Fómhar is the harvest season in Irish, encompassing both the richness of the gathered crops and the elegiac awareness that the year is turning toward darkness. In Irish nature poetry the autumn is treated with the same sensory precision as the other seasons, noting the changing light, the colours of foliage, the sounds of harvesting. The harvest itself carries social and communal meaning — the gathering of the community's annual labour — and its failure in the great Famine made fómhar a word haunted for later generations by catastrophic loss. Poets working after the Famine could not use the harvest vocabulary without feeling the weight of years when the fómhar brought death rather than abundance.

Fómhar (autumn/harvest) in Irish poetry is a time of abundance mixed with anticipation of winter's scarcity. It symbolizes maturity, fulfillment, and the beginning of decline. Poets use fómhar imagery to reflect on aging, death, and the cycle of life. The harvest is a communal activity, reinforcing social bonds, but also a reminder of labor and dependence on nature. Fómhar light is often described as golden and melancholic, creating a distinctive atmospheric mood in lyric verse.