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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 ( c) 2011 Gale. All Rights Reserved. Poetry for Students, Volume 36 – Finals/ 8/21/2010 08:29 Page 4 Poetry for Students, Volume 36 ª 2011 Gale, Cengage Learning Project Editor: Sara Constantakis ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 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Jennifer Wahi Content Conversion: Katrina Coach For product information and technology assistance, contact us at Product Manager: Meggin Condino Gale Customer Support, 1-800-877-4253. For permission to use material from this text or product, submit all requests online at www.cengage.com/permissions. Further permissions questions can be emailed to [email protected] While every effort has been made to ensure the reliability of the information presented in this publication, Gale, a part of Cengage Learning, does not guarantee the accuracy of the data contained herein. Gale accepts no payment for listing; and inclusion in the publication of any organization, agency, institution, publication, service, or individual does not imply endorsement of the editors or publisher. Errors brought to the attention of the publisher and verified to the satisfaction of the publisher will be corrected in future editions. Gale 27500 Drake Rd. Farmington Hills, MI, 48331-3535 ISBN-13: 978-1-4144-6703-0 ISBN-10: 1-4144-6703-6 ISSN 1094-7019 This title is also available as an e-book. ISBN-13: 978-1-4144-7387-1 ISBN-10: 1-4144-7387-7 Contact your Gale, a part of Cengage Learning sales representative for ordering information. Printed in the United States of America 12345671413121110 ( c) 2011 Gale. All Rights Reserved. Poetry for Students, Volume 36 – Finals/ 8/21/2010 08:03 Page 294 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 recog- nized 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 accept- ance it conveys of the passage of time and the seasons, and the way in which it presents and rec- onciles opposites. ‘‘To Autumn’’ can be found in most editions of Keats’s poems. 294 ( c) 2011 Gale. All Rights Reserved. Poetry for Students, Volume 36 – Finals/ 8/21/2010 08:03 Page 295 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 tuber- culosis, 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 Poetry for Students, Volume 36 295 ( c) 2011 Gale. All Rights Reserved. Poetry for Students, Volume 36 – Finals/ 8/21/2010 08:03 Page 296 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.

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