In A Nutshell

John Keats was one of the greatest British Romantic poets, but he didn't have a long

career like earlier generation Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor

Coleridge. "To Autumn," published in 1819, was one of the last poems that Keats ever

wrote and, boy, what a note to go out on. Many readers count this short-and-sweet beauty

as one of their favorites in the English language. It's normally grouped among the set of

his poems known as the Great Odes, including "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "Ode to a

Nightingale." Keats had mixed feelings about his poetic career and often considered

himself a failure. However, many critics think that if Keats hadn't caught tuberculosis and

died at the age of 25, he would have gone on to write many more classics.

As it were, Keats wrote "To Autumn" on September 19, 1819, at the height of his skill.

He had just returned from a stroll near the town of Winchester in Hampshire, England.

As he put it in a letter to his friend J.H. Reynolds:

How beautiful the season is now – How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it.

Really, without joking, chaste weather – Dian skies – I never lik'd stubble fields so much

as now – Aye better than the chilly green of spring. Somehow a stubble plain looks warm

– in the same way that some pictures look warm – this struck me so much in my Sunday's

walk that I composed upon it.

As the letter suggests, the poem professes Keats's preference for autumn over spring, but

the real star of "To Autumn" is the language and, more specifically, the sound.

The influential American poet Allen Tate said that "To Autumn" is "a very nearly perfect

piece of style but it has little to say" (source). Well, OK, we'll let that last dig slide. Yale

Professor Harold Bloom calls it "as close to perfect as any shorter poem in the English

language" (source). Labeling a poem as "perfect" or "flawless" has come to sound

outdated to many readers: after all, we're talking about an artistic experience, not a

gymnastics floor exercise. There are no perfect scores in poetry. But the raptures that

critics, poets, and readers have had over this poem should tell you something about what

it has meant to a whole lot of different people.

WHY SHOULD I CARE?

"To Autumn" is a poem for anyone who has a little trouble letting good things come to an

end. It could be a relationship, a cherished experience, or just something you outgrow.

And, of course, it could even be a favorite time of year.

Before he set out to write this poem, John Keats surely knew that the hip thing to do

would have been to write a poem in praise of spring, the season of life and rebirth. But

despite their reputation for intense emotions, the British Romantic poets were not

sentimentalists. They famously wrote odes in praise of things that most people wouldn't

think to praise, like "Dejection" or "Melancholy." They found beauty in the neglected

corners of life. In "To Autumn," Keats finds beauty in the lengthening days, chilly

weather, and brown fields of fall, the time just before winter squelches the last bit of

warmth and everyone retreats to their fires and hot cider.

So what's the secret to letting a good thing end with grace and good humor? First, always

look forward, never back. When Keats thinks about the flowers of spring and summer,

he's thinking about the seeds that are being dropped to bloom next year, and not what

happened last year. Second, soak up every last bit of goodness at that moment without

worrying about what comes next. The woman who personifies autumn in this poem

spends her time napping in the fields and watching cider being made. She doesn't fret

about winter. Finally, take a snapshot in your mind (or better yet, on paper), so you'll

always have a powerful memory to return to. Each of the three stanzas of "To Autumn" is

like a different Polaroid put into words, and filled with the light, smells, and sounds of

the season.

Sadly, Keats was to become a living example of things coming to an end too soon. He

died at the age of 25, only two years after completing this poem.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cider-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

TO AUTUMN SUMMARY

Throughout the poem, the speaker addresses autumn as if it were a person. In the first

stanza, he notes that autumn and the sun are like best friends plotting how to make fruit

grow and how to ripen crops before the harvest. The ripening will lead to the dropping of

seeds, which sets the stage for spring flowers and the whole process starting over again.

He tells us about the bees that think summer can last forever as they buzz around the

flowers. But the speaker knows better.

The second stanza describes the period after the harvest, when autumn just hangs out

around the granary where harvested grains are kept. Most of the hard work has already

been done, and autumn can just take a nap in the fields, walk across brooks, or watch the

making of cider.

In the third stanza, the speaker notes that the music of spring is a distant memory, but that

autumn's music is pretty cool, too. This music includes images of clouds and harvested

fields at sunset, gnats flying around a river, lambs bleating, crickets singing, and birds

whistling and twittering. All of the sights and sounds produce a veritable symphony of

beauty.

Lines 1-2

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

From the title it's clear that the speaker is talking about autumn. The speaker

briefly describes the season and immediately jumps into personification,

suggesting that autumn and the sun are old pals.

"Mists" often accompany chilly weather because the moisture in the air condenses

into a vapor when it's cold.

"Mellow fruitfulness" sounds like something people would say at a wine tasting,

doesn't it? "Mmm...this season has a mellow fruitfulness, with just a hint of cherry

and chocolate." The word "mellow," meaning low-key or subdued, is a good fit for

autumn, with its neutral colors and cool, yet not cold, weather. And it's also the

season when many fruits and other crops are harvested, making autumn fruit-full.

Autumn is a close friend of the sun, who is "maturing" as the year goes on.

"Maturing" could be a polite way of saying "getting old." The sun is no longer in

its prime.

A "bosom-friend" is like that friend you told all your secrets to in junior high

school.

Lines 3-4

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

Ah, so now the sun and autumn are "conspiring," eh? Looks like we might have to

separate the two of them. What are they whispering about over there?

OK, so not quite as thrilling as we thought. They are planning how to make fruit

grow on the vines that curl around the roofs ("eves") of thatched cottages.

The image highlights the weight of the fruit as it "loads" down the vines.

Thatched cottages suggest a pastoral setting, characterized by shepherds, sheep,

maidens, and agriculture. The "pastoral" as a literary genre was thought to

originate in Ancient Greece, and the ode is a Greek form, so it is appropriate for

this ode to include pastoral themes. Keats's other Great Odes, especially "Ode on a

Grecian Urn," include similar imagery.

Lines 5-6

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

Keats is going nuts (pun!) with images of weight and ripeness. The richness here

is like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory set in an orchard.

The apples "bend" down the branches of mossy trees with their weight. The trees

belong not to some big farming cooperative, but to the simple cottages of country

folk.

The ripeness penetrates deep to the very center of the fruit. They're not like those

apples that look delicious until you take a bite and realize that the fruit is hard and

sour. No, these babies are ready for chow-time right now.

Lines 7-8

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

In line 6, the ripeness converged on the center of the fruit. Now, the ripeness

expands like a balloon to "fill up" nuts and gourds. The opposition of these

motions helps us visualize the process.

"Gourds" include things like squash, zucchini, and, especially, pumpkins! What

could be more appropriate for autumn than huge pumpkins ripening on the vine?

"Hazel" is a plant that produces the nuts that add delicious flavor to coffee or

gelato. The nut is the "sweet kernel" that we eat.

It's almost as if the speaker is coordinating the growth of all these fruits and nuts.

He's like, "more! More! MORE!"

Lines 9-11

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

The "budding" that the speaker describes is in the future. He has just been

describing the "kernels" or seeds that drop to the ground when nuts fall from trees.

These seeds will "later" turn into new plants and flowers when spring comes

again.

Autumn isn't just a time of things dying off, turning brown, and falling to the

ground. It also sets the stage for the return of growth in the spring. From nature's

perspective, fruit is the mechanism for planting new seeds.

