Poetry for Students, Volume 36 – Finals/ 8/21/2010 08:27 Page 3

POETRY for Students

Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Poetry VOLUME 36

Sara Constantakis, Project Editor Foreword by David J. Kelly

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To Autumn

JOHN KEATS ‘‘To Autumn’’ is a poem by the English romantic poet John Keats. It was written in 1819 and 1820 published the following year in his collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems. Keats was living in Winchester in the county of Hampshire in southern England at the time that he wrote the poem. Every day he walked for an hour before dinner. On Sunday, September 19, 1819, he walked along the Itchin River and across the meadows in fine weather. Two days later, he wrote a letter to his friend Joshua Reynolds, in which he described the gen- esis of ‘‘To Autumn’’:

How beautiful the season is now—How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it. . . . I never lik’d stubble fields so much as now—Aye better than the chilly green of the 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. ‘‘To Autumn’’ is the last of the six great odes Keats wrote in 1819, and it has always been recognized as one of his finest poems. Reviewers have regarded it as one of the most perfect poems in English literature. It is notable for its serene appre- ciation of the autumn season, the sense of acceptance it conveys of the passage of time and the seasons, and the way in which it presents and reconciles opposites. ‘‘To Autumn’’ can be found in most editions of Keats’s poems.

To Autumn

GeorgemarriedandemigratedtotheUnited States, where he lost all his money in a bad business venture in Kentucky. Keats’s younger brother Tom contracted tuberculosis, and Keats nursed him until his death in December. Caring for his brother aggravated Keats’s own bad health, which had begun when he caught a severe cold on a walking tour in Scotland in the summerandwassofeverish hehadtoreturnhome.Keatsalsometandfellin love with eighteen-year-old Fanny Brawne. They became engaged the next year and lived next door to each other in Hampstead, London. In 1819, Keats wrote most of the poems that would make him famous, including The Eve of St. Agnes, ‘‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci,’’‘‘Ode to a Nightingale,’’‘‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’’Lamia, and ‘‘To Autumn.’’ These poems were published in his third book in 1820. Keats also recast his unfinished epic Hyperion into The Fall of Hyperion. However, in October, only a month after writing ‘‘To Autumn,’’ he became seriously ill with tuberculosis, a tendency to which seemed to run in the John Keats (The Library of Congress) family. In 1820, his health rapidly worsened. In September, he left England for Italy, hoping that the warmer climate would improve his health. He stayed in Rome but did not recover. Keats died on February 23, 1821, and was buried in the Protes- AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY tant Cemetery in Rome. Keats was born on October 31, 1795, in London, England. His father died after falling from his horse when Keats was only eight, and his mother POEM TEXT died six years later in 1810. In 1811, when Keats was fifteen, he was taken out of school by his guardian, Richard Abbey, and apprenticed to an I apothecary. Four years later, Keats entered Guy’s Hospital in London to continue his medical stud- Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; ies. He qualified as an apothecary in 1816 but had Conspiring with him how to load and bless no interest in becoming a surgeon. Instead, he With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves decided to dedicate his life to writing poetry. He run; had already met the poet and journalist Leigh To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, 5 Hunt, and Hunt introduced him to other literary And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; men, including William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. In 1816, Keats wrote And still more, later flowers for the bees, his first major poem, a sonnet titled ‘‘On First Until they think warm days will never cease, 10 Looking into Chapman’s Homer,’’ which was pub- For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy lished in 1817 in his first volume of poetry. Later cells. that year he wrote his long poem Endymion and began an epic poem, Hyperion, modeled on John Milton’s Paradise Lost. II The year 1818 was a tumultuous one for Keats. Endymion was published but received hostile Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? reviews in the literary press. Keats’s older brother Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

To Autumn

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; 15 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: And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep MEDIA Steady thy laden head across a brook; 20 Or by a cyder-press, with patient look, ADAPTATIONS Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. John Keats, an audio CD in the Great Poets series, was released by Naxos AudioBooks in 2007. Poetry of Keats, read by Sir Ralph Richard- son, was released on audio cassette by Caed- III mon in 1996. 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, 25 And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; Stanza 2 Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn In stanza 2, the poet addresses autumn directly. Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; Autumn is personified as a woman, perhaps a kind And full-grown lambs loud bleat from of goddess figure, as shown by the use of the word hilly bourn; 30 thee to address her. In lines 12 and 13, the poet says Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft that she can often be seen by anyone who cares to The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; look. The emphasis in this stanza is not on growth And gathering swallows twitter in the skies. but on harvesting. Autumn is presented in four different guises. First (lines 14–15), she might be found sitting on the floor of a granary (a store- house for grain), her hair just fluttering a little in the breeze. Then perhaps (lines 16–17) this female POEM SUMMARY autumn figure might be found asleep, pushed into slumber by the odor of poppies, in a furrow of a Stanza 1 partially harvested field of grain. As autumn sleeps, ‘‘To Autumn’’ consists of three stanzas of eleven the poet imagines a brief moment while the har- lines each. Stanza 1 begins with a general descrip- vesting stops (line 18). In line 19, autumn is pre- tion of the characteristics of autumn. Autumn is a sented in a third guise, this time as a gleaner time when nature’s processes of growth come to stepping across a brook with a load on her head. fruition. Everything has reached a mature stage of A gleaner is a person who picks up grain that has growth, yet growth still continues. Beginning in been left in the field by harvesters. In lines 21 and line 2 and continuing throughout the stanza, the 22, autumn is seen in yet another guise. She season of autumn is presented as being in league watches in a state of repose a cider press as it with the sun to bring about this state of ripeness in creates cider from pulped apples. nature. The vines that cling to the eaves of the cottages’ thatched roofs are flowering. Trees are weighed down with apples, and all the fruit is ripe Stanza 3 (line 6). In line 7, the poet gives more examples of Stanza 3 continues for the first two lines the direct ripeness, using verbs that convey images of growth address to autumn. The first line has a note of and fullness as applied to gourds and hazelnuts. regret, as the vanished sounds of spring are twice Flowers continue to bloom (lines 8–9), providing a recalled, but in line 2 the poet states that the pass- seemingly endless supply for the bees to gather ing of spring is not something to be regretted. nectar or pollen. In lines 10–11, the bees are pre- Autumn has its own sounds that are, it is implied, sented as being so full of what they gather from the of equal value and beauty. The remainder of the flowers that they think the heat of summer will stanza evokes these sounds of autumn. First, in line never end. 3, the poet refers to a gentle autumn sunset in

