English Literature for Lawyers

Module- 3
Literary Text (Poetry)

Lecture- 20

Topic

Ode to Autumn by John Keats

In this session, you will learn about introduction and summary of Ode to Autumn, major themes
in the poem, structure, and rhyme scheme of the poem and different literary devices used in Ode
to Autumn.

Introduction to the Poem:

Ode to autumn is written by a romantic poet John Keats who is considered his final work in “Keats
1819 odes”. This Ode was composed in September 1819 and published in the very next year, 1820.
The poem is divided into 3 stanzas with eleven lines in each of it. It describes a journey through
the season from late crop maturation to harvest and the last days of October as winter approaches.
John Keats needed money at that time, so it is considered the previous work of his poetic career.

What Does an Ode to Autumn Mean?

The poet addresses precisely one subject in ode, mainly in the form of a song. Ode to autumn is a
tribute to autumn by John Keats. Specifically, poets discuss winter or spring whenever the beauty
subject comes, but Keats chooses a different matter. When the leaves fall, vegetables and fruits get
ripened, beauty lies in its which most people deny or ignore—an ode to autumn specifically written
to praise nature for giving us the autumn season.

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Summary of Ode to Autumn:

A great lover of nature and romantic poet, John Keats wrote Ode to autumn. Unlike other poets
who generally discuss the characteristics and beauty of spring, Keats describes the autumn
specifications. Autumn has its music, which is rare and attractive.

At the starting of the poem, the sun and autumn conspire to bless the trees with ripened fruits. The
autumn is linked with the granary floor, and in the second stanza, autumn is represented as a
woman by John Keats. The woman is mostly seen sitting on the granary floor, taking rest, and
sleeping in the fields calmly, and found in front of cider press while watching the squeezing of
apple juices.

In the third stanza, autumn is told not to wonder where the spring songs have disappeared. Instead,
autumn should enjoy her music. Clouds sparkle with the sunlight, and tiny gnats mourn like a
blowing wind over the sallow trees. The lambs bleat from hills, cricket started to sing, and robin
whistles from the garden. The poem ends with the swallows who gather and sing for their
upcoming migration.

Major Themes in Ode to Autumn:

There are three main themes that John Keats supports in Ode to autumn.

1. Passage of time

2. Power of nature

3. Solace of beauty

Passage of time:

New time, new life, new things, and new beauty: that is the main motive of Ode to autumn in the
theme of the passage of time. Keats conveys the message not to be afraid of change, as it will bring
something better than the previous. Change happens by nature which is beautiful; try to explore
its beauty instead of getting disturbed.

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Ode to Autumn as a Nature Poem:

Nature always attracts Keats more than anything, and we can find nature theme in almost all the
odes of 1819 written by him. Character is represented in vegetables, fruits, trees, flowers, and
animals like insects, birds, and even lambs. Nature is powerful; it can mold anything and turn the
ugliest thing into the most beautiful items.

Solace of Beauty:

Beauty always gives comfort, and when you sit in the lap of nature like Keats, you will explore
the true meaning of a relaxing mind. When you are tired of the miseries of this world, there is one
thing that will always be here to soothe your mind and its natural beauty.

Literary devices Used in Ode to Autumn:

Poets employ literary devices to better communicate their thoughts, ideas, feelings, and beliefs to
the reader. Keats uses literary elements such as imagery, personification, and others to make the
text interesting in Ode to a Nightingale.

Imagery in Ode to Autumn

An Ode to autumn, Keats uses imagery to help the reader understand better what he is trying to
say? He uses imagery to visualize emotions and feelings to evoke smell, taste, sight, and hearing.
The examples in this Ode are

Full-grown lambs

Mossed cottage trees

Thatch eyed

Granary floor

Fume of poppies

Plump the hazel shells

Sweet kernel

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The apostrophe in Ode to autumn:

It is an apostrophe that the phrase or stanza in which the poet speaks to other person or absent
things. Thus, for example, in the twelfth line speaker addresses the autumn season, which is an
imaginary character not present.

