun Lewis

23 - Bitter Rain by Wu Zao

24 - The Rain and the Wind by William Ernest Henley

25 - Rain Music by Joseph Semon Cotter

26 - North Wind in October by Robert Seymour Bridges

27 - October by William Cullen Bryant

28 - An October Garden by Christina Georgina Rossetti

29 - Autumn in the Garden by Fredegond Shove

30 - The Wild Swans at Coole by W B Yeats

31 - Through October Fields by James Edwin Campbell

32 - October on the Sheep Range by Arthur Chapman

33 - Written At Lovere, October 1736 by Mary Wortley Montagu

34 - Give Me October's Meditative Haze by Alfred Austin

35 - The Falling Leaves by Margaret Postgate Cole

36 - On the 10th October by Phillip Henry Savage

37 - The Kitten and the Falling Leaves by William Wordsworth

38 - Fall Leaves Fall by Emily Bronte

39 - Turn Me to My Yellow Leaves by William Stanley Braithwaite

40 - On the Road to Waterloo, the 17th October (En Vigilante, 2 Hours) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

41 - October 1915 by Dora Sigerson Shorter

42 - October by John Payne

43 - An October Sunset by Archibald Lampman

44 - Autumn Fires by Robert Louis Stevenson

45 - October 21st, 1905 by George Meredith

46 - The National Prayer, October 1840 by Henry Alford

47 - Last Week in October by Thomas Hardy

48 - Lines Written October 23rd, 1836, A Few Hours After the Birth of My First Child by Henry Alford

49 - On St Chrispins Day, October 25th, 1763 by James Wilson Claudero

50 - From October - On Nearing Halloween (Extract) by James Grahame

51 - A Witches Chant (An Extract) by James Hogg