To Autumn

which the stubble on the harvested fields takes on a completes the picture of nature’s fullness in all its reddish color. At that time of day, the sound of manifestations. gnats can be heard, like a choir singing a melancholy song. Coming from the sallow trees by the river, the sound of the gnats is heard in the gentle Opposites breeze as it rises and falls (lines 28–29). A sallow In stanza 1, the emphasis is on action and move- tree is a kind of willow tree with broad leaves. In ment in nature, but in stanza 2, while movement still lines 30 and 31, the poet refers to more sounds that continues, it is balanced by moments of stillness and can be heard in autumn: the bleating of lambs and inaction. This is conveyed through the personifica- the singing of the crickets in the hedges. Finally, tion of autumn as a female figure, who is shown in completing the variety of natural sounds, the poet various attitudes of repose: sitting on the granary evokes the songs of the robin with its red breast floor, asleep in the fields, and watching the cider and the swallows that call as they gather in the sky press. There is still activity going on, but beside it ready to migrate for the winter. there is rest; the two opposites are somehow reconciled. This is part of a wider set of opposites that are reconciled in the poem. Whereas stanza 1 emphasizes fullness and continued growth, stanza 3 focuses on another aspect of autumn. Although THEMES the beauty of the sounds of autumn are celebrated, Nature thereisalsoanawarenessthatnature’scycleis beginning to shift and move on; the other side of The poem, especially in the first stanza, creates the fullness is emptiness and death, the qualities of impression of the fullness of the natural world. At winter. The reference in the last line to the swallows this point in autumn, nature is full and complete. gathering in order to migrate is a sign that winter is The earth and the sun combine to create abun- approaching. The two direct references to death in dance. Everything is ripe. Indeed, nature is almost this stanza—the dying day and the dying down of weighed down by its own fullness. The vines that the light wind—are also gentle hints about what is run around the thatched roofs of the cottages are to come. The same is true of the reference in line 5 to loaded with fruit; the apple trees are so full of the mournful wailing of the gnats. This may be part apples that the branches are bending under the of the pleasing music of autumn that the poet weight. The fullness presented is not a static con- announces in line 2 but is also a subtle reference to dition; everything is still growing and filling out, as loss and death that puts in mind the wider reality of is emphasized by the description of the gourd and nature’s processes. If there is life there is also death, hazelnut in stanza 1, line 7. The flowers are still not only of all the natural phenomena mentioned in budding, and the sense of a never-ending fullness the poem, but of human life, too. is conveyed by the repetition of the word more in stanza 1, lines 8 and 9. The word is used to describe the flowers but applies to all of nature’s Natural Cycles processes that are presentedinthefirststanzaof Throughout the poem there is a feeling of relaxed the poem. Nature is so full that even the bees can acceptance of nature’s processes. This is apparent hardly keep up with their work. eveninline1,wherethewordmellow suggests not The pattern of imagery in this first stanza only the pleasing flavor resulting from the ripeness ensures that all of nature, from great to small, is of the fruit but also the relaxed frame of mind of included in this fullness. The poem begins rather the speaker. The poet just watches, observes, and like a cinematic long shot of a misty autumnal accepts everything that nature does; he does not scene, and this is followed by the expansive argue, regret, or speculate. Indeed, at the beginning image of the sun. Following this is what might of stanza 3, the poet takes it upon himself to cheer be referred to as a medium shot of vines growing up the personified figure of autumn by telling her around the eaves of thatched cottages and not to regret the absence of the sounds of spring orchards full of apple trees. Then the images of because she, autumn, has her own sounds that are nature become smaller and smaller, as if nature is of equal value. In this way, the poet lays out his being revealed in a series of close-ups. From the own acceptance of life and death. Everything in apple trees, the reader is taken to gourds and nature may be impermanent, but that is no cause hazelnuts, flowers and bees, and finally to the for distress or protest: just as there is a time for overfilled cells of bees, a detailed image that growth, there is a time for decay.

To Autumn

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

Write an essay in which you compare and con- Sunday in September 1819 that led to him trast ‘‘To Autumn’’ with either ‘‘Ode to a writing the poem ‘‘To Autumn.’’ Note what Nightingale’’ or ‘‘Ode on a Grecian Urn.’’ Do you see and use it as a basis for the poem. the poems have themes and imagery in com- Visit http://www.npg.org.uk/home.php, the mon? How do they differ in mood, atmos- Web site of London’s National Portrait Gal- phere, and formal structure? lery, and do a search on John Keats. The Using for your research The Romantics: Eng- search will produce a number of portraits of lish Literature in Its Historical, Cultural, and Keats. Two are by Joseph Severn, who accom- Social Contexts by Neil King, one of five vol- panied Keats to Rome and tended him until umes in the young-adult ‘‘Backgrounds to his death. Other artists include Henry Meyer, English Literature’’ series published by Chel- Charles Armitage Brown, and William Hilton. sea House in 2002, or other print and online Look at all the portraits, and then select two or sources, give a class presentation in which you three that you like best. Write a paragraph or explain why ‘‘To Autumn’’ should be consid- two in which you describe Keats’s appearance ered a romantic movement poem. What char- in each portrait. What clothes does he wear? acteristics does it have that classifies it as How would you describe his face and hair? romantic? Use PowerPoint or a similar pro- What is the expression on his face? What is in gram to present your main ideas. the background? Are the portraits realistic or Write a short poem about autumn or any of romanticized? Does Keats look similar in each the seasons. For preparation, you might want portrait or different? How is he different? to take a walk, like the one Keats took on that Which portrait do you like best, and why?

STYLE poet Horace. In English literature, odes either follow the pattern of Pindar or Horace or of a third Ode category, the irregular ode. An example of the ‘‘To Autumn’’ is an ode. An ode is an elaborate latter is Wordsworth’s ‘‘Ode: Intimations of lyric poem with a formal structure consisting of Immortality.’’ Most of Keats’s odes, including several stanzas. It is dignified in tone and language ‘‘To Autumn’’ are Horatian in form, in which all and usually treats a serious topic. The first two of the stanzas follow the same structure. The lines of Keats’s ode illustrates the kind of formal, eleven-line stanza and its rhyming pattern in ‘‘To elegant diction that is typical of the ode form. Autumn’’ is Keats’s own invention. (Diction refers to the language of the poem and the type of words and phrases used.) The elaborate Rhyme and Meter way in which autumn is addressed in these first two The rhyme scheme varies only slightly. In stanza lines is an example of periphrasis, in which indirect 1, line 1 rhymes with line 3, line 2 with line 4, line 5 phrases are used to describe an ordinary object, an with lines 9 and 10, line 6 with line 8, and line 7 abstraction, or a simple action in a roundabout with 11. This rhyme scheme might be represented way. Periphrasis was commonineighteenthcen- as follows: abab cde dcce. In stanzas 2 and 3, there tury English poetry, and Keats is following in this is a slight alteration. The fifth line rhymes with tradition. eighth line, while the sixth line rhymes with ninth The ode was first developed in classical liter- and tenth lines. This rhyme scheme might be ature by the Greek poet Pindar and the Roman represented as follows: abab cde dcce.