The speaker goes on a little imaginative trip into the next spring and summer,

where the bees take advantage of the flowers that began as a small seed in autumn.

Unlike humans, who can make sense of past, present, and future, the bees only

know their task for the present. The bees think the summer will never end, and that

the flowers will always be in bloom.

The bees are like monks or prisoners inside of "clammy cells," the cells being the

moist insides of the flowers in which they seek nectar.

At this point, even the speaker must admit that all this growth has become too

much, and summer is like a sweet liquid that threatens to spill over the brim of a

glass. Besides, he is starting to get away from the point. Must be time for a new

stanza.

Line 12

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Keats returns to the personification of spring. He asks a rhetorical question:

Who hasn't seen autumn hanging out by his or her (we're not sure yet) "store" of

fruits, nuts, and other ripe things?

The word "store" suggests the abundance of crops, and you might think of a barn

or a grain silo filled with the most recent harvest.

Lines 13-14

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Good, he's going to tell us how to find autumn now. It's like trying to find the

leprechaun from the Lucky Charms commercial (we'll get those charms from you

yet!).

All anyone has to do is travel through the countryside hitting up every "granary" –

buildings where large amounts of harvested grain are kept cool and dry – until you

find autumn sitting on the floor of one of them.

A silo is one kind of modern granary.

Now that the grain has been harvested, autumn doesn't have a care in the world.

The work for this season is done and in the books.

We think "abroad" means "widely" or "through the countryside" or "across the

land," rather than "in a foreign country."

Line 15

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

From this line we will tentatively guess that autumn is a woman. Not only because

seasons were traditionally personified as female in European art, but also because

this season has oh-so-soft hair. What kind of conditioner are you using, autumn?

We could play gender police and point out that Keats never uses "she" or "her" in

this poem, but it's simpler if we use these pronouns while you just keep that fact in

mind.

Autumn is like a college student when exams are over: she has nothing to do but

hang out. She sits on the granary, and her hair is lifted by a gentle wind.

The word "winnowing" is perfect here because "to winnow" in farm-speak means

to separate the grain (the edible part of the plant) from the chaff (its inedible

covering). In centuries past, farmers winnowed their crops by having people beat

the harvested plant with, say, large sticks. This action loosens the heavier grain,

and then the chaff is light enough that it can be blown away, or "winnowed," in the

wind.

The place where the grain and the chaff are separated is called the "threshing

floor" – this is where autumn is hanging out.

Lines 16-18

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

But, Keats, what if she's not on the threshing floor? Where do we find autumn?

Well, he says, she might also be on the furrow of a field that has only partially

been harvested. She's taking a nap because, darn it, she's earned one. "Furrows"

are the long, undulating hills that you see in fields, on top of which crops grow.

The dips in the furrows are used for irrigation.

The speaker claims that autumn is basically drunk on the smell of the poppy

flowers that she was going to harvest. She lies on the furrow while the "hook," or

sickle, that she uses to cut the flowers lies unused. She hasn't gotten to the next

"swatch" of flowers, so they're saved... for now.

The reference to poppies is no accident. Poppies were used to make opium, a drug

that was popular in England in the 19th century. The writer Thomas de Quincey

wrote an article called "Confessions of an Opium-Eater" about his experience with

the drug, which was published the year after "To Autumn."

Of course, the smell of the flowers alone could not make someone intoxicated,

except metaphorically.

Lines 19-20

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

The harvesting metaphors continue, as autumn is compared to a "gleaner,"

someone who picks out the last stalks of grain that were missed during the

threshing process. Poor peasants would often be allowed to "glean" the field, the

equivalent of picking up scraps after a feast.

Autumn puts her head down to cross over a brook, just as a gleaner bows his or

her head to look for grains. Her head is "laden" or heavy – yet another image of

weight.

Lines 21-22

Or by a cider-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

But, if we still haven't had autumn, after searching all those other places, we might

try the "cider-press," where she's totally mesmerized watching the fruit get

squeezed into a thick, sugary juice.

Apple cider is the most common form, but pear cider is also drunk in England.

Cider is frequently alcoholic, so this could be another reference to an intoxicant.

See "Calling Card" for more on this trend in Keats's poetry.

Autumn is starting to sound like a real slacker. She has nothing to do, nowhere to

be. She can "patiently" watch the thick juice or "ooze" of the apples drop from the

press for hours on end.

"Oozings" is definitely our favorite word in this poem. It captures the concentrated

sweetness of the season.

Lines 23-24

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--

The final stanza begins with another rhetorical question, which we'll paraphrase

as, "Where are your songs at, Spring? Huh? Bring it, if you got it. I can't hear

you... Yeah, that's what I thought."

That's the super-aggressive version, at least. But the speaker is definitely needling

the season opposite to autumn on the calendar. Spring might be great and all, but it

doesn't stick around, so who needs it.

He reassures autumn, who might be feeling a tad inadequate compared to her more

celebrated counterpart, that she has her own music.

Keats alludes again to the pastoral tradition in poetry, in which shepherds typically

"sing" in springtime, often while playing a lyre.

Lines 25-26

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

The speaker begins to describe the "song" of autumn. It's more of a metaphorical

song, in that the scene begins with light and images.

He describes the patchy clouds, between which patches of sky can be seen, as

"barred." These clouds appear to be in "bloom," like flowers, as they light up with

the colors of sunset. The use of "bloom" is a direct challenge, again, to springtime.

The day is "dying" at sunset, but it's not a tragic or violent death. It's "soft" and

gentle.

The reddish colors of the sunlight "touch" the fields gently. The fields have been

harvested, so all that is left is a flat "stubble" of crop.

Lines 27-29

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

The gnats by the riverside "mourn" the dying day like a choir at a funeral. They

are "wailing" as if the daylight had been a favorite grandparent or something.

In fact, they are just doing what gnats do: coming out at evening time. The choir

sound is the collective buzzing of their tiny little wings. Some people would have

a different word than "choir" to describe this sound: namely, "extremely

annoying."

Gnats especially like to hang out in wet areas, near trees, and here we find them

near the willow or "sallow" trees down by the river.

Their movement appears to be coordinated with the light. Light gets brighter,

gnats go up; light gets dimmer, gnats go down. Keats is having all kinds of fun

with movement and directions in this poem.

The speaker continues to paint the sunset as a life-or-death struggle for the light.

The sound of the gnats contributes to the song of autumn.

Lines 30-33

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

The poem concludes with more animal sounds, but those of a more conventional

variety than the buzzing of gnats.

Lambs are bleating near the small stream, or "bourn," that flows down a hill.

Notice that the speaker calls them "full-grown lambs," which is like saying, "full-

grown child." Wouldn't that just be a sheep? He seems to want to highlight the in-

between stage between the glorious ripeness of youth and plain old adulthood.

Crickets are "singing" by rubbing their wings together, otherwise known as

"chirping."

With a soft but high ("treble") voice, the redbreast robin is whistling in an

enclosed garden, or "garden-croft."

Last but not least, the swallows have taken to the sky at twilight, and they "twitter"

joyfully as the sun goes down.

Symbol Analysis

Odes often address an inanimate object or abstract idea directly, but they do not always

portray that object/idea as a person, as Keats does. We think that autumn is a woman,

because the seasons were typically personified as beautiful women in European Art. The

Italian painter Botticelli, for example, depicted spring as a pregnant woman. (Check out

the painting here.) In this poem, the lady autumn teams up with the sun, basks in the

breeze of a granary, and takes lazy naps in a field.

