'To Autumn' 200 Years, September 19, 2019 When John Keats Wrote His

‘To Autumn’ 200 years, September 19, 2019

When John Keats wrote his last ode, ‘To Autumn’, 200 years ago, on September 19, 1819, amid the warm glow of stubble fields in Winchester, he had 16 months to live. Gone are the outspoken passions of the earlier odes; now there is calm, an accumulation of images, sounds and associations giving a picture rich in detail as a Constable painting.

‘To Autumn’ was written in the knowledge that the 24 year old Keats was, at best, in the autumn of life. The first signs of the tuberculosis that was to kill the poet had appeared a year previously and would become fatal shortly after the poem was written. His harvest of poems was nearly over.

Two hundred years on, ‘To Autumn’ can also be read as a poem about the autumn of the life of the planet beneath a dying star. Keats is part of a profound English culture of love and concern for the countryside; yet that hasn’t prevented a steady depletion of most species of birds, bees, wildlife and plants. Most rivers in England are so polluted that they are dangerous to swim in or drink from.

Among notable warnings of environmental ruin is Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), which spurred public awareness of the dangers of pesticides and the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Carson quotes a poem Keats wrote several months before ‘To Autumn’, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, ‘and no birds sing’ as an accurate picture of the depletion of the bird population. Aldous Huxley remarked that half the subject-matter of English poetry was already gone, the music of the seasons silenced.

And indeed, the writing of poets such as Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Clare, Keats and Hopkins, and many others, is a record of a natural world destroyed, an elegiac quality conveyed in the closing lines of ‘To Autumn’:

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 red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

In much poetry since the time of Keats, images of environmental ruin appear side by side with images of dehumanization and moral corruption. T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land, written almost exactly a century after ‘To Autumn’, in reaction to the slaughter in World War I, depicts a civilization ruined and traumatized, its moral bankruptcy symbolized by biblical imagery of dead land with its stony rubbish, where there is only ‘A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,/ And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,/ And the dry stone no sound of water.’ Pollution of the Thames - ‘empty bottles, sandwich papers,/ Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends’ - signifies moral pollution.

Keats’ poem is a picture of rural England in 1819 as the Industrial Revolution took hold, at the end of the Napoleonic wars, after which the forces of change and the human power of self-destruction rapidly increased. The poem has the close accurate observation of the growing field of natural science, starting from Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selbourne, published a few years before Keats’ birth in 1795. At the point when ‘England’s green and pleasant land’ was threatened, poets and scientists evidently felt the same desire to record and preserve, motivated by the same love and awe for the living world of the English countryside.

‘To Autumn’ was written at the last moment before the balance shifted decisively from agriculture to industry; within 30 years, by 1850, most people in England lived in cities. The critic Lionel Trilling wrote of Keats, ‘He stands as the last image of health at the very moment when the sickness of Europe began to be apparent’, a sickness that grew to encompass wars of unprecedented destruction and genocides as well as vast damage to the natural world.

The reverence in Keats’ poetry for living things contrasts sharply with the human penchant for destroying human life. His contemporary, the American novelist, James Fenimore Cooper in The Last of the Mohicans (1826), lamented the extinction of American Indian tribes; this was followed by other genocides, in Bulgaria, the Belgian Congo, the German colony of Namibia, Serbia, Armenia, Soviet Russia and the Far East, with millions of victims. Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness (1898) is a damning indictment of European imperialism which allowed genocide in Africa on a massive scale.

National literatures mirror the contempt and violent hatreds among nations, leading to destructive wars with many genocides since the so-called Age of Enlightenment, and a long history of grievous maltreatment and exploitation. As prejudice was widespread, including the language of Massenmord, it could not easily be seen as an evil to be eradicated. Poets often express the national spirit burning with humiliation and grievance, hatred and lust for revenge: ‘From humanity via nationality to bestiality’ (Von der Humanität durch Nationalität zur Bestialität), as the Austrian poet Grillparzer put it. Gory revenge fantasies characterize much European poetry from 1789 to 1918, in works by Burns, Kleist, Mickiewicz, Shevchenko, Valaorites, Njegoš, Eminescu, and D’Annunzio, among others. Whitman is practically the only major 19th century poet who openly welcomes foreigners rather than threaten to shoot them. Contempt for and murderous hatred of foreign countries and ethnic groups contributed to both world wars costing the lives of millions of civilians apart from the industrial slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust.

Nations so constituted can hardly be expected to succeed in any global project requiring close cooperation among peoples at odds with one another, to protect the environment. Humans in this view are not to be trusted with the natural world. Two centuries after the Industrial Revolution began, scientists established that human beings were murdering not just other human beings but the planet itself.

In Keats and other Romantic poets reverence for the natural world predominates. Keats’ older contemporaries, Wordsworth and Goethe, may be counted among the early conservationists. To Wordsworth, Nature is a source of moral good, of

a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose presence is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky…

Goethe, both scientist and poet, believed science was an outgrowth of poetry, and poetry could influence legislation. Faust, Part Two (1829) reflects the rapid transition from a subsistence agricultural economy to an industrial economy in its concern with the damage caused by enterprise. Faust the entrepreneur ruins the environment.

It is striking how far removed Keats is from the Western misanthropic tradition in which human nature is fundamentally wicked - has in fact, like Faust, made a pact with the Devil. Swift, Blake, Nietzsche, and Conrad are among those who confront the human heart of darkness. In his Autobiography, Mark Twain summed up his view of man as the most malicious and detestable of animals, ‘below the rats, the grubs, the trichinae … the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain’.

With misanthropic views such as these, should hope for the environment be abandoned? Will self-destructive human nature lead inevitably to global calamity?

Poets such as Keats do not think so. Since the time of the Hebrew Bible, poets have seen human nature - misanthropic, xenophobic, and violently destructive as it is, to the point of omnicide - as capable of love and self-sacrifice, harmony and creativity. Conflict can lead to reconciliation and the healing of war-torn landscapes. Writers perhaps, dealing with universals, with feelings, instincts, relationships, conflicts, understand best the need for a universal vision, a story all can share, valid even in the knowledge of human evil: ‘While the earth exists, seedtime and harvest, the cold and warm of the seasons, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease’ (Genesis 8: 22).

The importance of Keats has become more apparent with time, for his fascination with the mystery of existence, his sensual openness to experience, his intense engagement with imagination - like Adam’s dream, ‘he awoke and found it truth’ - and above all his reminder that although we can pretend to own the earth we cannot pretend to own the seasons, being as we are part of a cycle of life which we tamper with at our peril, of ebb and flow, budding and ripening, seedtime and harvest,

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…

David Aberbach teaches at McGill University, Montreal, and is presently writing a study of literature and the environment at the Oxford Environmental Change Institute. His most recent book is Literature and Poverty: from the Hebrew Bible to the Second World War.