The poem describes apples on ‘‘the moss’d cottage-trees’’ and ‘‘all fruit with ripeness to the core.’’ (Image copyright Vphoto, 2010. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)

The meter (pattern of stressed syllables) is place for this inversion is at the beginning of a line. predominantly iambic pentameter. An iamb is a Examples occur in stanza 1, line 1; stanza 2, lines poetic foot (unit of meter) consisting of two sylla- 17, 18, and 20; and stanza 3, line 23. bles, the first unstressed and the second stressed. It is the most common foot in English poetry. A Apostrophe pentameter consists of five feet. Lines 4, 7, and 26 Apostrophe is a figure of speech in which an absent are examples of regular iambic pentameter. How- person or a personified object is directly addressed. ever, Keats varies the meter on many occasions. The title of the poem, ‘‘To Autumn,’’ illustrates this He makes frequent use of spondees. A spondee is a figure of speech, which is employed throughout foot in which both syllables are stressed. The third stanza 2 and continued in the first two lines of foot of line 10 in stanza 1 is a spondee that empha- stanza 3. Keats also uses apostrophe in one of his sizes the warmth of summer. The fact that the first other famous odes, ‘‘Ode on a Grecian Urn.’’ syllable of that foot is stressed makes it stand out against the expected iambic rhythm, in which the Personification first syllable of the foot is always unstressed. Spon- Personification is a figure of speech in which an dees also occur in stanza 2 (lines 16 and 18) and object or an abstraction is given human qualities. frequently in stanza 3: the last foot of line 27 (the Personification was a common figure of speech in gnats), line 29 (the wind), line 30 (third foot), line eighteenth century English poetry, and Keats con- 31 (first foot), and line 32 (second foot). Keats also tinues that tradition in stanza 2 of the poem, in employs trochaic feet. A trochaic foot is an which he personifies autumn as a female figure inverted iamb: it consists of a stressed syllable going about her tasks, sometimes resting from followed by an unstressed one. The most common weariness.

To Autumn

Imagery Many of the romantics expressed their response The imagery in the poem is drawn from nature, to nature through the form of the lyric poem, includ- such as fruit, flowers, bees, and birds. The images ing the ode, and in this Keats was also typical of his appeal primarily to the sense of sight, as the poet time. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley all wrote creates a series of pictures of autumn. The last odes. Shelley’s ‘‘Ode to the West Wind’’ is one of the stanza, however, contains as many auditory most famous. (related to the sense of hearing) as visual images as Keats and Shelley were personally acquainted, the poet describes the variety of natural sounds that but they kept their distancefromeachother.They are heard in autumn. In stanza 2, there is a notable met in December 1816, and Shelley, having read olfactory (related to the sense of smell) image in line some of Keats’s poems, advised him not to publish 17, referring to the poppies. them—advice that Keats did not take. After Keats died Shelley wrote an elegy, Adonais, in his mem- ory. Byron did not know Keats personally, but he did express a dislike of Keats’s poetry, although he HISTORICAL CONTEXT modified his judgment after Keats’s death, praising Keats’s unfinished epic poem, Hyperion. The English Romantic Movement The romantic movement in English literature began in the last decade of the eighteenth century, The Peterloo Massacre when William Wordsworth (1770–1850), Samuel In the 1810s England was in a period of economic Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), and William Blake distress. Life for the working classes was particu- (1757–1827) began to publish their poetry. Keats larly hard. Wages were falling, unemployment was belongs to the second generation of romantic high, and there was growing agitation for political poets and was the youngest of the six major fig- reform. In the summer of 1819, public protest ures. He was a contemporary of Percy Bysshe meetings were held in the English cities of Leeds, Shelley (1792–1822) and Lord Byron (1788–1824). Stockport, and Birmingham, as well as in Glas- gow, Scotland. On August 16, a huge crowd of One of the seminal works of the emerging between sixty and eighty thousand people gath- movement was Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyr- ered in St. Peter’s Fields, Manchester, to call for ical Ballads, published in 1798, in which Words- political reform, including universal suffrage. worth rejected the formal poetic diction of the Barely had the meeting started when orders were eighteenth century and wrote in a language that given for the militia to arrest one of the leaders of was closer to the way ordinary people spoke. the reform movement, Henry Hunt, known as Wordsworth is also known for his love of nature, ‘‘Orator’’ Hunt. In the ensuing cavalry charge, particularly the area in northwest England known as the Lake District, where he lived almost all of his fifteen people were killed, and between four hun- life. Keats did not discover the poetry of Words- dred and seven hundred were injured. The incident worth until 1816, and he quickly judged him Eng- quickly became known as the Peterloo Massacre land’s greatest living poet. Wordsworth was to have and produced shock and outrage throughout the a great influence on Keats’s poetic development. country. Keats was a typical romantic in that he valued Several of the English romantic poets reacted imagination over reason, feeling over thought. strongly to the massacre. Living in Italy at the Along with Wordsworth and Blake, he believed time, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was always on that the imagination provided a more complete the side of reform, expected a revolution to break understanding of truth than could be gained by out shortly. He wrote a poem, ‘‘The Mask of the unaided rational mind. In one of his letters he Anarchy,’’ in which he encouraged the masses to wrote, ‘‘What the imagination seizes as Beauty must rise up against their oppressors. Lord Byron, who be truth’’ (a thought he would also express in his was also living in exile in Italy, expressed a similar ‘‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’’), and he longed for ‘‘a Life view about the imminence of a revolution. How- of Sensations rather than of Thoughts.’’ Also typi- ever, no revolution occurred. The British govern- cal of romanticism was Keats’s interest in dreams as ment responded swiftly to the Peterloo Massacre a way of exploring aspects of human consciousness by passing repressive laws later that year aimed at beyond the everyday waking mind. His poem ‘‘The stifling the reform movement. These laws were Eve of St. Agnes’’ is an example of this. known as the Six Acts. Political reform would

To Autumn

COMPARE & CONTRAST

1810s: Britain emerges victorious in the Napo- verse narratives such as The Lady of the Lake leonic Wars following the victory at the Battle (1810) are perennial favorites. of Waterloo in 1815. In this battle, Britain and Today: In an online British Broadcasting Cor- its ally Prussia defeat France under Emperor Napoleon I. Victory does not bring prosperity, poration (BBC) poll taken to mark National however, and Britain endures hard economic Poetry Day, T. S. Eliot is voted Britain’s times for the remainder of the decade. favorite poet. The only living poet to make Today: Britain joins the U.S.-led invasion of the top ten is Rastafarian performance poet Iraq in 2003 and withdraws its combat forces Benjamin Zephaniah. Keats places ninth. six years later, in April 2009. Britain also 1810s: Romanticism is a growing movement in endures, along with much of the rest of the literature, art, and music in Europe, especially world, a severe economic recession beginning England and Germany. in 2008. Today: Literature is dominated by the move- 1810s: The most popular poets in England are Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott. Byron’s per- ment known as postmodernism. Most poets sonal magnetism and scandalous life make him do not write formal verse such as odes but the most famous poet in Europe, while Scott’s prefer the flexibility of free verse.