Lines 2-3: Autumn is personified for the first of many times in the poem. She and

the sun whisper together like a bunch of gossipy teenage girls. But the goal is

serious and necessary: they are responsible for the bounty of fruit and crops that

will sustain people through the winter.

Line 12: The speaker asks a rhetorical question to introduce a connection he

believes the reader will recognize, between autumn and the harvest.

Lines 13-15: The personification of autumn feels most explicit in these lines,

where her long hair is gently lifted by the wind. "Winnowing wind" is an example

of alliteration. Implicitly her hair is compared to chaff, the inedible part of a grain

that blows away after the threshing process.

Lines 16-18: Autumn has several different roles in this poem. Here she is a laborer

in the fields, taking a nap after working hard to harvest the flowers with her

"hook." The hook, too, is personified. It is presented as a conscious thing that

chooses to "spare" the flowers, rather than as a tool that just lies idle.

Lines 19-20: From a laborer, autumn then becomes like a "gleaner" in this simile,

which compares her to the people who pick up the scraps from the field after the

harvest.

Lines 21-22: Autumn's "look," the appearance on her face while watching the

cider, is an example of metonymy when the word "patient" is attached. An

expression cannot itself be patient, but her look is associated with the patience of

her character.

Line 24: Autumn is addressed for the final time, as the speaker tells her not to feel

jealous of spring.

Autumn is the season when things fatten up and come to fruition. It is a season of harvest

and abundance, one with which we associate the overflowing cornucopia. Keats tries to

illustrate the incredible thickness and richness of autumn in the language of the poem. He

contrasts images of lightness and heaviness, of things falling and things flying.

Line 3: Fruit doesn't just grow on the vines; the vines are "loaded" with fruit, the

way you might "load" a shelf with heavy items.

Line 7: The gourd is "swollen" with ripeness and the hazel nuts are "plump" with

meat.

Line 15: In this implicit metaphor, autumn's hair is like the light chaff that

surrounds a heavy seed. On a threshing floor, the weight of the grains prevents

them from being blown away in the air.

Line 20: Autumn's head is described as "laden," or heavy, when she crosses over

the brook.

Line 29: The line contains a vivid image in which the gnats rise and fall in concert

with the strength of the wind.

A "pastoral" poem is inspired by shepherds, shepherdesses, and other forms of simple life

in rural settings. Pastorals commonly feature natural scenery so rich and vivid that you

could drown in it. Like the ode, pastoral artworks are a staple of Ancient Greece, so it's

natural that Keats paired the two together. As autumn traipses through the landscape,

we're treated to a full range of traditional images of the joys of the English countryside.

Lines 4-5: Pastoral artworks often show how nature and humans coexist within a

landscape. Here the vines run around the eves of thatched houses, and mossy trees

grow next to cottages.

Line 24: The reference to music could allude to the tradition in which shepherds

and other outdoorsy-types played rustic music on a lyre or pipe. Keats's "Ode on a

Grecian Urn" features a musician playing a pipe, for example. Here Keats uses

"music" as a metaphor for the harmonies of the scenery.

Line 27: Gnats are an unusual choice to include in the symphony of autumn's

metaphorical "music," but Keats describes them so well that we don't notice an

incongruity. In this extension of the metaphor about the "dying" of daylight in line

25, the gnats are the metaphorical chorus that "wails" in mourning at the funeral.

Lines 30-33: Lay it on us, Keats. He decides to go all-in with the pastoral imagery,

picking out some of the genre's most recognizable images: lambs on the hillside,

crickets in the hedge, and birds in the garden.

The poem doesn't miss the opportunity to contrast autumn with its competitors, spring

and summer. (Winter gets left out in the cold – thanks, folks, we'll be here all night).

Summer is great, but it has to end sometime, a fact that the bees don't seem to realize.

And spring has some kickin' songs, but autumn's playlist is just as good.

Line 11: Silly bees, you can't hide inside those flowers forever. "Clammy cells"

implies a metaphor that compares the insides of the flowers to the small, damp

cells of monks or even prisoners. The warmth of summer reaches all the way

inside the flowers.

Line 23: The speaker asks a rhetorical question to begin the third stanza, as he did

with the second. He alludes to the tradition in which poets and lyricists sang to

celebrate the new life of springtime. He might be thinking specifically of Ancient

Greece, where the ode as a form of poetry was invented.

Ode in Iambic Pentameter

As a poet, Keats is probably most famous for his odes. An ode is a poem that addresses a

person or object that can't talk back. The form originated in Ancient Greece, where poets

like Pindar and Horace sang them at public events, often accompanied by music. Here

Keats addresses a season of the year. To use a technical term, it's like one big long case

of apostrophe. (Apostrophe is when an idea, person, object, or absent being is addressed

as if it or they were present, alive, and kicking.) But the ode is more than just a device;

it's a highly structured form with built-in divisions and transitions. Compared to Keats's

other odes like, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" or "Ode to a Nightingale," "To Autumn" is

shorter at three stanzas of eleven lines each (the other two are five and eight stanzas

apiece).

The rhyme scheme of each stanza is ABAB CDEDCCE. You'll notice that this scheme

divides the stanzas into a section of four lines and a section of seven lines. The first four

lines set up the specific topic of each stanza – ripeness, harvesting, and song, respectively

– and the last seven lines elaborate.

The meter of the poem is generally iambic pentameter, in which each line has five

("penta") iambs consisting of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented one:

A-mong | the riv|-er sal|-lows bourne | a-loft.

But the iambic pentameter is more like the default setting than a strict requirement in "To

Autumn." Maybe critics have marveled at this poem's complicated use of many different

kinds of rhythm. For example, the beginning each stanza departs from the iambic meter

in the same way: with an accented syllable right off the bat: "Sea-son," "Who," and

"Where." You could write an entire paper on the meter alone, never mind the meaning.

ANALYSIS: SPEAKER

The speaker of the poem has a direct hotline to speak with the seasons. He also has an

omniscient viewpoint on this woman named "autumn" who likes to relax in various

autumn-y places. He manages to track her down from place to place, which sounds like

no small feat. He has a keen imagination and takes notice of things the rest of us might

miss, like the "bars" in the clouds or the moss on the cottage-trees. His perspective has

the effect of a magnifying glass.

He assumes that everyone knows who this lady autumn is, and that all of us readers have

seen her sitting in granary. What he really wants to say is, "I've seen autumn on the

granary floor." He's also slightly aggressive when it comes to springtime. At the

beginning of the third stanza, he puts his hand to his ear and is like, "Where are you at

now, Spring?" He looks around and shouts, "I can't hear your songs, Spring!" He's

obviously protective of autumn and, on the plus side, he would make a loyal friend. He's

the kind of person who always wants to remind you of your good qualities when you're

feeling a little inadequate. "But what about the time you did this cool thing?" Oh, yeah,

thanks!

Where It All Goes Down

Can you guess which season this poem is set in? "To Autumn" gives us all the ripe,

growing things we would expect from a poem with this title, and Keats even throws in an

aimless, super-chilled-out lady, to boot.

When you look closely at the poem's images, you notice all kinds of hidden movement.

