To Autumn, By John Keats

(1795-1821)
To understand the use of imagery in
the poem
 Why write the poem?
Keats wrote "To Autumn" after enjoying a lovely
autumn day; he described his experience in a letter to
his friend Reynolds:

"How beautiful the season is now--How fine the air. A

temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking,
chaste weather--Dian skies--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."
 Structure
• No narrative voice or persona at all.
• The poem is about the real world; the vivid, concrete
imagery immerses the reader in the sights, feel, and
sounds of autumn and its progression.
• Keats totally accepts the natural world, with its
mixture of ripening, fulfilment, dying, and death.
• Because this ode describes the process of fruition and
decay in autumn, keep in mind the passage of time as
you read it.
• An ‘ode’ is a poem written for a particular occasion or
on a particular subject
• Use of iambic pentameter (5 stresses per line)
 Themes of
Poet talking directly to
autumn – Stanza I Mortality and
Change
personification ‘close
bosom-friend’
Alliteration
SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness, a
Shows autumn –         Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; b
sun low in sky     Conspiring with him how to load and bless a
        With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; b
    To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, c
        And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; d
A time of harvest –             To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells e
vines/apples/hazel shells
– ‘swell’ ‘plump’ like a
    With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, d
pregnancy/fertility         And still more, later flowers for the bees, c
        Until they think warm days will never cease, c
            For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells. e

Structure – only one

Too many flowers for sentence – lengthy
the bees to handle descriptions dominate
 References to
‘Thee’ is the autumn
farming and
personified – it becomes the
harvesting: ‘store’,
‘granary floor’, ‘half-
Stanza II reaper/harvester, crossing a
brook and waiting by a cider
reaped’
press
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? a
        Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find b
    Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, a
Poem slows         Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; b
down ‘asleep’     Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep, c
and ‘drows’d’ as         Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook d
the season slows             Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: e
down the     And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep c
growing of fruits         Steady thy laden head across a brook; d
        Or by a cyder-press, with patient look, d
            Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. e

The use of ‘winnowing wind’

is onomatopoeic/alliterative,
adding to the sounds
Questions song of spring Rosy skies as
– but notes that autumn winter approaches
has ‘music too’, despite
the ‘soft-dying day’
Stanza III – still seen as
beautiful

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? a

        Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,— b
    While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, a
Gnats         And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue; b
laments the     Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn c
death of         Among the river sallows, borne aloft d
nature
            Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; e
    And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; c
        Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft d
Full grown lambs         The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; d
are slaughtered in            And gathering swallows twitter in the skies. e
autumn
  Birds leaving for warmer
Keats accepts the living and dying of climates signifying the end
nature and accepts the mortality of of the season
dying as part of life