have to wait more than a decade, until the Great study, F. M. Owen refers to the ‘‘autumnal glory Reform Act of 1832. which had touched the poet’’ when he wrote ‘‘To Keats, who is not thought of as a political poet, Autumn.’’ In 1886, poet and critic A. C. Swinburne nonetheless followed political events quite closely declared that Keats’s odes are ‘‘unequalled and and had decided opinions about the state of the unrivalled.’’ He selected ‘‘To Autumn’’ and ‘‘Ode country. He was in the huge supportive crowd on a Grecian Urn’’ as ‘‘perhaps the two nearest to that greeted Orator Hunt when he reached London absolute perfection, to the triumphant achieve- on September 13 to await trial. Keats expressed his ment accomplishment of the very utmost beauty thoughts about the matter as part of a long letter he possible to human words.’’ Swinburne’s comment wrote to his brother George over ten days in late was echoed by poet Robert Bridges in his book A September, which was exactly the time during Critical Introduction to the Poems of John Keats which he wrote ‘‘To Autumn.’’ He believed that in (1896), in which he places ‘‘To Autumn’’ as the spite of the current repression, there was hope that finest of Keats’s odes, declaring, ‘‘I do not know liberty would triumph. that any sort of fault can be found in it.’’ The assessments by Swinburne and Bridges set the tone for much twentieth-century criticism of the poem. M. R. Ridley, for example, in Keats’ Crafts- CRITICAL OVERVIEW manship: A Study in Poetic Development, first published in 1933, describes it as ‘‘the most serenely ‘‘To Autumn’’ has always been regarded as one of flawless poem in our language.’’ In an influential Keats’s finest poems. When books about Keats’s collection published in 1963, Walter Jackson Bate work began appearing in the late-nineteenth cen- acknowledges that the ode ‘‘is one of the most tury, the poem was often singled out for praise. In nearly perfect poems in English,’’ and he points Keats: A Study (1880), the first book-length critical out that it brings together many of Keats’s typical

Sheep grazing on English hillside with autumn colors (Image copyright Kevin Eaves, 2010. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)

concerns and reconciles them, such as presenting a the elements of a fertility ritual, including the har- union between process and stasis, movement and vest, a goddess, and a priest (the poet). For another stillness. In John Keats: His Life and Writings (first prominent critic, Helen Vendler, in The Odes of published 1966), Douglas Bush builds on Bate’s John Keats (1983), the ode arises not from a sense reading and refines it. He argues that ‘‘To Autumn’’ of fullness about the season leading to celebration is not quite the ‘‘poem of untroubled serenity’’ that but the opposite, a sense of deprivation, which is many have taken it to be. Even while the poet apparent in the stubble fields. Keats saw the stubble celebrates, in the first two stanzas, the fullness fields on the walk that inspired the poem. Vendler inherent in autumn, there is ‘‘the overshadowing argues that Keats, on seeing those fields, ‘‘wished to fact of impermanence. The summer has done its fill up the empty canvas of the landscape, to replen- work and is departing; and if autumn comes, winter ish its denuded volume, to repopulate its bounda- cannot be far behind.’’ These ‘‘melancholy implica- ries.’’ So he fills the scene with a succession of tions’’ are more fully developed in the final stanza in images to convey nature’s fullness rather than its which ‘‘every item carries an elegiac note.’’ The final emptiness. result Keats achieves is ‘‘the power to see and accept In his biography Keats (1997), Andrew Motion life as it is, a perpetual process of ripening, decay, writes that the poem ‘‘seems easily to balance forces and death.’’ of life and death, and to combine a sense of natural In an unusual reading, Dorothy van Ghent in growth with individual effort.’’ He also takes into Keats: The Myth of the Hero analyzes the poem in account more recent readings of the poem that terms of the archetypal quest myth of the hero. The emphasize the social context of the poem. This hero is the lyric voice of the speaker of the poem was a time of working-class unrest and government who attends ‘‘as celebrant on the epiphany of the repression in England, and Keats’s use of the word earth-goddess and her withdrawal to the under- gleaner is significant. Gleaning had been made ille- world.’’ She explains that the poem contains all gal in 1881, and Motion points out that Keats’s use

To Autumn

of the image of a gleaner ‘‘refers to his sympathy for the denied and the dispossessed.’’

POETRY FOR KEATS EMERGES

SPONTANEOUSLY FROM A WELL OF STILLNESS, CRITICISM AND THE ENTIRE PROCESS RESEMBLES A Bryan Aubrey NATURALLY RECURRING EVENT.’’ Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English. In this essay, he considers ‘‘To Autumn’’ in terms of the ideas about poetry and creativity that Keats discussed in his letters. Readers since Keats’s day have been struck by the serenity and sense of acceptance that pervades through a kind of intuitive understanding, felt in the the ode ‘‘To Autumn.’’ In this respect it differs from blood rather than reasoned in the mind. two of the great odes Keats wrote just a few months earlier. In ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale,’’ for example, the It is this sense of serene acceptance of whatever poet is a distressed figure who finds solace in a life brings that makes this ode the perfect example momentary loss of self stimulated by the song of of what Keats described as ‘‘negative capability.’’ the nightingale. The ode has some of the luxurious This is part of a definition of the state of mind that imagery of nature (although in springtime) that is Keats believed the poet should cultivate. He also found in ‘‘To Autumn,’’ but it ends on a note of described it in a letter he wrote to his brothers loss and doubt; the poet cannot permanently lose George and Tom in late December 1817. He men- himself in nature as he does in the later poem. He tions a discussion he had just had with a friend that questions the nature of the self and of reality. Like had led him to a new understanding of the nature of the nightingale ode, ‘‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’’ also poetic creativity: alludes to the sorrows inherent in earthly life. The [S]everal things dovetailed in my mind, & at once poem celebrates the figures on the urn precisely it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of because they are beyond the world of process and Achievement especially in Literature & which change. The trees depicted will never shed their Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean leaves; spring will never depart. The life depicted Negative Capability, that is when man is capable on the urn is frozen in a moment of passionate of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, with- desire that can never fade. It is this vision of the out any irritable reaching after fact & reason— Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine eternal sensual moment that makes the urn a com- isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetra- fort, says the poet, to humans throughout the ages, lium of mystery, from being incapable of remain- whomustdealwiththerealities of change, decay, ing content with half knowledge. This pursued suffering, and loss. through Volumes would perhaps take us no fur- There is none of this need for escape or comfort ther than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or in ‘‘To Autumn.’’ There is no contrast or opposition rather obliterates all consideration. between eternity and change; there is no flight from earthly reality followed by an anguished return. ‘‘To This passage, along with many others in Autumn’’ strikes a note of acceptance from the Keats’s letters, has become famous as an ideal to beginning and does not waver. The poet not only which the poet might aspire. Keats means that the contemplates but also relishes and celebrates the poet should not allow the constant, restless ques- natural process, including the cycle of the seasons. tioning of the mind to dominate his awareness, There is no sense in which the poet’s self is strug- because the mind is more likely to obscure truth gling to understand or to escape from life. He than to reveal it. The poet should pay no attention observes the scene untroubled and undisturbed. to it but instead be more present in each moment The only question he asks (in the first line of stanza with his whole being, open to whatever experience 3) is a rhetorical one, to which he already knows the is presenting itself to him. When a person can lay answer. He says that no one should regret the pass- the mind aside, the beauty inherent in all things ing of the songs of spring because autumn has its may reveal itself. Keats pokes a little fun at Samuel own sounds that are of equal beauty. Keats answers Taylor Coleridge, his older contemporary, a man his own question not by a process of intellectual of enormous intellect who followed his mind wher- reasoning, of which he was always suspicious, but ever it insisted on leading him and whose poetic