In the first stanza, you get a sense of the "conspiratorial" tone between the sun and

autumn, as the unassuming vines and fruits creep around houses and trees until – boom! –

everything bursts into a surge of ripeness. The setting of the first stanza is characterized

by growth and swelling under the influence of the sunlight, and this growth even carries

us into the spring and summer, as if time itself were expanding.

The second stanza is all about the harvesting process. Autumn sits with her "store" of

grains like King Midas with his gold. She may have been hanging around the poppy

plants too much, because she seems a little tipsy. She just kind of wanders around,

inspecting things and taking occasional naps. What a life. Despite being a tad out-of-it,

she's a tough bird to track. The speaker follows her around like a bodyguard, from field to

brook to, um, cider factory.

In the last paragraph, Keats ties everything together with the idea of music and songs. He

uses a few powerful images to suggest that all of nature works in harmony to produce the

beauties of autumn. This music is associated with the sunset, in particular, and you might

think that the sun has been slowly going down through the entire poem. Only we were

too busy admiring the poetic landscape to notice the passage of time, just as the speaker

is too busy admiring autumn to notice the approach of winter.

ANALYSIS: SOUND CHECK

"To Autumn" doesn't sound very much like normal speech. It has a formal quality

appropriate to the ode form. It sounds like Poetry with a capital "P." Not to say that the

elevated tone feels unnatural at all. It's as if the speaker were delivering a complicated

three-part argument to a crowd of skeptical people who are thinking, "Who is this

'autumn' we keep hearing about? We want spring!"

You can see what we mean when we say it's not like normal speech if you imagine

someone walking up to you and starting a conversation, "Season of mists and mellow

fruitfulness!" Even if our name were "autumn" this would be a confusing opener. He

starts right off with description and does not let up until the end of the poem. Look, for

example, at the number of adjectives. There's hardly a noun in the poem without an

adjective attached: "twined flowers," "winnowing wind," "soft-dying day," "rosy hue,"

even, oxymoronically, "full-grown lambs."

The complicated rhyme scheme contributes to a sense of formal difficulty. Some of the

rhymes are right next to each other (in the first stanza, "brook" and "look"), while others

are spread out over several lines ("trees" and "bees"). Finally, if you've read any

Shakespeare, you'll notice that Keats sounds remarkably similar. Keats obviously read a

lot of Shakespeare, and this poem has the grandeur and the descriptive range of a great

soliloquy. Like Keats, Shakespeare had a thing for adjectives.

ANALYSIS: WHAT'S UP WITH THE TITLE?

"To Autumn" seems to be missing a key word when compared to Keats's other Great

Odes: the word "ode." You would expect the title to be, "Ode to Autumn," but maybe

Keats felt confident that he had this whole ode thing down and could just use a shorthand.

However, "To Autumn" seems to change the meaning, as well. It sounds like a dedication

you might read in the front of a book: "To Mom and Dad," "To My Kindergarten

Teacher, For Not Failing Me At Finger-Painting," "To Autumn." Or Keats could merely

be helping us understand whom the speaker is addressing. Otherwise, when he asks,

"Who hath not seen thee?" in the second stanza, we might think he had forgotten to

introduce a character. Whatever your explanation, "To Autumn" stands out as a title

among Keats's odes.

(5) Tree Line

"To Autumn" is probably the most straightforward of Keats's Great Odes. It does not

contain any references to Greek mythology or complicated metaphors spanning five

stanzas. The main challenge with Keats is the density of his images. You can't skim a

poem like this, but then again, why would you need to: it's only three stanzas. When you

slow down your pace, you recognize the little things, like the comparison of a flower to a

monk's "cell" or the connection between the choir of gnats and the death of daylight.

These small connections are what makes the poem great, so you don't want to miss out on

them. Also, look for hidden patterns, like the use of rhetorical questions.

TO AUTUMN THEME OF MAN AND THE NATURAL WORLD

There's a lot more to say about this poem besides the fact that it's a "nature poem." By

itself, the term "nature poem" doesn't tell us much. "To Autumn" contains very specific

natural landscapes and images. The first stanza offers images of the interaction between

humans and the plants that surround them. The second describes the production of

agriculture, a natural process that is controlled by people. The third stanza moves outside

of the human perspective to include things that are not used or consumed by humans,

such as gnats and swallows. This third section captures some of the "wildness" and

unpredictability of nature.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; (lines 1-2)

The first line distinguishes autumn from the other seasons, while the second line sets up the

personification of autumn throughout the poem. Why would the sun be friendlier with autumn

than with any of the other seasons? Oh, spring is going to be so mad when she hears about this.

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; (lines 3-4)

The first stanza gives an optimistic view of nature plotting to help people. Moreover, the imagery

integrates plants and human dwellings.

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, (lines 13-14)

Tracking down autumn is like trying to track down a leprechaun. Autumn has a few

choice hideouts (sadly, not at the end of rainbows), but she's always on the move. She has

no cares once the work of harvesting is finished.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? (line 23)

Keats makes a reference to the pastoral tradition that started in Ancient Greece. Within

this tradition, shepherds piped simple songs in honor of the seasons. He may even be

referring back to his own famous "Ode on a Grecian Urn," in which a young Greek man

pipes a tune beneath a tree.

TO AUTUMN THEME OF TIME

We don't think it's a coincidence that "To Autumn" mentions autumn and spring, but not

winter. Keats doesn't want to dwell on the cold days to come. To appreciate autumn, we

need to forget about how each passing day seems a little shorter and chillier. For the most

part, the speaker stays focused on the present moment, just like the personified figure of

autumn, who doesn't seem to have a care in the world. Nonetheless, the poem moves

forward in subtle ways. The natural world is at the peak of sunlight and ripeness in the

first stanza, and by the third stanza the sun is setting.

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. (lines 10-11)

The bees have no sense of past of future: they live for the present. Does the poem argue

that we should be more like the bees? Because "summer" has made it all the way inside

the flowers, the time is probably around mid-day.

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, (line 16)

No sleeping on the job, autumn! Since she has only reaped half of the furrow of poppies,

we think that the day has progressed since the first stanza. This is her afternoon siesta.

Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours. (line 22)

From the half-way finished job of reaping, we arrive at the completely finished job of

cider-making. It's almost quittin' time, and the sun will set soon.

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,-- (line 24)

The speaker advises autumn not to look back in jealously on spring's music. Spring never

seems so distant as at the peak of autumn.

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; (lines 25-26)

The progression from mid-day sunlight to sunset could be a metaphor for the progression

from summer to winter. That would be using one measure of time to represent another – a

neat poetic trick.

TO AUTUMN THEME OF AWE AND AMAZEMENT

This ode is almost like a pep talk delivered to autumn. The speaker knows that autumn

often gets short shrift in the catalogue of seasons, so he reminds her (and, maybe,

himself) of its many wonders: the bounty of the harvest, the dropping of seeds that will

become next year's flowers, and the symphony of sights and sounds at sunset. Strangely,

autumn herself seems blissfully unaware of any need to be praised or appreciated by

anyone. She wanders through the scenery and examines her work without concern or

urgency.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, (line 1)

Autumn is the most subdued and least flashy of the seasons. That's why they call her

mellow yellow... er... "mellow fruitfulness." Though we do tend to associate autumn with

the color yellow.

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells (line 6-7)

The language dives in to the very center of the fruit, only to push outward again like a

balloon. Autumn is the secret ripeness expanding from the center of things.

