Discuss three poems that deal with the subjects of change.

“To Autumn” deals with a circular pattern of change, the seasons, by recreating a particular moment in that cycle, including the memory of before and the promise of the future: Summer, and Winter and Spring. Its images are generic, timeless and natural: “Mists and mellow fruitfulness… fume of poppies… twinéd flowers.” “An Arundel Tomb”, on the other hand, deals with linear change, the gradual effect of centuries upon an apparently permanent object, the tomb itself. The poem evokes both the bygone “armorial age” of the “pre-baroque”, and the modern world as “eyes / begin to look, not read.”

“To Autumn” is divided into three verses, which share the same rhyme scheme and shape, while they each depict autumn from a different perspective. The first verse deals with the accumulation and ripening of the fruits of autumn. Here, the register is of fertility, growth and fruitfulness. Change is occurring, as something is created, apparently from nothing, with the help of “the maturing sun”. The season and the sun are “conspiring… how to load and bless / with fruit… / to bend with apples the mossed 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”. This list, with the repetition of “to”, both emphasises the abundance of the season, and creates, in the idea of “conspiracy”, a sense of quiet purpose and benevolence to it, despite the negative connotations of the word “conspiracy” itself. The repetitions of sounds further serve to construct an impression of abundance. “Conspiring with him how”, the phrase that begins the main body of the verse, is harmonious with the assonance of short “i” sounds and the alliteration of “h”. In line six, “fill all fruit” uses a vigorous alliteration, and in line eleven the repeated “mm” sound recalls the bees and hence, their “clammy cells”, “o’er-brimmed” with honey. The word “with” appears frequently, underlining both the profusion and variety of autumn produce, like items on a menu. Likewise the repetition of “more” stretches the impression to the “o’er-brimmed” level, preparing us for the glutted lethargy of the second verse. The first verse seems to look back, “Summer has o’er-brimmed their clammy cells”, and the third verse forward, “Where are the songs of Spring?” The second verse connects both with the author and with the present. Indeed, there are many references to time in this verse, all of them vague, “oft… sometimes… hours by hours”, helping to recreate the drowsy, “careless” state of the figure in the poem. This figure seems to be the poet himself, or some generic idler, “drowsed with the fume of poppies”. The scene presented in this verse is luxurious, but soporific. The “winnowing wind”, picked out in this verse by its repeated “w” and “i” sounds, the “fume of poppies” and the “last oozings” of the cider-press recreate the surroundings in touch, smell and vision. The word “oozings” itself is particularly languid in its slow “oo” sound. All of this suggests an absence of change, a timeless and comfortable sort of limbo, yet of course the surrounding verses speak of constant change. This dichotomy conveys the paradox of seasons: they are both ever-changing and eternal. The third verse not only heralds the coming of winter, especially in the last two lines, but also looks further into the future, for the “songs of Spring”. In telling us to “think not of them”, Keats asks us to appreciate the autumn and winter first, instead of wishing them away for spring. Perhaps “To Autumn” is partly a response to Wordsworth’s spring daffodils. In any case, the third verse speak most directly of change, and of natural cycles. The harvest has been made and the fields are “stubble- plains”, the spring lambs are “full-grown”, the “redbreasts” are reappearing and the swallows are flying south. In line 29 the assonant “i” sound of “sinking as the light wind lives” recreates the wind itself, and emphasises the idea of fluctuation, “borne aloft / or sinking”, that is manifest in the change of the seasons. The rhyme sounds in this verse are much longer and lower than in the previous verses, “mourn” and “bourn” instead of “brook” and “look”, for example. The end of autumn is a time of death, for gnats for example, but also a time of activity and new beginnings, as for the twittering swallows: the high-pitched onomatopoeic sound of “twitter” complements this optimistic image.

“An Arundel Tomb” describes not cycles but a linear pattern of change. It also hints at a permanent, unchanging truth that is somehow expressed through the very change that has occurred to the tomb: “what will survive of us is love.” Like “To Autumn”, its most overriding effect is that of the passage of time, achieved by, for example, varying the length of sentences to create a speeding-up and slowing-down effect. The poem begins in a formal style, “Such plainness of the pre-baroque / hardly involves the eye”, mimicking or even parodying the formality of the tomb, and indeed the very idea of a tomb showing statues of its occupants and inscribed in Latin. Despite the “faint hint of the absurd”, it is uninteresting. In the second verse, a sense of shock is achieved by picking out key words at the end of an enjambed line: “…until / it meets his left-hand gauntlet, still / clasped empty in the other”. There is an element of suspense here, as the poem slowly reveals what makes the tomb special, saving the revelation for a simple, alliterative phrase at the end of the verse: “holding her hand”. The first line of the third verse is emphasised by its simplicity, in comparison with the longer, complex sentences that formed the first verses, and by the repeated “l” sound in “lie so long”. This line, and this verse, disconnects the discussion tomb itself, and its unique feature, from the people it commemorates. To them, it was “just a detail friends would see”, and does not reveal whether they did or did not love one another. Another short, simple sentence, forming the first line this time of the sixth verse, reinforces this idea that the true identity of the earl and countess is unknown, “washed away”. Not only has the world around it changed over the time, into “an unarmorial age”, but the tomb itself has changed, both physically through the “soundless damage” of the air, and in its meaning: “time has transfigured them into / untruth.” Verses four and five describe and recreate the passing of time like time-lapse photography: the subject is still, while everything moves and changes around it. The tomb is on a “supine, stationary voyage”; this phrase emphasised by its sibilance, evoking the hiss of sand through an hour-glass. In another alliterative phrase, time was to “turn the old tenantry away”, and the feudal system collapse. “How soon succeeding eyes begin / to look, not read” the “Latin names around the base” that were, for the earl and countess, the purpose of the tomb. The relentless cycle of the seasons, “Snow… Light… summer”, is expressed in the short sentences and enjambment of verse five. The last two verses seem regretful and nostalgic, pointing out the helplessness of the tomb and its world in the face of time, using transient, weak words like “smoke” and “scrap”. Line 36 seems to play on the word “attitude”, both as a pose or position, i.e. of the figures on the tomb, and as a state of mind. In fact both of these things remain: the romantic “almost-instinct almost true”, that love is some kind of permanent legacy, and the enduring symbol of that idea, the Arundel Tomb. The conclusion is not, in the end, so much nostalgic as wistful. Truly unchanging is the notion of love’s power, that endures through the age of chivalry, “blazon” and feudalism, to today’s “altered” world.

Thus both poems suggest a sense of permanence, whether in the cycles of nature or the persistence of our “almost-instincts”. “I Am” celebrates, or recognises, another of the latter, the longing “for scenes, where man hath never trod… there to abide with my Creator, God”. It shares with “To Autumn” a motif both of loneliness and connection with a permanent external force. All these poems deal with the subject of change by recreating the passage of time, but also by picking out a contrasting, unchanging feature of the world. In “An Arundel Tomb” time may cause a “transfiguration”, but this, in the gospel sense, is not a qualitative change, but the revelation of a deeper truth.