To Autumn

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

Keats’s ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale’’ is one of his how this literary group operated and the prin- great odes. It was written in May 1819, only a ciples it represented. few months before ‘‘To Autumn.’’ The poem John Keats by Stephen Hebron (2002) is a was stimulated by the delight Keats took in biography of Keats for young adults. It is the song of a nightingale that he listened to as well illustrated, with paintings, drawings, and he sat in the garden outside Charles Brown’s etchings that bring the romantic period to life. house in Hampstead, London, where he was Hebron gives a compelling portrait of Keats’s living at the time. One morning Keats sat for short, tragic, but inspiring life. several hours in the garden under a plum tree and wrote the poem. It can be found in any Art & Nature: An Illustrated Anthology of edition of Keats’s poetry, including Complete Nature Poetry (1992) by Kate Ferrell is a lav- Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats,with ishly illustrated volume. It contains almost two an introduction by Edward Hirsch (2001). hundred nature poems, organized by season, William Wordsworth’s majestic ‘‘Ode: Intima- and is illustrated with photographs of artwork tions of Immortality from Recollections of from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Early Childhood’’ completed in 1804 and pub- From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural lished in 1807, is one of the greatest odes in the Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas English language. Keats knew it well, and it 1900–2002, edited by the poet and novelist by was very influential on his thinking. The ode Ishmael Reed (2002), is an anthology that can be found in any collection of Wordsworth’s spans over a hundred years of American poems, including William Wordsworth: The poetry. Poets of all races are represented, Major Works, including the Prelude (2007) including Sylvia Plath, Yusef Komunyakaa, edited by Stephen Gill. Thulani Davis, Bob Holman, Jayne Cortez, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Diane Glancy, Garrett Hongo, Charles Simic, Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle by Jef- Al Young, Nellie Wong, Gertrude Stein, Ai, frey Hunt (2004) is a detailed look at the circle and Tupac Shakur. The anthology shows how of writers who gathered around the journalist, poetry has changed over the last century and minor poet, and radical Leigh Hunt. These even more so since Keats wrote his formally include the second generation of English structured ode ‘‘To Autumn.’’ The anthology romantics, not only Shelley, Keats, and also includes poetic manifestos and commen- Byron but also the essayist William Hazlitt tariesthatcanbecomparedwithKeats’sown and others. Jeffrey Hunt draws out their rela- beliefs about poetry as expressed in many of his tionships and gives a fascinating picture of letters.

genius flamed out before he was thirty. Keats In November 1817, he wrote to his friend Benjamin referred to his friend Charles Wentworth Dilke in Bailey that ‘‘if a Sparrow come before my Window I terms similar to those he used about Coleridge. At take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel.’’ almost exactly the time he wrote ‘‘To Autumn,’’ he It is this sense of the poet’s self standing aside in wrote to his brother George and his wife that order to allow the fullest possible experience of life ‘‘Dilke will never come at a truth as long as he in all its manifestations that is so apparent in ‘‘To lives; because he is always trying at it.’’ Autumn.’’ The questing self has retreated before the Keats wrote often about how he would lose beauty of the perceived moment and the larger himself in contemplation of whatever came his way. natural process of which it is a part.

To Autumn

It is perhaps this absence of the self that enables read today. Given the turmoil of Keats’s life at the the poet to sense the stillness that underlies the time, in which he was beset by financial, emotional, ongoing process of autumn. Underlying the move- and health problems, the serenity of this ode seems ment of the season is a state of rest. These two like a minor miracle. It was to be the last major states, activity and rest, coexist in an easy equili- poem he wrote. Seventeen months later, John Keats brium. This is presented in the second stanza. The was dead. personified figure of autumn is shown sitting (not Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on ‘‘To Autumn,’’ working) on a granary floor, asleep in a field as the in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2011. reaping is momentarily suspended, and as a gleaner carefully balancing a load on her head as she steps Arnd Bohm across a brook. The last image all by itself suggests a In the following essay, Bohm asserts that ‘‘To balance between activity and stasis, and as such it is Autumn’’ should be read in the political context typical of Keats’s poetry. He was frequently of 1819. inspired in his work by sculpture and painting that The suggestion that Keats drew on James showed human figures caught in a moment of Thomson when composing the closing line of ‘‘To repose yet also contained great dynamism (poten- Autumn’’ has not aroused any consternation (Ven- tial for physical energy, movement, or change). dler 322). The situations are similar, and Keats The second stanza of ‘‘To Autumn’’ shows echoes the crucial verb twitter: ‘‘And gathering that although Keats has often been thought of as swallows twitter in the skie’’ (361). Thomson had a poet of the richness of sensual experience—and described the ‘‘swallow-people’’: he is that—he is also a poet of silence and stillness. rejoicing once For Keats, a kind of inner silence was not an idea Ere to their wintry slumbers they retire, but a direct experience. Heoftenappearstohave In clusters clung beneath the mouldering slipped into a quiet state of mind in which the bank, boundaries of the self relaxed, and he uses various And where, unpierced by frost, the cavern phrases in his poetry to describe this (in ‘‘Ode to sweats: Psyche’’ for example). It was clearly an experience Or rather, into warmer climes conveyed. he valued greatly. Sometimes he called it idleness With other kindred birds of season, there or indolence, but he gave those terms a positive They twitter cheerful, till the vernal months meaning, associating them with creativity. Poetry Invite them welcome back—for thronging emerges from those moments of relaxed quietness. now In one of his early poems, ‘‘Sleep and Poetry,’’ Innumerous wings are in commotion all. he personifies poetry as a figure of great power half- The discussion of Keats’s reception of Thom- sleeping on its own arm, which is another image, as son’s Autumn has been directed by the assump- in ‘‘To Autumn,’’ of the coexistence of rest and tion that both poets were linked primarily through dynamism. Seen in this light, stanza 2 of ‘‘To the imagery and vocabulary of nature and that Autumn’’ becomes a metaphor of the creative proc- both poems dealt simply with nature. However, ess, one that adheres to some fundamental principle with growing awareness of Keats’s social con- in life as a whole. Poetry for Keats emerges sponta- sciousness, especially troubled in the wake of the neously from a well of stillness, and the entire proc- Peterloo Massacre, the language of ‘‘To Autumn,’’ ess resembles a naturally recurring event. Keats resonates with ever-clearer political overtones. For expressed this idea in a letter he wrote to his friend example, when set into the political context, the and publisher John Taylor on February 27, 1818: verb conspiring in the third line makes an explicit ‘‘the rise, the progress, the setting of imagery should reference to the political climate of 1819, as Nich- like the Sun come natural. . . . If Poetry comes not as olas Roe has shown (254–57). naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not A word in the poem that has gone unexplored come at all.’’ So it was with ‘‘To Autumn,’’ a poem for its political implications is gathering in the last that appears to have been written quickly and line. On one level, the adjective can be read as a easily, although as M. R. Ridley pointed out in straightforward description of what swallows Keats’ Craftsmanship: A Study in Poetic Develop- andotherbirdsdoatthattimeofyear,asHelen ment, a preserved earlier draft of the poem shows Vendler does: ‘‘the swallows (in the most gently that stanza 2 gave Keats some difficulties. Once he touched of these phrases) are ‘gathering’ in a had solved them the poem emerged in the form it is mutual cluster—whether for their night-wheeling