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; (lines 14-15)

A granary is where grains like wheat are stored. This is the only image in the poem that

seems to eroticize autumn, as her hair is blown to and fro by the wind.

The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies. (lines 32-33)

The end of the poem moves from human industry to an appreciation of the deeper

mysteries of the season, the ones that only the animals seem to be aware of. What are

they whistling about?

TO AUTUMN THEME OF TRANSFORMATION

Autumn is the time of transformation between the growth of summer and the dormancy

of winter. Things are winding down, and once the harvest is complete, there is nothing

left to do but wait until the next season. Much of the transformation in the poem occurs

between stanzas. For example, in the first stanza fruits and gourds are swelling outward

before they will be picked for food. By the second stanza, the harvest is already complete,

or mostly complete, and the ripe apples have been turned into rich, delicious cider. The

third stanza focuses only on one transformative event, the setting of the sun.

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; (lines 5-6)

The transformation into ripeness proceeds slowly, as the branches bend more and more

under the weight of the growing apples. The speaker imagines this process as the

outcome of secretive plans between autumn and the sun.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? (lines 12)

The second stanza moves subtly from ripeness to the harvest process. While the first

stanza was centered on fruit and nuts, which are more like luxuries, the second stanza

focuses on grains, the most essential food staple.

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook; (lines 19-20)

The poem moves through the different events of the season without the reader hardly

noticing. At the end of the stanza on harvesting, Keats compares autumn to a gleaner who

picks the last bits of grain left on the field.

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, (line 25)

Even at the end of the day, symbolizing the end of the season before winter sets in,

something is "blooming." Namely, the red sunset. Keats uses the language of spring

ironically in order to describe the end of the season of growth.

TO AUTUMN THEME OF MORTALITY

Autumn is frequently used as a symbol in literature for old age, the time before death,

symbolized by winter. "To Autumn" avoids any super-obvious references to death, but

we do get some subtle ones, like the oblivious bees that think the summer will last

forever, or the "hook" that spares the poppy flowers from their inevitable end. As the day

begins to "die" in the final section, the entire landscape contributes to the song of

mourning.

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; (line 2)

The word "maturing" reminds us that the sun is figuratively growing "older," its rays are

getting weaker and the days become shorter.

while thy hook (lines 17-18)

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

The hook is used for reaping but is also associated with death, i.e., the "grim reaper." But

Keats softens the blow of this image by "sparing" the next patch of flowers, at least for

now.

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; (lines 27-29)

The language of mortality is extremely subtle in this poem. The gnats are like a funeral

choir, singing a requiem for the "dying" day. Also, the wind itself "lives or dies." The

speaker has death on his mind in the final stanza.

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies. (lines 30-33)

How does the end of the poem relate to the earlier hints of mortality? Do these animals

continue the song of mourning, or does this song evolve into something that cannot be

understood on human terms? Maybe these animals, like the bees, have no knowledge or

concern for when the season will end.

To Autumn

Notes on To Autumn by John Keats

This poem has a sense of conflict and ambiguity similar to earlier dramatic and

questioning odes. It was written when the French Revolution had happened, creating a

sense of freedom.. This shows how Keats writes when he's inspired- 'if poetry comes not

naturally as leaves to a tree, then it better not come at all'.

Poem has elevated style, like a celebration, but also lamenting the death that Autumn

brings. Keats had also just lost his brother to TB, and had caught the illness himself.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Sinister? As the sun ages, things die. But the ‘maturing sun’ could indicate wisdom.

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

Energy and beauty– but that life is going to be harvested at its prime as we are about to

find out.

He has so much to say.

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Nature semantic field

‘bees’ ‘cease’ and ‘cells’ - sibilance. Illustrates continual supply– but too claustrophobic?

The bees are offered abundant pollen. But they are soon to be disappointed in the belief

that the ‘warm days will never cease’

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Free, relaxed, detached, aloof

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Autumn personified as a fertile, beautiful woman. As with other female presences in

Keats poems– charm co-exists with cruelty.

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers

Implies clemency but it is only a delayed death for the flowers

‘Hook’ has a harsh, clinical sound.

The execution of life abruptly ends the sleepy mood of the first stanza.

Sense of ambivalence with this beautiful yet destructive presence

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

‘patient’- she is immortal, and can spare time to watch the destruction

‘oozings’- sinister; drawn out destruction

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Calling to Autumn– wild desperation?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

‘clouds bloom’- Juxtaposition of the two words. ‘clouds’ = looming, imminent death.

‘bloom’ = life blossoming, creation.

‘soft dying’- another juxtaposition. ‘ soft’ = calm, beautiful. ‘dying’ = death, the end.

And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Semantic field of death and closing down

‘Lambs’- Autumn’s children, pathetically innocent; don’t know what’s round the corner.

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

This last line seems positive but...

‘gathering’ - like vultures?

‘swallows’ - swallowed?

‘twitter’ - secretive, hiding something

More notes on To Autumn, looking at form and language

Summary

Keats' speaker opens his first stanza by addressing Autumn, describing its abundance and

its intimacy with the sun, with whom Autumn ripens fruits and casues the late flowers to

bloom. In the second stanza, the speaker describes the figure of Autumn as a female

goddess, often seen sitting on the granary floor, her hair "soft-lifted" by the wind, and

often seen sleeping in the fields or watching a cider-press squeezing the juice from

apples. In the third stanza, the speaker tells Autumn not to wonder where the songs of

spring have gone, but instead listen to her own music. At twilight, the "small gnats" hum

above the shallows of the river, lifted and dropped by the wind, and "full-grown lambs"

bleat from the hills, crickets sing, robins whistle from the garden, and swallows,

gathering fro their coming migration, sing from the skies.

Form

Like "Ode on Melancholy", "To Autumn" is written in a three-stanza structure with a

variable rhyme scheme. Each stanza is eleven lines long (as opposed ten in "Ode on

Melancholy"), and each is metered in a relatively precise iambic pentameter. In terms of

both thematic organization and rhyme cheme, each stanza is divided roughly into two

parts. In each stanza, the first part is made up of the first four lines of the stanza, and the

second part is made up of the last seven lines. The first part of each stanza follows an

ABAB rhyme scheme, the first line rhyming with te third, and the second line rhyming

with the fourth. The second part of each stanza is longer and varies in rhyme scheme; the

first stanza is arranged CDEDCCE, and the second and third stanzas are arranged

CDECDDE. (Thematically, the first part of each stanza serves to define the subject of the

stanza, and the second part offers room for musing, development, and speculation on that

subject. However, this thematic division is only very general.)

Themes

In both its form and descriptive surface, "To Autumn" is one of the simplist of Keats'

odes. There is nothing confusing or complex in Keats' paean to the season of Autumn,

with its fruitfulness, its flowers, and the song of its swallows gathering for migration. The

extraordinary achievement of this poem lies in its ability to suggest, explore, and develop

a rich abundance of theme withour ever ruffling its calm, gentle and lovely description of

Autumn. Where "Ode on Melancholy" presents itself as a strenuous heroic quest, "To

Autumn" is concerned with the much quieter activity of daily observation and

appreciation. In this quietude, the gathered themes of the preceding odes find their fullest

and most beautiful expression.