Personification Used in Ode to Autumn:

Personification term is used in the opening of the poem in which sun and autumn season are called
friends, which help ripen the fruits and vegetables. Sun and autumn are given the human quality
of friend like “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” “close bosom-friend of the maturing sun.”

Symbolism:

When two different things are given the same qualities with the symbolic meaning, symbolism is
represented. For example, in the poem, autumn is symbolized as a woman and the sun as a male
character; however, they are different in their literary meanings.

Rhyme Scheme and Structure of Ode to Autumn:

Ode to an autumn rhyme scheme is ABAB CDECCCE. The poem consists of three stanzas
different from each other’s; they are written without creating any link. Each stanza consists of
eleven lines. Ode to autumn tone is lively, reveling the richness of autumn.

Ode to Autumn as a Romantic Poem:

Romantic poems mainly discuss lovers and their passion, but romanticism is different when it
comes to Keats. Nature is his primary subject in Ode of autumn; he creates a link between our life
and nature in a romantic way. Keats uses imagery, rhythm, sound, diction, and emotional feeling
towards the autumn. In this poem, he chooses to celebrate nature instead of mourning over his real-
life losses, which is the natural way to live.

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What Makes To Autumn so Beautiful?
The Sound
First of all how it sounds. Even if you don’t understand all the words, you’ll probably agree with
me that the sound of the language is serious, warm, humming, noble and happy. Only towards
the end when we also come to the end of the day in the scenes that the poet is describing can we
start to feel a little chill. Lambs that bleat is not a warm sound. Neither are the mourning gnats
(small flies) that are wailing in a choir. Not a nice sound at all (I hate buzzing mosquitoes and
similar bugs, personally).
The red-breast (robin) singing is a bit better and swallows twittering is not a bad sound either,
but overall these are thin bird sounds and somehow the poem sounds colder in this last stanza.
Winter is coming. Those swallows will fly away; these are migrating birds that don’t stay in
England over the winter. They’re flying back to Africa, until the spring will lure them (= make it
attractive for them) back again.
The Imagery
What’s the second thing that makes the poem beautiful? The imagery, I suppose. The scene in
the first stanza is of golden light that shines through a mist on ripening fruit and nuts: all the
wonderful harvest that the season brings. The fruit and gourds are swelling and so are the bees’
honeycombs. Everything looks sweet and mouthwatering. There is a rich bountifulness of food
of the season. The scene is pastoral: we are in the countryside and not in the city. This is typical
in Romantic poetry, as Romantic poets loved the country and nature.

To Autumn Summary

Stanza 1

In the first stanza the poet describes autumn in its aspect of vegetation. Autumn is the season of
mists and ripe fruits. The autumnal sun causes all sorts of fruits-grapes, apples, gourds and nuts to
ripen and become sweet and juicy. “Later flowers” blossom in this season and bees go on sucking
honey out of them till they begin to think that summer is yet continuing and will never come to an
end.

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Stanza 2

In the second stanza the poet describes the different occupations of autumn as embodied in
personality-as a reaper, as a gleaner, as a harvester or as a cider-presser. The harvester is found
sitting carelessly on the granary floor with his hair ruffled by the gentle wind. The reaper, after the
morning’s hard work is found asleep drowsed with the fragrance of poppy. The gleaner is seen
carrying home the load of the day’s pickings on her head and gracefully balancing herself as she
crosses a brook. The cider presser is found sitting beside the vat and watching the apple-juice ooze
hour after hour.

Stanza 3

In the third stanza the poet describes the music (sounds) of autumn. The music of autumn is not
less sweet than that of spring. When the sky and stubble-plains are lit up with the soft rosy hue of
the setting sun, we can hear the mournful sound of gnats by the riverside, the loud bleating of
grown-up Jambs on the hills, the shrill chirping of the crickets in the hedges, the whistling of robin
red-breast in the house-garden and the twitter of the swallows in the sky.

1-Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

2-Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Autumn, the season associated with mists and a general sense of calm abundance, you are an
intimate friend of the sun, whose heat and light helps all these fruits and vegetables grow.

3-Conspiring with him how to load and bless

4-With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

You work closely with the sun to make lots of fruit grow on the vines that wrap around the roof
edges of the farmhouses.