A thatched English cottage in autumn (Image copyright Gary Andrews, 2010. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)

or for their migration is deliberately left unspecified, widespread conviction that such rights did exist but the steady onward progress of the season in the and had done so since Anglo-Saxon times. The poem urges us to think of winter’’ (452–53). But constellation of facts, institutions, and historical when it is set in the historical context, the gathering myths that sustained belief in the ‘‘ancient consti- also makes us think of the politics of public assem- tution’’ offered reassurance that the people were blies, so violently contested in 1819. First there were the ultimate source of political power. A patriotic the events in Manchester, which pitted a lawful poet such as Thomson could wax eloquent in assembly against an increasingly repressive govern- describing an England where free men joined ment (Chandler 15–21; Thompson 681–93). The together for the common good: entry of Henry Hunt into London on 13 September Then gathering men their natural powers 1819 reinforced the right of free English people to combined, assemble in public and to demonstrate their con- And formed a public; to the general good victions. Keats happened to be in London and Submitting, aiming, and conducting all. reported on the spectacle in a letter: For this the patriot-council met, the full, The free, and fairly represented whole; You will hear by the papers of the proceedings For this they planned the holy guardian at Manchester and Hunt’s triumphal entry into London—It would take me a whole day and a laws, quire of paper to give you any thing like detail. I Distinguished orders, animated arts, will merely mention that it is calculated that And, with joint force Oppression chaining, 30,000 people were in the streets waiting for set him—The whole distance from the Angel Isling- Imperial Justice at the helm, yet still ton to the Crown and anchor was lined with To them accountable: nor slavish dreamed Multitudes. (Letters 2: 194–95) That toiling millions must resign their weal Although English law recognized neither And all the honey of their search to such an unrestricted right of free assembly nor an As for themselves alone themselves have explicit right of voluntary association, there was a raised.

To Autumn

Gathering, grammatically identical with the merely descriptive, seems underemployed. This is present participle of Keats’s ‘‘gathering swallows,’’ especially so considering that Keats took some here initiates a series of actions that becomes trouble over the image, ‘‘barred clouds bloom’’ unstoppable progress to liberty and prosperity. If being a manuscript replacement for ‘‘a gold cloud in September 1819 Keats turned his mind to Thom- gilds.’’ In a poem of such tactile and kinesthetic son’s Autumn, as the ‘‘twittering swallows’’ indicate, imagery, ‘‘barred’’ seems to have more than visual then, by the same token, he would have recalled force. Bars obstruct, curtail movement, may be Thomson’s vision of an England where justice and grasped and held. Furthermore, they verbally cor- liberty prevailed (Griffin 74–97; Ridley). respond with the ‘‘cells’’ of bees in line 11, which When read in isolation as a poem about one ‘‘Summer has o’er-brimm’d’’ with honey. Cells in a season, ‘‘To Autumn’’ appears to end on a some- honeycomb are not prison cells, of course, but the what desolate note, anticipating the bleakness of word is the same, and the sameness is augmented winter without even the optimism of cyclical prog- by the bee cells being ‘‘clammy.’’ The connotation ress. However, Thomson explicitly reminds readers of discomfort increases possible association with that the swallows return in the spring; the onset of prison cells, which are conventionally, if not winter is a phase, not an end. The ‘‘swallow-peo- clammy (though dungeon cells are), uncomfort- ple’’ twitter cheerfully as they participate in the able. Windows in prison cells are barred. If ‘‘barred natural process. In the same vein, the interpolated clouds’’ do evoke imprisonment, they symbolically vision of how liberty had been established in Eng- mean one or both of two things: that the poet and land through the actions of ‘‘gathering men’’ reader (and all of humanity) are imprisoned; or stressed that history was a process. Thomson was that the sun, which is setting behind the clouds, is confident that if liberty were threatened, the same imprisoned. If the latter, Keats may be influenced forces that had first freed people could and would by the sun behind the skeleton ship in Coleridge’s act again in the present and future. The restoration ‘‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’’: of liberty, like the return of spring, would take its natural course. And straight the Sun was flecked with bars, However cloying Thomson’s sentimentalism (Heaven’s Mother send us grace!) might seem to a jaded observer today, in the gloom As if through a dungeon grate he peered of 1819 it was a bulwark against despair. The echo of With broad and burning face. (176–80) gathering suggests that Keats let himself be per- If the poet, reader, and the rest of humanity are suaded that the autumn of political oppression and imprisoned, there would be possible justification social injustice would be followed by a spring of for the negative connotations of ‘‘Conspiring’’ in liberation and the government by ‘‘the patriot-coun- line 3 of Keats’s poem. There Autumn is ‘‘Close cil, the full, / The free, and fairly represented whole.’’ bosom-friend of the maturing sun; / Conspiring If it was natural for the swallows to assemble without with him how to load and bless / with fruit the hindrance, then surely the people of England could vines [ . . . ]’’ (2–3). Beyond immediate positive pur- do likewise, without being trampled and killed as pose, the sun colludes with all seasons to ‘‘imprison’’ they had been in Manchester. humanity in time. About this, of course, the sun and Source: Arnd Bohm, ‘‘The Politics of Gathering in Thom- seasons are not free but are themselves similarly son’s Autumn and Keats’s ‘To Autumn,’’’ in ANQ, Vol. constrained. 20, No. 2, Spring 2007, pp. 30–32. The sense of ‘‘barred’’ as indicative of con- straint—an indication increased by association Thomas Dilworth with ‘‘Conspiring’’ and ‘‘cells’’—adds to the con- In the following essay, Dilworth discusses Keats’s notations of mutability throughout the poem, use of the word ‘‘barred’’ as a descriptor for clouds. which virtually all critics and readers have noticed. I have always wondered why in line 24 of It darkens them by adding the element of enforce- Keats’s ‘‘To Autumn’’ the clouds at sunset are ment and implied oppositional desire. The overall ‘‘barred.’’ Keats writes that Autumn has its own meaning of the poem is slightly altered, its effect songs, ‘‘While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying strengthened. Negative connotations increase the day, / and touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue’’ impression of abundance by contrast to it, as (lines 24–25). The adjective ‘‘barred’’ implies that seasoning increases the taste of food, as darkness the clouds are long and thin like horizontal bars. It makes light brighter. In the poem, physical, emo- is, however, an odd modifier for clouds and, as tional, and sonic abundance remains the primary