"To Autumn" takes up where the other odes left off. Like the others, it shoes Keats'

speaker paying homage to a particular goddess; in this case, the deified season of

Autumn. The selection of this season implicitly takes up the other odes' themes of

temporality, mortality and change. Autumn in Keats' ode is a time of warmth and plenty,

but it is perched on the brink of winters' desolation, as the bees enjoy "later flowers", the

harvest is gathered from the fields, the lambs of spring are now "full grown", and in the

final line of the poem, the swallows gather for their winter migration. The understated

sense of inevitable loss in the final line makes it one of the most moving moments in all

of poetry; it can be read as a simple, uncomplaining summation of the entire human

condition.

Despite the coming chill of winter, the late warmth of Autumn provides Keats' speaker

with ample beauty to celebrate; the cottage and its surroundings in the first stanza, the

agrarian haunts of the goddess in the second, and the locales of natural creatures in the

third. Keats' speaker is able to experience these beauties in a sincere and meaningful way

because of the lessons he has learned in the previous odes. He is no longer indolent, no

longer committed to the isolated Imagination (as in "Psyche"), no longer attempting to

escape the pain of the world through ecstatic rapture (as in "Nightingale"), no longer

frustrated by the attempt to eternalize mortal beauty or subject eternal beauty to time (as

in "Urn"), and no longer able to frame the connection of pleasure and the sorrow of loss

only as an imaginary heroic quest (as in "Melancholy").

In "To Autumn", the speaker's experience of beauty refers back to earlier odes (the

swallows recall the nightingale, the fruit recalls joy's grape, the goddess drowing among

the poppies recalls Psyche and Cupis laying in the grass), but it also recalls a wealth of

earlier poems. Most importantly, the image of Autumn winnowing and harvesting (in a

sequence of odes often explicitly about creativity) recalls an earlier Keats poem in which

the activity of havesting is an explicit metaphor for artistic creation. In his Sonnet "When

I have Fears", Keats makes this connection directly:

"When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,

Before high piled books, in charact'ry,

Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain"

In this poem, the act of creation is pictured as a kind of self-harvesting; the pen harvests

the fields of the brain, and books are filled with the resulting "grain". In "To Autumn",

the metaphor is developed further, the sense of coming loss that permeates the poem

confronts the sorrow underlying the season's creativity. When Autumn's harvest is over,

the fields will be bare, the swaths wit their "twined flowers" cut down, the cider-press

dry, the skies empty. But the connection of this harvesting to the seasonal cycle softens

the edge of the tradegy. In time, spring will come again, the fields will grow again, and

the birdsong will return. As the speaker knew in "Melancholy", abundance and loss, joy

and sorrow, song and silence are as intimately connected as the twined flowers in the

fields. What makes "To Autumn" so beautiful is that it brings an engagement with that

connection out of the realm of mythology and fantasy and into the everyday world. The

development the speaker so strongly resisted in "Indolence" is at last complete; he has

leaned that an acceptance of mortality is not destructive to an appreciation of beauty and

has gleaned wisdom by accepting the passage of time.

What is Keats ' 'To Autumn' about and what aspects of style have you noticed?

The title is the first striking aspect of this poem. Keats has addressed his work

specifically to the season; it is not an 'ode to', which would make it less personal, but a

direct communication instead. This suggests an intimacy, almost a friendship, and here

the elements of classic mythology, which sit at the roots of Romanticism, are apparent.

The ancient Greeks had many deities that represented natural objects and occurrences -

Helios, the sun god, or Hephaestus, god of fire, for example - in an attempt to explain the

world around them. Keats adopts this culture with the personification of Autumn into a

living, conscious entity with thoughts and feelings:

'Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless' (Lines 2 & 3, Stanza I)

In this sense, the indication that Autumn is a deity suggests that the poem is, in fact, an

offering or a gift - adding a hint of worship to the title, as opposed to a simple message to

a familiar acquaintance. The word 'bless' emphasises this as it has distinct religious

overtones.

Autumn is a short season, and, at only three stanzas long, this reflected in the short and

concise structure of the actual poem. However, Autumn is also a time of richness and

abundance before the scarcity of winter and Keats has used extensive vocabulary and

language to draw a detailed picture in the mind of the reader of this brief, colourful

season.

The first stanza concerns itself with extolling the beauty and floridity of Autumn,

appealing to the senses of sight and taste. The visual sense is the first to be addressed -

'Mists and mellow fruitfulness'. The use of 'mellow' conjures up an associated colour; one

of warmth and age, the parchment yellow of ripened pears perhaps, or the sienna of fallen

leaves - all of which fall under 'fruitfulness'. However, we are reminded to keep our other

senses aware with the mention of 'mists' - sometimes our vision can be clouded and we

have to rely on something other than sight. Taste is an obvious choice for the season of

harvest: Keats refers to the 'sweet kernels' and fruit with 'ripeness to the core'. However,

most description is used to fully conveying Autumn's bounty giving the impression that,

for a short time span, the land is overwhelmed with nourishment:

'Conspiring with him how to load and bless....

...To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees ...

To swell the gourd and plump the hazels shells...

For Summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cells.' (Lines 3, 5, 6, 7 & 11,Stanza I)

A sense of fullness and lethargy is created in the language used. Line seven in particular

uses long, slow verbs to create an atmosphere of calm and inertness: an atmosphere that

continues through the second stanza, where Keats creates actual scenes to paint a specific

picture in the mind of the reader.

All the images are of the ceasing of human civility to take in the hypnotic spell of

Autumn - the gentle wind, the incense of the poppies, the slow pressing of apples, the

quiet bubbling of a brook. Keats is recreating the sensations of Autumn by employing

various techniques. Both alliteration and onomatopoeia are apparent in this stanza:

'thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind' (Line 4. Stanza II)

The effect of the onomatopoeia is to evoke another sense - that of sound. The final two

words read like a gentle whistling, and Keats is completing a three-dimensional picture

for the reader. The clear indication here is that to fully appreciate the gifts and unique,

sensuous experience Autumn brings, it is not enough merely to observe. This insight

makes it apparent that Keats writes from first-hand experience. The alliteration continues

the 'sound' of the whistling as a continuous drone, creating a lullaby effect to match the

sleepy ambience of the first stanza. This relaxed, heavy feeling is emphasised again by

the language used:

Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers' (Lines 5 & 6, Stanza II)

'Drows'd' and 'swath' both include long, slow vowels which serve to slow the rhythm and

pace of the poem and force the reader to dwell on each word, lingering on the poem as

the unseen characters linger at their work. The concept of 'twined flowers' conjures up the

image of damp, heady overgrowth where the wildlife escape the heat of the day and even

the insects are still. Time moves slowly in this stanza:

'Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.' (Lines 9 & 10, Stanza II)

The slow vowels in 'oozings' and 'cyder-press', coupled with the 'patient look' and

'watchest' make the time seem indeed like hours on end. The whole stanza is designed to

create the sensation of a lazy, warm afternoon, rich in stimulation for all the senses, made

all the more precious by the knowledge that the chill of winter is not far away. The

overall image of Autumn so far is one extolling the great beauty and bounty of this

particular season. Keats' deep respect for nature runs throughout the poem: the idea that

nature 'blesses' us with her gifts shows the poet's understanding of the dependence of all

living things on the earth's fertility and fruitfulness. He treats it almost with reverence,

addressing it as if it were a living force and a presence - a view that displays the

romanticism of Keats' poetry.