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5-To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
6-And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
You work to make so much fruit grow that it weighs down the branches of the mossy apple trees
that grow outside the farmhouses. Together, you and the sun make every fruit completely ripe.

7-To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

8-With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, to set budding more,
9- And still more, later flowers for the bees,

You make gourds swell and hazel shells grow fat with a sweet nut inside.

You make the flowers grow new buds and keep growing more, and when these buds bloom, bees
gather the flowers' pollen.

10-Until they think warm days will never cease,

11-For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Those bees think your warmth will last forever, because summer brought so many flowers and so
much pollen that the beehives are now overflowing with honey.

12-Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Who hasn't noticed you, Autumn, in the places where your bounty is kept?

13-Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

14-Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
15-Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Any person who finds themselves wandering about is likely to find you sitting lazily on the floor
of the building where grain is stored, and notice your hair lifted by a light wind that separates
strands of hair in the same way a harvester might separate the components of a grain of wheat.
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16-Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
17-Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Anyone might also find you asleep in the fields, on an incompletely harvested crop row, fatigued
because of the sleep-inducing aroma of the poppies.

while thy hook

18-Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

In that case, your scythe, which you'd been using to cut the crops, would be cast to the side—it
would just be lying there, and therefore the next section of the twisted flowers would be saved
from being cut.

19-And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

20-Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Sometimes, Autumn, you're like the agricultural laborer who picks up loose cuttings from the fields
after the harvest—like this laborer, who has to be observant, you watch the stream with your full,
heavy head of fruit and leaves.

21-Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

22-Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Other times you patiently watch the machine that juices the apples for cider, noting how the juice
and pulp slowly ooze out of the machine over the course of many hours.

23- Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Where is the music that characterizes spring (for example, birdsong)? I repeat, Where is it?

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24-Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
Don't think about the spring and its typical music—you have your own music.

25-While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

26-And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
The background for your music is a scene in which beautiful, shadowed clouds expand in the
evening sky and filter the sunlight such that it casts pink upon the fields, which have been
harvested.

27-Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

28-Among the river sallows, borne aloft
29-Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
Your music includes gnats, which hum mournfully among the willows that grow along the
riverbanks, and which rise and fall according to the strength of the wind.

30-And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

It includes mature, fully grown lambs that make their baah sound from the fence of their hilly
enclosure.

31-Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

32-The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
It includes crickets singing in the bushes and a red-breasted bird that softly whistles from a small
garden.

33-And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

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 And lastly, it includes the growing flock of swallows, which rise and sing together against the
darkening sky.

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Summary
Keats’s speaker opens his first stanza by addressing Autumn, describing its abundance and its
intimacy with the sun, with whom Autumn ripens fruits and causes the late flowers to bloom. In
the second stanza, the speaker describes the figure of Autumn as a female goddess, often seen
sitting on the granary floor, her hair “soft-lifted” by the wind, and often seen sleeping in the fields
or watching a cider-press squeezing the juice from apples. In the third stanza, the speaker tells
Autumn not to wonder where the songs of spring have gone, but instead to listen to her own music.
At twilight, the “small gnats” hum among the "the river sallows," or willow trees, lifted and
dropped by the wind, and “full-grown lambs” bleat from the hills, crickets sing, robins whistle
from the garden, and swallows, gathering for their coming migration, sing from the skies.

Form
Like the “Ode on Melancholy,” “To Autumn” is written in a three-stanza structure with a variable
rhyme scheme. Each stanza is eleven lines long (as opposed to ten in “Melancholy”, and each is
metered in a relatively precise iambic pentameter. In terms of both thematic organization and
rhyme scheme, each stanza is divided roughly into two parts. In each stanza, the first part is made
up of the first four lines of the stanza, and the second part is made up of the last seven lines. The
first part of each stanza follows an ABAB rhyme scheme, the first line rhyming with the third, and
the second line rhyming with the fourth. The second part of each stanza is longer and varies in
rhyme scheme: The first stanza is arranged CDEDCCE, and the second and third stanzas are
arranged CDECDDE. (Thematically, the first part of each stanza serves to define the subject of the
stanza, and the second part offers room for musing, development, and speculation on that subject;
however, this thematic division is only very general.)

