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John Keats
I
The first stanza begins with Keats painting a picture of Autumn as being a
“season of mist and mellow fruitfulness”. This is used in conjunction with the
use of the image of a “maturing sun” which ripens the Autumn harvest of
views and the fruits. He describes the fruit being ripened to the core, the
gourds are swelled, the hazel nuts plumped and trees bend from the weight
of the apples. So the first stanza describes quiet vividly the fullness and
abundance of life.
• The second stanza has a bit of a different approach where
Keats is addressing someone. He personifies Autumn as a
woman for he refers to Autumn by “thy hair is soft-lifted
by the winnowing wind”. In line 12 he addresses Autumn
to rhetorical question. It is clear that Autumn is the time
for harvesting, gathering and preparing for the Winter
that lies ahead. The stanza ends appropriately in that it
literally describes the process of the last apples being
pressed for cider, but more importantly it describes the
last breathes of life being squeezed out of Autumn.
• The third stanza continues with another two
rhetorical questions, one reiterating the other
“where are the Songs of Spring? Ay, where are
they?” This stanza is probably the bleakest of
the three as there is direct reference to death.
Words like “soft-dying day”, “mourn”, “The
light wind lives or dies” are all references to
the dying of Autumn.
• “To Autumn” is written in a three-stanza structure with a
variable rhyme scheme. Each stanza is eleven lines long .
• 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.)
Themes in the poem
• “To Autumn” is one of the simplest of Keats’s odes. There is nothing
confusing or complex in Keats’s ode to the season of autumn, with its
fruitfulness, its flowers, and the song of its swallows gathering for
migration.
• “To Autumn” shows Keats’s speaker paying homage to a particular
goddess—in this case, the deified season of Autumn.
• 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.
• 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 wrote "To Autumn" after enjoying a lovely
autumn day
• (1) There is no visionary dreamer or attempted
flight from reality in this poem; in fact, there is no
narrative voice or persona at all. The poem is
grounded in the real world; the vivid, concrete
imagery immerses the reader in the sights, feel,
and sounds of autumn and its progression.
• (2) With its depiction of the progression of
autumn, Keats totally accepts the natural world,
with its mixture of ripening, fulfillment, dying,
and death.
Analysis : Stanza I
• Keats describes autumn with a series of specific, concrete,
vivid visual images. The stanza begins with autumn at the
peak of fulfillment and continues the ripening to an almost
unbearable intensity. Initially autumn and the sun "load
and bless" by ripening the fruit.
• But the apples become so numerous that their weight
bends the trees; the gourds "swell," and the hazel nuts
"plump."
• This fertility that has no end is suggested in the flower and
bee images in the last four lines of the stanza. Keats refers
to "more" later flowers "budding" (the -ing form of the
word suggests activity that is ongoing or continuing); the
potentially overwhelming number of flowers is suggested
by the repetition "And still more" flowers.
• The bees cannot handle this abundance, for their cells are
"o'er-brimm'd." In other words, their cells are not just full,
but are over-full or brimming over with honey.
Stanza II
• The ongoing ripening of stanza I, which if continued would become
unbearable, has neared completion; this stanza slows down and
contains almost no movement.
• Autumn, personified as a reaper or a harvester, crosses a brook and
watches a cider press. Some work remains; the furrow is "half-
reap'd," the winnowed hair refers to ripe grain still standing, and
apple cider is still being pressed.
• However, the end of the cycle is near. The press is squeezing out
"the last oozings."Notice that Keats describes a reaper who is not
harvesting and who is not turning the press.
• Is the personification successful, that is, does nature become a
person with a personality, or does nature remain an abstraction? Is
there a sense of depletion, of things coming to an end? Does the
slowing down of the process suggest a stopping, a dying or death?
Does the personification of autumn as a reaper with a scythe
suggest another kind of reaper--the Grim Reaper?
Stanza III
• Spring in line 1 has the same function as Summer in stanza I; they
represent process, the flux of time. In addition, spring is a time of a rebirth
of life, an association which contrasts with the explicitly dying autumn of
this stanza.
• Furthermore, autumn spells death for the now "full-grown" lambs which
were born in spring; they are slaughtered in autumn. And the answer to
the question of line 1, where are Spring's songs, is that they are past or
dead. The day, like the season, is dying. The dying of day is presented
favorably, "soft-dying." Its dying also creates beauty; the setting sun casts
a "bloom" of "rosy hue" over the dried stubble or stalks left after the
harvest.
• Keats accepts all aspects of autumn; this includes the dying, and so he
introduces sadness; the gnats "mourn" in a "wailful choir" and the
doomed lambs bleat (Why does Keats use "lambs," rather than "sheep"
here? would the words have a different effect on the reader?). It is a
"light" or enjoyable wind that "lives or dies," and the treble of the robin is
pleasantly "soft." The swallows are gathering for their winter migration.
• Keats blends living and dying, the pleasant and the unpleasant, because
they are inextricably one; he accepts the reality of the mixed nature of the
world.