There is no resentment at the way humans are ultimately tied to the earth. Instead, Keats

chooses to celebrate the fecundity that keep us alive, expressing gratitude rather than

hostility. The need to live in harmony with nature is stressed vividly with the scenes in

the second stanza. Note the characters are not described as people, but as Autumn itself.

'Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting carelessly on a granary floor...

... Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep.' (Lines 1,.2, 3 & 4. Stanza III)

This suggests that the essence of Autumn is in everybody and with it the maturity and

'mellowing' that age brings. The activities suggested are all connected with the harvest, a

time when the earth's gifts can be collected and used to survive - the gathering of the

wheat and corn, the pressing of the apples to produce a luxurious drink. The poet sees this

time as one for joy and festivity, despite winter's deathly grip on the verge of tightening.

Destroying nature would literally destroy the essence of survival, and co-existence is an

important theme here. This attitude towards nature, and especially towards this particular

season, speaks much of Keats' attitude to life itself. To celebrate fertility, as he does, is to

celebrate new life. Why, then, does he choose the son where death begins to make itself

known? The rich colours of the leaves add to the glory of the but they are like a

swansong: a sign that the vegetation is dying.

'Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun.' (Line 2, Stanza I)

'Maturing' is the key word here that unlocks the deeper meaning of 'To Autumn'. It

denotes experience, wisdom, knowledge and an ability to accept the inevitable. Autumn

can be described as the 'twilight months' of the year; a time when the buds have bloomed

and are in their full glory; a time when the young have grown and are ready to face the

challenges of survival; a time when the old live out their last days before the onset of

winter. If Autumn were a metaphor for life, then it would represent those of middle age,

who have the benefit of hindsight and the wisdom of years of experience to draw from.

The old are often overshadowed by the energy and vitality of the young; yet Keats, by

richly describing the glory and blessings of Autumn, tells us that maturity an experience

can offer just as much, if not more. The final stanza makes this point clear:

'Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too.' (Lines 1&2, Stanza III)

The reaping of the harvest is symbolic of reaping the benefits of such qualities, or the

'music' of the season. However, death is an important factor here. As with winter ever

closer as Autumn draws on, so maturity and age beckons the inevitable. Here Keats

reveals the full extent of his acceptance. He takes a broad, cinematic view of the earth,

expanding on the close description of the first two stanzas to reflect on the passage of

time as Autumn - and ultimately life - draws to a close:

'While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day

And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue.' (Line 3, Stanza III)

Yet the demise is made to seem almost welcoming: the transience to winter - to death - is

pleasant and 'soft', a gentle passing that is beautiful to experience and not to be feared.

There is no morbidity here, only a quiet acceptance that life on earth must end for each

one of us. However, not all life dies. The poem ends with the sounds of various creatures,

a stubborn message that the cycle of the seasons will continue and life will return, as the

poet reminds us in his final line:

'And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.' (Line 11, Stanza III)

Keats's Composure - Article by Joe Sutcliffe

Sometime, it is illuminating to adopt a biographical approach to criticism. Joe

Sutcliffe examines 'To Autumn' in relation to Keats's anxieties about personal

difficulties and about criticisms of the personal nature of his earlier poetry.

'To Autumn' is often interpreted as a peaceful evocation of the beauties of the English

countryside, To me, it is more a subtle, troubled attempt by Keats to make some kind of

sense out of dying young. It is hard to determine how much of this comes from a

consciousness of his own impending death, and how much derives from more general

thoughts about mortality. Nevertheless, it seems evident that the poem has a sense of

conflict and ambiguity similar to the earlier, more obviously dramatic and questioning

odes. The season of autumn is presented as a fertile and beautiful woman ('thy hair soft-

lifted by the winnowing wind') but, as with other beautiful female presences in Keats's

poems (La Belle Dame Sans Merci, the personified Grecian Urn, Lamia), the charm co-

exists with a potential cruelty and indifference.

Autumn: Kind and cruel

This ambivalence is apparent in the second stanza where we see Autumn as, if not exactly

a Grim Reaper, at least a cool presider over the destruction she brings in her harvest. She

sleeps insouciantly while the flowers await their fate at the hands of her 'hook' - a harsh,

clinical sound which jars against the softer rhymes earlier in the poem and abruptly ends

the preceding gentle, sleepy mood: 'Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook'..

On first reading, 'Spares the next swath', in the following line, implies clemency. In factm

the image points to adelayed execution for the flowers. There is a similar effect here to

that created by the final image of stanza 1, where the bees are offered unexpected and

abundant pollen, but are soon to be disappointed in their belief that 'warm days will never

cease'. The final image of stanza 2, Autumn watching the cider-press, also contains a hint

of cruelty. Her patience is an aspect of her own immortal existence and contrasts with the

slow crushing of the apples. The fact that she watches their 'last oozings hours by hours',

emphasises the drawn-out nature of their destruction.

Each of these verbal pictures connects back to the opening of the poem and the perhaps

surprising use of 'conspiring' in line 3. The sinister, calculating sense of the word fits the

presentation of Autumn as a force which blesses with energy and beauty ('And fill all

fruit with ripeness to the core') only for that life to be harvested in its prime. This is a

knowledge of which Autumn's children are pathetically innocent: the 'full-grown lambs

loud bleat from hilly bourn' but they do not know what is around the corner. Autumn sits

'careless' on her granary floor: the word means both free and relaxed, and also detached

and aloof. The doubleness of 'careless' is similar to Keats's use of 'viewless' in 'Ode to a

Nightingale' ('the viewless wings of poetry') where the sense of both incomparably

sublime and without clear vision is relevant.

'To Autumn' is full of such 'about to' images, which create an anticipatory tension beneath

a surface of calmness and gentleness. Gradually, as we move through the stanzas, this

tension becomes more apparent. The first stanza describes plans of 'close bosom-friends',

Autumn and the sun. It is curiously static grammatically: its chain of infinitives stems

from 'Conspiring with him how to...' and constitutes one long sentence. Stanza 2 presents

Autumn as midway through her work: lying on a 'half-reap'd' furrow; then as a gleaner

half-way across a brook (F.R. Leavis saw the movement of the eyes from the end of one

line to the next as evocation of the gleaner's transition across the brook); and finally

watching the near completion of the crushing apples. Stanza 3 describes the passing of

Autumn and the implicit expectation of winter. This is hinted at through daylight turning

into evening ('soft dying day'), the presence of a robin, and the reference to swallows

'gathering' to migrate for warmer skies. It is also the reason for the elegiac 'music' of the

final stanza, with its subtle but repeated allusions to death: 'the soft-dying day.. in a

wailful choir the small gnats mourn.. as the light wind lives or dies'. The mention of

'sallows' (a Spenserism for 'willows'), a tree conventionally associated with sadness, adds

to this mood, as does the poem's final image of the departing swallows. ('Swallows

twitter' could, in fact, be an echo of the most well-known elegy of Keats's day, Gray's

'Elegy written in a Country Churchyard', with its 'swallow twitt' ring from the straw-built

shed'.)

Thinking about dying?

When Keats wrote the poem in September 1819, he may have known that he himself

would soon die of tuberculosis, though it is impossible to tell exactly what he knew. On

the one hand, he had pressing concerns about his health. He had been suffering from a

persistent sore throat since the previous summer (one of the recognised symptoms of

tuberculosis) which worsened until February 1820, when he knew that he had the fatal

illness. He had also lost his brother Tom, aged 19, to tuberculosis in December 1818.