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Themes
In both its form and descriptive surface, “To Autumn” is one of the simplest of Keats’s odes. There
is nothing confusing or complex in Keats’s paean to the season of autumn, with its fruitfulness, its
flowers, and the song of its swallows gathering for migration. The extraordinary achievement of
this poem lies in its ability to suggest, explore, and develop a rich abundance of themes without
ever ruffling its calm, gentle, and lovely description of autumn. Where “Ode on Melancholy”
presents itself as a strenuous heroic quest, “To Autumn” is concerned with the much quieter
activity of daily observation and appreciation. In this quietude, the gathered themes of the
preceding odes find their fullest and most beautiful expression.
“To Autumn” takes up where the other odes leave off. Like the others, it shows Keats’s speaker
paying homage to a particular goddess—in this case, the deified season of Autumn. The selection
of this season implicitly takes up the other odes’ themes of temporality, mortality, and change:
Autumn in Keats’s ode is a time of warmth and plenty, but it is perched on the brink of winter’s
desolation, as the bees enjoy “later flowers,” the harvest is gathered from the fields, the lambs of
spring are now “full grown,” and, in the final line of the poem, the swallows gather for their winter
migration. The understated sense of inevitable loss in that final line makes it one of the most
moving moments in all of poetry; it can be read as a simple, uncomplaining summation of the
entire human condition.

Despite the coming chill of winter, the late warmth of autumn provides Keats’s speaker with ample
beauty to celebrate: the cottage and its surroundings in the first stanza, the agrarian haunts of the
goddess in the second, and the locales of natural creatures in the third. Keats’s speaker is able to
experience these beauties in a sincere and meaningful way because of the lessons he has learned
in the previous odes: He is no longer indolent, no longer committed to the isolated imagination (as
in “Psyche”), no longer attempting to escape the pain of the world through ecstatic rapture (as in
“Nightingale”), no longer frustrated by the attempt to eternalize mortal beauty or subject eternal
beauty to time (as in “Urn”), and no longer able to frame the connection of pleasure and the sorrow
of loss only as an imaginary heroic quest (as in “Melancholy”).
In “To Autumn,” the speaker’s experience of beauty refers back to earlier odes (the swallows recall
the nightingale; the fruit recalls joy’s grape; the goddess drowsing among the poppies recalls
Psyche and Cupid lying in the grass), but it also recalls a wealth of earlier poems. Most importantly,

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 the image of Autumn winnowing and harvesting (in a sequence of odes often explicitly about
creativity) recalls an earlier Keats poem in which the activity of harvesting is an explicit metaphor
for artistic creation. In his sonnet.

When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactry,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain…

In this poem, the act of creation is pictured as a kind of self-harvesting; the pen harvests the fields
of the brain, and books are filled with the resulting “grain.” In “To Autumn,” the metaphor is
developed further; the sense of coming loss that permeates the poem confronts the sorrow
underlying the season’s creativity. When Autumn’s harvest is over, the fields will be bare, the
swaths with their “twined flowers” cut down, the cider-press dry, the skies empty. But the
connection of this harvesting to the seasonal cycle softens the edge of the tragedy. In time, spring
will come again, the fields will grow again, and the birdsong will return. As the speaker knew in
“Melancholy,” abundance and loss, joy and sorrow, song and silence are as intimately connected
as the twined flowers in the fields. What makes “To Autumn” beautiful is that it brings an
engagement with that connection out of the realm of mythology and fantasy and into the everyday
world. The development the speaker so strongly resisted in “Indolence” is at last complete: He has
learned that an acceptance of mortality is not destructive to an appreciation of beauty and has
gleaned wisdom by accepting the passage of time.

Literary Devices
Themes
The Inevitability of Death
Even before his diagnosis of terminal tuberculosis, Keats focused on death and its inevitability in
his work. For Keats, small, slow acts of death occurred every day, and he chronicled these small
mortal occurrences. The end of a lover’s embrace, the images on an ancient urn, the reaping of
grain in autumn—all of these are not only symbols of death, but instances of it. Examples of great
beauty and art also caused Keats to ponder mortality, as in “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” (1817).
As a writer, Keats hoped he would live long enough to achieve his poetic dream of becoming as

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great as Shakespeare or John Milton: in “Sleep and Poetry” (1817), Keats outlined a plan of poetic
achievement that required him to read poetry for a decade in order to understand—and surpass—
the work of his predecessors. Hovering near this dream, however, was a morbid sense that death
might intervene and terminate his projects; he expresses these concerns in the
mournful 1818 sonnet “When I have fears that I may cease to be.”

