A CRITICAL APPRECIATION

JOHN KEATS’ “TO AUTUMN”

Minerva Salguero Gómez
August 3rd, 2020

Keats wrote this poem at the end of September 1819. It belongs to a group of poems
known as the Odes. In this case, as the title describes, the subject matter is a poem
dedicated to autumn. The speaker highlights the particularities of this season, which can
be appreciated as beautiful and meaningful to understand existence, a cyclical creation,
and the beauty in modesty. This paper deals with the effects the form and vocabulary
have on the subject and how it is described and “personified.”

The poem is structured in three stanzas of eleven lines each. According to the rhyme
sequence: ABABCDEDCCE, ABABCDECDDE, ABABCDECDDE, the first differs from the
other two; this difference is also present in the treatment of the subject. For example, while
the first stanza describes the season as ambiance, in the other two, the speaker
addresses the season as if it were a person. This shift provokes a moment of intimacy as
if the speaker could see and talk to Autumn. The senses are present as in the other Odes.
It alludes to the taste of mellow fruit, the smell of flowers, the touch of the warm sweat
temperature, the hearing of soft songs of birds and trees moved by the wind, and finally,
the sight of a calm landscape at the end of a day of harvest, resting next to a cypress and
receiving the last ray of light.

Regarding the vocabulary, several terms deal with abundance, maturity, and beauty. In
the first stanza, the speaker refers to autumn as the “season of mists and mellow
fruitfulness” The word “fruit” is repeated several times, as well as references to fruit
(apples, core, gourd, kernel). These words associated with maturity, as the product of
seeds and the effect of agriculture, generate a sensation of abundance as a reward that
only comes in time, after spring and summer have passed. September is the month when
fall starts, and it is the transition to winter. However, the speaker highlights how this
season has its own atmosphere; on the one hand, it seems like “warm days will never
cease”; on the other hand, it is time to recollect the products from the earth to prepare for
the next cycle.

The first line in the second stanza introduces a question in which the season is
personified: “Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?” in case this might seem a
rhetorical question, the speaker remarks that if someone pays close attention “may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;” On
these four lines the speaker not only describes Autumn as a person but offers a
characterization of its personality. If autumn were a person, how would it be, a woman or a
man? Carless? Patient? Contemplative? Mature? It is not clear or explicit the gender;
however, within the poem, there are some signs that Autumn could be referred to as a
woman, perhaps as an allegorical representation. Anyhow, this is a portrait of a person
wise enough to decide what to spare and what to take he/she is confident and a friend of
time who can spend days contemplating “the last oozing hours by hours.”

The third stanza introduces the question, “Where are the songs of spring?” which
establishes a connection to the seasonal cycle. In Western cultures, spring is the most
celebrated season of the year; it symbolizes birth, beginning, youth, life, and beauty, the
opposite of winter, which is rough and associated with the end, dark, oldness, and death.
Between these opposites, autumn is the beginning of the end and contains a duality of
abundance, as the harvest season, and death, as the end of the agrarian cycle. In this
stanza, the speaker invites autumn to not worry about the precious of spring but to look at
the beauty inside. The days are not hot but soft and warm, the animals have grown, and
they are in peace and calm; even in the end, nature knows how to ooze life. The beauty of
autumn relies on accepting the inevitable death, understanding that to create it is
necessary to perish.

As a personal thought, the first image that came to me while I was reading this poem was
a scenery taken from a Pre-Raphaelite painting, an allegory of autumn as an adult woman
wearing a white robe resting in a field, as the harvest is about to end, she is sitting next to
a tree, and from time to time she contemplates the horizon. Her clothes will not get dirt,
and her skin will not sweat because her presence is beyond this time and this earth. She
emerges once a year, and although unable to procreate, she comes to recollect what
spring and summer have sown; she is at peace with the world and understands her role.
Of course, it is a kind invitation, although difficult to accomplish. Because, as human
beings, we treasure life and youth, only time gives us the wisdom to let go and seize the
day.