To Autumn

reality owing to emphasis on awareness of the present moment, which is secured by imagery of touch and kinesthesis. This suits Keats’s stated preference for experience over philosophical THE AWARENESS OF IMPERMANENCE thinking—‘‘O for a Life of Sensations rather AND ULTIMATELY OF DEATH IS NO LESS MOVING than of Thoughts!’’ Immediate tactile sensation here results in an experience of fullness and BECAUSE IT MUST BE MOMENTARILY SUPPRESSED peace, which resists thoughtsofwinteranddeath IN A WAY THAT MAKES US RECOGNIZE THE that time inevitably brings. The imagery of con- straint gives special emphasis to awareness in, and IMPOSSIBILITY OF ANY DIRECT CONFRONTATION.’’ of, the present and highlights a heretofore unap- preciated thematic aspect of the poem. It implies that inner freedom of awareness and attention is available to the poet and reader, and to anyone else, in any physically contextual situation. As The perfection of the ode lies chiefly in the care Richard Lovelace put it, ‘‘Stone walls do not a and subtlety of patterning within its three-part prison make, / Nor iron bars a cage.’’ structure. The patterns are ones that partly connect ‘‘To Autumn’’ with the odes of the spring and Source: Thomas Dilworth, ‘‘Keats’s ‘To Autumn,’’’ in partly mark a new development and vary in com- Explicator, Vol. 65, No. 1, Fall 2006, pp. 26–28. plexity. As critics have often pointed out, the three stanzas successively proceed from the last growth of late summer through the fullness of high Stuart M. Sperry autumn to the spareness of an early winter land- In the following essay, Sperry views ‘‘To Autumn’’ scape, just as they suggest the progress of a single as Keats’s ‘‘most mature comment on the nature of day through to its close in sunset. As Bush, among the poetic process.’’ others, has noted, the imagery of the first stanza is The fallacy of using any single work, such as mainly tactile, that of the second mainly visual, The Fall of Hyperion, either to predict or limit the that of the last chiefly auditory. In these and shape of Keats’s career or the direction of his other respects the ode displays a deliberate symme- evolution, had he lived, is nowhere better demon- try and balance the earlier odes do not possess. At strated than in the lyric he transcribed the same the same time it makes a more even and practiced day he announced the final abandonment of use of devices developed in its predecessors. The Hyperion—the ode ‘‘To Autumn.’’ As John Mid- personification of the season, introduced at the dleton Murry long ago observed, the two works beginning of the first stanza in a way reminiscent are almost total contrasts in tone and spirit. With of the opening of the ‘‘Urn,’’ is developed in the its struggle for ascent through doubt and self- second into a full series of tableaux, and then is questioning to a point of visionary comprehen- briefly and elegiacally revived at the outset of the siveness above the human world, the longer work third before the ode returns us to the simple sounds is fired with a Miltonic ardor and intensity. In its and images of the natural landscape. There condensed but unhurried perfection, its contem- remains, too, but in a more subtle way, the pattern plation of the actual, the ode is much closer to of lyric questioning, from the submerged ‘‘how’’ of Shakespeare. The two works,tobecertain,share the first stanza, to the rhetorical ‘‘who’’ at the out- one supreme concern: their common involvement set of the second, to the more imperative ‘‘where’’ with process. However as treatments of that theme at the commencement of the third, that marks the they differ immeasurably. Hyperion fails through gradual emergence into consciousness of the rec- the inability to evolve a framework for transcend- ognition the season both epitomizes and expresses. ing process, for reconciling man to the knowledge One must add, following Bate’s observation that of sorrow and loss. ‘‘The Autumn’’ succeeds ‘‘‘To Autumn’ is so uniquely a distillation,’’ that the through its acceptance of an order innate in our ode is Keats’s last and most mature comment on experience—the natural rhythm of the seasons. It the nature of the poetic process. For its whole is a poem that, without ever stating it, inevitably development, from the imagery of ripening and suggests the truth of ‘‘ripeness is all’’ by develop- storing in the first stanza, through that of winnowing, with a richness and profundity of implication, ing and slow extraction in the second, to the subtle, the simple perception that ripeness is fall. thin, and tenuous music with which the poem rises

To Autumn

to its close, represents his final adaptation of his The picture is more than an intermingling of favorite metaphor for poetic creation. The analogy activity and stasis. For a moment the figure of the Shelley makes explicit in his ‘‘Ode to the West season is involved with and actually worked upon Wind’’ is not less moving or real because it is left by the very processes she emblemizes, even while implicit in Keats’s hymn. If the ‘‘wild West Wind’’ she remains careless and impervious to the changes and its ‘‘mighty harmonies’’ express Shelley’s sense they imply. Such juxtapositions convey a sense of of a universal force of spiritual creativity, irony of the most delicate and subtle kind. the autumnal sounds that are borne away on ‘‘the Throughout the ode the play of irony is devel- light wind’’ that ‘‘lives or dies’’ at the end of Keats’s oped by the way in which the major patterns alter- ode converge to produce a music that is poignantly nate and run counter to each other. In the first natural. stanza the sense of process and maturing is carried The ironies that pervade the odes of the spring forward by such active verbs as ‘‘load,’’ ‘‘bend,’’ arebynomeansmissingin‘‘ToAutumn.’’How- ‘‘fill,’’ ‘‘swell,’’ ‘‘plump,’’ ‘‘set budding.’’ At the ever they are now resolved within an image that same time another pattern of words, concentrated transcends them—the imageofautumnitself.Vir- near the end of the stanza, suggests the contradic- tually from its beginning the ode compels us to tory idea of a repletion that has already been conceive of the season in two different ways: as a attained: ‘‘fruitfulness,’’ ‘‘all,’’ ‘‘more, / And still conventional setting or personified abstraction that more,’’ ‘‘later,’’ ‘‘never,’’ ‘‘e[v]er.’’ In the second has been depicted poetically and pictorially from stanza, which, as Bate has written, is ‘‘something time immemorial with a fixed nature and identity of a reverse or mirror image of the first,’’ autumn is of its own; and as a seasonal interval, a mere space personified in a series of fixed poses—as thresher, between summer and winter that can never be reaper, gleaner, watcher—that, in their immobility, abstracted from the larger cycle of birth and death. suggest an ideal of completion. Nevertheless the Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, effect is in a measure counterbalanced by a sus- Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; tained use of partitives—‘‘oft[en],’’ ‘‘Sometimes,’’ Conspiring with him how to load and bless ‘‘careless,’’ ‘‘half,’’ ‘‘next,’’ ‘‘sometimes,’’ ‘‘last,’’ With fruit the vines that round the thatch- ‘‘hours by hours’’—as well as by the movement eves run. and diversity implied by such different positioning (1–4) prepositions and adverbs as ‘‘amid,’’ ‘‘abroad,’’ ‘‘across.’’ The homely, welcoming personifications seem to proclaim a role that is familiar and established. It is in the last stanza that these various oppo- Nevertheless, as B. C. Southam has observed, the sitions achieve a resolution unlike any in the odes opening line, with its allusion both to ‘‘mists’’ and of the spring. The questioning with which the ‘‘mellow fruitfulness,’’ already points to different stanza begins becomes more direct and pressing, and contrasting aspects of the year. forcing into conscious recognition the knowledge that has all the while been growing latently While the first stanza concentrates upon the throughout the ode: natural world through images of growth and process, the second stanza shifts to a more artful and Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where stylized conception by presenting autumn as a are they? figure captured and framed within a series of per- Think not of them, thou hast thy music too. spectives that are recognizably conventional. How- (23–24) ever the two conceptions of autumn, as process and The awareness of impermanence and ulti- abstraction, continually modify and interpenetrate mately of death is no less moving because it must each other. To take only one example, there is the be momentarily suppressed in a way that makes us depiction in the second stanza of autumn recognize the impossibility of any direct confronta- sitting careless on a granary floor, tion. Still, such awareness is not finally rejected but Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; rather tempered and reflected in the light of the Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep, ‘‘soft-dying day,’’ where the imagery of the spring Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy (‘‘bloom,’’ ‘‘rosy’’) is briefly reborn amid the ton- hook alities of autumn, just as it is echoed in the ‘‘wailful Spares the next swath and all its twined choir’’ of gnats that ‘‘mourn’’ and in the distant flowers. ‘‘bleat[ing]’’ of the lambs. For it is, in the end, the (14–18) music of autumn that works within the poem its