The Contemplation of Beauty

In his poetry, Keats proposed the contemplation of beauty as a way of delaying the inevitability of
death. Although we must die eventually, we can choose to spend our time alive in aesthetic revelry,
looking at beautiful objects and landscapes. Keats’s speakers contemplate urns (“Ode on a Grecian
Urn”), books (“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” [1816], “On Sitting Down to Read King
Lear Once Again” [1818]), birds (“Ode to a Nightingale”), and stars (“Bright star, would I were
stedfast as thou art” [1819]). Unlike mortal beings, beautiful things will never die but will keep
demonstrating their beauty for all time. Keats explores this idea in the first book
of Endymion (1818). The speaker in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” envies the immortality of the lute
players and trees inscribed on the ancient vessel because they shall never cease playing their songs,
nor will they ever shed their leaves. He reassures young lovers by telling them that even though
they shall never catch their mistresses, these women shall always stay beautiful. The people on the
urn, unlike the speaker, shall never stop having experiences. They shall remain permanently
depicted while the speaker changes, grows old, and eventually dies.

Motifs
Departures and Reveries
In many of Keats’s poems, the speaker leaves the real world to explore a transcendent, mythical,
or aesthetic realm. At the end of the poem, the speaker returns to his ordinary life transformed in
some way and armed with a new understanding. Often the appearance or contemplation of a
beautiful object makes the departure possible. The ability to get lost in a reverie, to depart
conscious life for imaginative life without wondering about plausibility or rationality, is part of
Keats’s concept of negative capability. In “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art,” the
speaker imagines a state of “sweet unrest” (12) in which he will remain half-conscious on his
lover’s breast forever. As speakers depart this world for an imaginative world, they have

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experiences and insights that they can then impart into poetry once they’ve returned to conscious
life. Keats explored the relationship between visions and poetry in “Ode to Psyche” and “Ode to a
Nightingale.”

The Five Senses and Art

Keats imagined that the five senses loosely corresponded to and connected with various types of
art. The speaker in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” describes the pictures depicted on the urn, including
lovers chasing one another, musicians playing instruments, and a virginal maiden holding still. All
the figures remain motionless, held fast and permanent by their depiction on the sides of the urn,
and they cannot touch one another, even though we can touch them by holding the vessel. Although
the poem associates sight and sound, because we see the musicians playing, we cannot hear the
music. Similarly, the speaker in “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” compares hearing
Homer’s words to “pure serene” (7) air so that reading, or seeing, becomes associating with
breathing, or smelling. In “Ode to a Nightingale,” the speaker longs for a drink of crystal-clear
water or wine so that he might adequately describe the sounds of the bird singing nearby. Each of
the five senses must be involved in worthwhile experiences, which, in turn, lead to the production
of worthwhile art.

The Disappearance of the Poet and the Speaker

In Keats’s theory of negative capability, the poet disappears from the work—that is, the work itself
chronicles an experience in such a way that the reader recognizes and responds to the experience
without requiring the intervention or explanation of the poet. Keats’s speakers become so
enraptured with an object that they erase themselves and their thoughts from their depiction of that
object. In essence, the speaker/poet becomes melded to and indistinguishable from the object being
described. For instance, the speaker of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” describes the scenes on the urn for
several stanzas until the famous conclusion about beauty and truth, which is enclosed in quotation
marks. Since the poem’s publication in 1820, critics have theorized about who speaks these lines,
whether the poet, the speaker, the urn, or one or all the figures on the urn. The erasure of the
speaker and the poet is so complete in this particular poem that the quoted lines are jarring and
troubling.
Symbols