Having nursed Tom throughout his illness, and as a former medical student, he might

have begun to fear the worst. His mother's death through tuberculosis (when Keats was

five) might have strengthened a sense of familial connection. On the other hand, there is

no direct evidence of Keats writing in his letter about his fear of developing the illness. In

fact, in many of the letters he sounds upbeat and hopeful about the future (then again he

might have wanted to protect his friends and family but not drawing attention to such

worries).

Perhaps he was thinking about Tom when wrote 'To Autumn' (as he had done earlier in

'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'). Perhaps he was thinking about premature death on a

general level ('Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies!- Ode to a

Nightingale'). Perhaps he was wondering whether he was to die young like Thomas

Chatterton, a celebrated poet who committed suicide aged 17. Keats actually mentions

Chatterton in a letter written to his friend Reynolds two days after he had written 'To

Autumn'; 'I always somehow associate Chatterton with autumn'. Whatever the precise

state of his feelings and knowledge about his health, he is occupied in the poem more

deeply than merely 'gaping after weather', as he jokingly tells Reynolds.

Calmness is suffering

If Keats was thinking about dying at a young age, why should he choose to shape such a

personal subject matter in the form of an ode; a traditionally public and formal genre?

And why should he decide to write in the well-trodden territory of English pastoral

writing; autumn being a distinctly conventional inspiration for poets? In 'To Autumn', I

think Keats is trying to find a meaningful perspective for the painful consciousness that

he might die young, like Tom and Chatterton. By placing his own worries in the context

of the processes of nature, he perhaps finds a degree of calmness, and his feelings of

frustration and potential self-pity perhaps struggle towards an understanding that his pain

is not unique.

The source of such comfort may derive partly from Keats's reading of Wordsworth. Keats

was in broad sympathy with Wordsworth's philosophy of man's intimate and mysterious

unity with nature. In a letter to Reynolds of 3 May 1818, Keats identifies

Wordsworth's Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey as the best example of

poetic under-standing of human suffering:

'We feel the 'burden of the Mystery', To this Point was Wordsworth come, as far as I can

conceive, when he wrote 'Tintern Abbey' and it seems to me that his Genius is

explorative of those dark Passages.'

Wordsworth's poem 'A slumber did my Spirit Seal' also seems comparable to 'To

Autumn' in its mystic presentation of a dead young child at one with nature: 'Rolled

round in earth's diurnal course /With rocks and stones and trees!'

In Hyperion, begun in late 1818 and abandoned at the time of writing 'To Autumn', Keats

was already exploring the need to accept suffering with dignity and courage. The poem

tells the story of the Titans (a group of mythical gods) and their dethronement by a new

set: the Olympians of Ancient Greece. Oceanus, the Titan god of the sea, offers an

explanation for the fall of his kind and suggests that they patiently give way to the

accession of the Olympians. They have fallen, he says, 'by course of Nature's law' and it

would be futile and self-destructive to fight the inevitable. The story of the fall of the

Titans seems to be of similar value to Keats as the playful but melancholic contemplation

of seasonal cycles (another aspect of 'Nature's law') in 'To Autumn'. The Titans' sudden

and to them inexplicable fall from power parallels his own experience.

Keats was writing The Fall of Hyperion, his second attempt at the Titan-theme, at the

same time as 'To Autumn'. In this poem, Keats allegorically and self-consciously shows

the narrator becoming a true poet. By engaging in the tragic suffering of Moneta and the

misery of the Titans, he places his own anxieties in the context of an abstract, eternal

story, and together with the beauty of Moneta's presence, this gives his understanding and

assurance:

'But for her eyes I should have fled away.

They held me back, with a benignant light...

... they saw me not,

But in blank splendour, beam'd like the mild moon,

Who comforts those she sees not, who knows not

What eyes are upward cast.

'Ode on Melancholy' (May 1819) is almost a blueprint for this psychological patterning.

Its explicit message is that the poet should cultivate his sensibility by turning away from

cliched Graveyard School images and self-pitying, self-generated depression ('Make not

your rosary of yew berries') and instead turn towards contemplation of external beauty in

Nature.

Response to criticism

There is perhaps a further explanation as to why Keats should choose to express his

thoughts about dying in such an apparently oblique way. In The Fall of Hyperion, he

condemns self-absorption through Moneta's attack on the narrator as a 'dreamer' who

'venoms all his days'. This might be a sensitive, self-correcting response to criticism of

his poetry by figures such as Byron, and magazines such as The Edinburgh

Review and Blackwood's. The usual charges against his work were of vulgar

sentimentality, pretentious straining for effect, and a cloying prettification of nature.

Byron, for instance, mocked Keats's limited knowledge of the natural world and of the

Classics, found his eroticism embarrassing, and thought his self-conscious attention to the

act of imagining and writing poetry puerile and tiresome: 'Johnny Keats piss a bed poetry

...always working himself up into a state ..frigging his imagination'. (I have not, though,

been able to find any evidence of Keat's knowledge of Byron's criticisms.)

Keats does seem aware of the possible dangers of navel-gazing when writing poetry. In

'Ode on Indolence' (May 1819) he concludes his thoughts by rejecting poetry in a rather

tongue-in-cheek manner, claiming it will only reveal him as 'a pet lamb in a sentimental

farce'. The image is dismissive of cosy, predictable and naive expressions of emotion

which lay themselves open, however heartfelt, to derision. It sounds slightly bitter. Keats

was prepared to accommodate some of the criticism directed at him, particularly in regard

to 'Endymion' (1817). Evidence of this is discernible in the more careful and detached

narrative style of 'Lamia' (Summer 1819) and in the changed ending of 'The Eve of St

Agnes' (January 1819) where the reappearance of the old and palsied Beadsman and

Angela after the romantic happy ending is an attempt to make the poem seem, in his own

words, 'less smokeable'. There is no direct evidence that Keats was deliberately looking

for a more detached style in 'To Autumn', but this appears to be the direction that his

writing was moving towards in late 1819, as, for example, in his desire to make The Fall

of Hyperion, 'more naked and Grecian' and in his attempts at drama, Otho the

Great and King Stephen: A Tragedy.

'To Autumn'

Intriguingly, The Oxford English Dictionary records usage of a verb 'to autumn' in 1771,

originating from the Latinautumnare, which mean to ripen, to bring maturity. Perhaps

Keats dropped the word 'Ode' from the title in order to hint that 'To Autumn' is a lyrical

poem about the process of ageing and dying young - 'Ode' appears in all the other five

titles of poems of this kind. Even if Keats was unaware of the existence of this no doubt

obscure verb, it is perfectly possible that he invented such a meaning: his delight in the

unusual vocabulary of Spenser, Milton and Chapman (archaisms by Keats's day) is

evident across his poetry, and when he felt the need he was quite capable of adopting a

word and changing it for his own purposes (see William T.Arnold's introduction to The

Practical Works of John Keats, pp. 48-9). We could see the pleasure Keats derived from

writing 'To Autumn' as part of the solace the poem's meditation brings. It seems

appropriate that he chose a word to do with calmness and balance when telling Reynolds

that he had just written a poem about the beauty and warmth of Autumn: 'this struck me

so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it'. Like the gleaner crossing her

brook, it may have kept him, momentarily, 'steady'.