To Autumn

saving mediation, that gathers together and by remaining to the last a poetry of sensation; yet it resolves the various antinomies within a larger leaves us with a full sense of the ultimate values. It movement. It is a music that is alternately ‘‘borne takes us as far as we have any right to require aloft’’ or ‘‘sinking’’ as the ‘‘light wind lives or dies.’’ It toward a poetry of thought. composes itself from the sounds of the ‘‘small gnats’’ Source: Stuart M. Sperry, ‘‘Epilogue: ‘To Autumn,’’’ in as well as from those of ‘‘full-grown lambs,’’ from Keats the Poet, Princeton University Press, 1973, pp. 336–42. the ‘‘loud’’ bleating of the sheep to the ‘‘soft’’ treble of the robin. It draws together the song of the red- breast, as Arnold Davenport has noted, ‘‘character- istically a winter bird,’’ and the call of the swallow, SOURCES ‘‘proverbially the bird of summer [who] leaves the country when summer is over.’’ It combines the Bate, Walter Jackson, ‘‘The Ode ‘To Autumn’,’’ in Keats: A cadences of change and continuity, of life and Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Walter Jackson Bate, death. It rises from earth, ‘‘from hilly bourn’’ and Prentice-Hall, 1964, p. 156; originally published in John Keats, Harvard University Press, 1963. ‘‘from a garden-croft’’ to ascend ‘‘in the skies.’’ In its gradual withdrawal and attenuation (‘‘treble,’’ Bridges, Robert, ‘‘A Critical Introduction to the Poems of ‘‘whistles,’’ ‘‘twitter’’), it suggests the inevitable end John Keats,’’ in John Keats: Odes: A Casebook, edited by G. S. Fraser, Macmillan, 1971, p. 54. of a natural cycle of growth, maturity and distill- ment in a ghostly and ethereal dissipation. Bush, Douglas, John Keats: His Life and Writings, Collier Books, 1966, pp. 176–78. One aspect of the ode, especially of its final Flood, Allison, ‘‘T. S. Eliot Named the Nation’s Favourite stanza, deserves to be commented on in more detail: Poet,’’ in the Guardian (London, England), October 8, 2009, the way it returns for a major element of its techni- http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/08/ts-eliot-nati que to the early verse, to sonnets like ‘‘How Many ons-favourite-poet (accessed January 22, 2010). Bards’’ and ‘‘After Dark Vapours.’’ The connection Gittings, Robert, ed., Letters of John Keats, Oxford Uni- issuggestedbyReubenBrower’sremarkthat‘‘To versity Press, 1970, pp. 37, 38, 43, 70, 291–92, 326. Autumn’’ reveals ‘‘how a succession of images, Keats, John, ‘‘To Autumn,’’ in Keats: Poetical Works,edited becoming something more than mere succession, by H. W. Garrod, Oxford University Press, 1973, pp. 218–19. imperceptibly blends into metaphor.’’ For the final Marriott, Sir J. A. R., England since Waterloo, 15th ed., stanza of the ode remains the most perfect expres- Methuen, 1965. sion of the poet’s habit of cataloguing (though the Keats latter term now seems crude and inadequate Motion, Andrew, , Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997, pp. 460, 462. to describe the effect ‘‘To Autumn’’ achieves). The beginning of the stanza deliberately eschews Owen,F.M.,‘‘JohnKeats:AStudy,’’inJohn Keats: Odes: A Casebook,editedbyG.S.Fraser,Macmillan,1971,p.40. the invitation to conscious reflection, avoiding the moral sentiment or epitaph that constitutes the chief Ridley, M. R., Keats’ Craftsmanship: A Study in Poetic resolution of a whole tradition of the pastoral mode. Development, University of Nebraska Press, 1933, p. 289. Instead the stanza gains its end by offering us one Swinburne, A. C., ‘‘Miscellanies,’’ in John Keats: Odes: A more succession of precise impressions, a series of Casebook, edited by G. S. Fraser, Macmillan, 1971, p. 48. images that extends its texture of associations and Van Ghent, Dorothy, Keats: The Myth of the Hero, reverberations as it unfolds. It elaborates a music revised and edited by Jeffrey Cane Robinson, Princeton that is entirely earthly and natural, yet filled with University Press, 1983, p. 173. furtherimplications.Itneverremovesusfromthe Vendler, Helen, The Odes of John Keats, Belknap Press of characteristic world of Keats’s poetry, a world of Harvard University Press, 1983, p. 256. leaves Budding—fruit ripening in stillness—autumn suns Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves. FURTHER READING (‘‘After Dark Vapours,’’ 9–11) Gaull, Marilyn, English Romanticism: The Human Con- Yet it imperceptibly creates a further range of text, W. W. Norton, 1988. meaning, the final awareness, if not of ‘‘a Poet’s This is a study of the literary movement of which Keats was a part. It gives sharp insight into the death,’’ of a settled ripeness of experience we strive social and cultural environment and the main to articulate within such set terms as ‘‘maturity’’ or historical events as well as the work of Keats ‘‘resignation’’ or ‘‘acceptance.’’ It preserves decorum and the other great English romantic poets.

To Autumn

Keats, John, Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John visual arts, his use of language, his letters, his Keats to Fanny Brawne, introduction by Jane Campion, sources and allusions, how Byron read Keats, Penguin, 2009. and more. It also includes a glossary of literary This book was timed to coincide with the Sep- terms and a chronology. tember 2009 release of the movie Bright Star about Keats’s relationship with Fanny Brawne. It includes all the letters he wrote to her as well as the sonnet that was supposedly inspired by her. SUGGESTED SEARCH TERMS Walsh, John Evangelist, Darkling I Listen: The Life and Death of John Keats, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. John Keats This is a detailed study of the last few months of Keats AND Autumn Keats’s life, which he spent fatally ill in Rome. Walsh believes that this period has never been Keats AND creativity fully examined, and he has much to say about Keats AND odes Keats’s tragic relationship with Fanny Brawne and the diagnosis and treatment of his illness. Peterloo massacre Wolfson, Susan, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Keats, Keats AND romanticism Cambridge University Press, 2001. John Keats poems This is a collection of sixteen articles by schol- John Keats biography ars of Keats. They present his work in a variety of contexts, including biographical and liter- John Keats AND Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, ary. Topics include Keats’s relationship to the and Other Poems