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Music and Musicians
Music and musicians appear throughout Keats’s work as symbols of poetry and poets. In “Ode on
a Grecian Urn,” for instance, the speaker describes musicians playing their pipes. Although we
cannot literally hear their music, by using our imaginations, we can imagine and thus hear music.
The speaker of “To Autumn” reassures us that the season of fall, like spring, has songs to sing.
Fall, the season of changing leaves and decay, is as worthy of poetry as spring, the season of
flowers and rejuvenation. “Ode to a Nightingale” uses the bird’s music to contrast the mortality of
humans with the immortality of art. Caught up in beautiful birdsong, the speaker imagines himself
capable of using poetry to join the bird in the forest. The beauty of the bird’s music represents the
ecstatic, imaginative possibilities of poetry. As mortal beings who will eventually die, we can
delay death through the timelessness of music, poetry, and other types of art.

Nature
Like his fellow romantic poets, Keats found in nature endless sources of poetic inspiration, and he
described the natural world with precision and care. Observing elements of nature allowed Keats,
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, among others, to create extended meditations and thoughtful
odes about aspects of the human condition. For example, in “Ode to a Nightingale,” hearing the
bird’s song causes the speaker to ruminate on the immortality of art and the mortality of humans.
The speaker of “Ode on Melancholy” compares a bout of depression to a “weeping cloud” (12),
then goes on to list specific flowers that are linked to sadness. He finds in nature apt images for
his psychological state. In “Ode to Psyche,” the speaker mines the night sky to find ways to
worship the Roman goddess Psyche as a muse: a star becomes an “amorous glow-worm” (27), and
the moon rests amid a background of dark blue. Keats not only uses nature as a springboard from
which to ponder, but he also discovers in nature similes, symbols, and metaphors for the spiritual
and emotional states he seeks to describe.

The Ancient World

Keats had an enduring interest in antiquity and the ancient world. His longer poems, such as The
Fall of Hyperion or Lamia, often take place in a mythical world not unlike that of classical
antiquity. He borrowed figures from ancient mythology to populate poems, such as “Ode to
Psyche” and “To Homer” (1818). For Keats, ancient myth and antique objects, such as the Grecian

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 urn, have a permanence and solidity that contrasts with the fleeting, temporary nature of life. In
ancient cultures, Keats saw the possibility of permanent artistic achievement: if an urn still spoke
to someone several centuries after its creation, there was hope that a poem or artistic object from
Keats’s time might continue to speak to readers or observers after the death of Keats or another
writer or creator. This achievement was one of Keats’s great hopes. In an 1818 letter to his brother
George, Keats quietly prophesied: “I think I shall be among the English poets after my death.”
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Beauty and Death

As its title would suggest, “To Autumn” celebrates the bountiful beauty of the fall. In the poem,
autumn is a season characterized by a rich abundance of life. The culmination of weeks of summer
warmth and sunshine, autumn sees trees overloaded with fruit, beehives dripping with honey, and
thick vines trailing up the sides of farmhouses.

Often, the poem is taken to be no more than an ode to a lovely, life-filled time of year that is often
overshadowed by spring and summer. And yet, running underneath this celebration of life is a
sense of impending decay. Autumn’s abundance is only possible because it comes at the end of
the growing season, and all this well-being exists on the brink of death; as winter approaches, fruit
will rot, leaves will fall, and crops will be harvested. This doesn't diminish the loveliness of
autumn, however, and instead suggests that beauty shines all the more powerfully in the moments
before it will soon be gone. In a way, then, death is just as much a part of autumn's loveliness as
is life.

The speaker envisions autumn as a transitional season that straddles the line between abundance
and decay. Tree limbs “bend” under the load of their apples, while gourds “swell” and the flowers
are “set budding more, / And still more.” The fruits are at their sweetest and juiciest, ripe “to the
core.” In a sense, they are beautiful and delectable precisely because they are on the verge of rot
(that is, of dying).

Indeed, all of these images veer close to destruction: were things to grow without end, perhaps the
tree limbs would break under the weight of their fruit, the gourds would burst, and the bees would
drown in "their clammy cells" (i.e., their over-filled hives). More life would transform this beauty
into something grotesque—which perhaps is why the speaker appreciates autumn not as a season
of growth, but rather one of impending death and reaping.

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The second stanza takes up this idea by focusing on the harvest, describing the “winnowing wind,”
the “half-reap’d furrow,” and the harvester’s “hook.” Each of these images depicts the separation
and cutting associated with farming, especially the “hook,” or scythe; each also clearly evokes
death.

But the speaker softens these images, lending all this death a kind of pleasure. The “winnowing
wind” results in “hair soft-lifted”; the personified autumn lies “sound asleep” on the “half-reap’d
furrow”; and the scythe does not cut, but “Spares the next swath.” Later, autumn loiters drowsily
in the fields, gazing into the brook and the “last oozings” of the cider press. Like the swollen fruit
from stanza 1, these end-of-autumn images bulge forth with sensuous beauty that combines both
life and decay.

The poem ultimately presents death as a sort peaceful rest at the end of frenzied activity. To this
end, the speaker depicts the day's transition into night (and the broader seasonal transition into
winter) as a process similar to falling asleep. First comes the onset of evening, as “barred clouds
bloom the soft-dying day.” Like autumn and its fruits, the day is dying—but softly. This process
has the beautiful quality of a flower that slowly blooms and wilts. Next, the dying sunlight
“touch[es] the stubble-plains with rosy hue.” It makes the freshly mowed plains, an image of death,
appear gentle and beautiful.

Meanwhile, a chorus of animals elegizes the end of autumn. Knowing death is on the horizon, the
speaker interprets the gnats’ hum as “wailful” and mournful. The speaker also recognizes beauty
in the singing crickets and the robin who whistles “with treble soft.” Finally, the swallows gather
and sing against the void of the darkening sky, which will soon pummel the land with harsh
weather. All this music, which might appear any time of year, takes on a special beauty in the
gathering shadow of death.

In “To Autumn,” the speaker stays rooted in the colorful world of the moment. The speaker
urges personified autumn not to think about “the songs of spring,” but rather to appreciate that
“thou hast thy music too.” That is, the speaker asks both autumn and the reader to focus exclusively
on the here and now. Yet even while focusing on autumnal imagery, the speaker can’t help but be
reminded of what comes before and after this particular season. As such, the poem suggests that

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embracing the present somewhat paradoxically leads to a deep appreciation of the past and future
as well.

The poem’s first lines contain bending apple trees, swelling gourds, ripe fruit, and beehives
overflowing with honey. These images of teeming life emphasize that this poem is about the
bounty of autumn. This bounty results from autumn’s close relationship with the “maturing sun, /
Conspiring with him to load and bless.” While appreciating this specific point in time, then, the
poem also recognizes that autumn only appears as the end of a long process of growth and ripening.

Indeed, focusing on the fruits of the present leads to an obvious question: where did all this come
from? To answer it, the poem must acknowledge autumn’s precursor: summer. For instance, the
bees see autumn as a lovely extension of summer—“they think warm days will never cease / For
summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.” In other words, the bees recall the summer that
enabled their hives to thrive.

On the one hand, then, the poem urges readers to simply stop and take in the beauty of this
particular moment. At the same time, the poem subtly implies that to do so properly requires an
appreciation of everything that led to this moment—as well as an appreciation of what will come
next.

To that end, the poem presents autumn as a sort of mixture of winter and spring by highlighting
features shared among the seasons. First off, both autumn and spring are full of noise and diverse
life. The bleating lambs, whistling robin, and twittering swallows of the third stanza might just as
well appear in a description of a spring morning, as might the “river sallows” (or willows),
“Hedge,” and “garden.”

At the same time, these images hint at the impending winter and its associated forms of death. The
lambs, for example are “full-grown,” and therefore ready for slaughter. The swallows, which
would perish in the cold, are gathering to migrate south. Thus, although autumn is distinct from
these other seasons, it contains hints of each of them in its characteristic imagery. The poem
conveys autumn’s depth without explicitly referring to the other seasons. Instead, it focuses on
“thy music”—autumn’s music. At the same time that it distinguishes autumn, this lively, mournful
music joins it with the past and future.

******************************************************************************

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 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;
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,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
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
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

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,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

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 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.

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