To Autumn by John Keats
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John Keats (b. 1795-d. 1821) is probably one of the most important of the Romantic poets. Although he only lived to be about twenty-five, his writing surpasses the maturity and understanding of life that most his age would have possessed. The works he is most famous for are his 1819 odes and the letters he had written. An ode in particular, To Autumn, is one in which nature is used to help the speaker work through the themes of growth and possibly death. The use of nature is typical of a poem written in the Romantic Era, which advocated the aesthetic experience rather than the use of logic and reason which were used in the Age of Enlightenment. To Autumn is considered by many to be “one of the most perfect short poems in the English literature” and has also been one of the most anthologized poems in the English literature. It is almost hard to imagine that a poem which such a legacy would have been written by a then at the time twenty-three year old John Keats.
To Autumn is a poem containing three stanzas with a rhyme scheme of A B A B C D E D C C E. It seems that Keats took the rhyme scheme for his first four lines from the rhyme scheme of a Shakespearian sonnet. The rest of the lines seem to be Keats’ own rhyme scheme. The first stanza seems to use the idea of growth by describing a beautiful summer scene:
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
Keats uses paints a sensual scene of summer that is prosperous and in its prime. He creates an ethereal serenity affecting all of the senses. He writes, “To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells/With a sweet kernel; to set budding more.” From those two lines alone sight, taste, and smell are all activated to enjoy the lush summer that Keats has created.
The second stanza has transitions the reader into the next season, autumn. Keats personifies autumn as a harvester. However the harvester is not harvesting. Autumn is depicted almost lazy, just in a state of rest with no changing:
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Because there is almost a standstill with no changing, this implies that there will be no more growing. The harvester is not harvesting yet is there, which means that there will be a time that the harvesting will begin. At this point in the timeline of the poem, prime is just past and decay of youth is rapidly approaching. In this stanza, Keats uses the symbolism of the poppy flower to represent the closely approaching death. He writes, “Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook.” The word fume is so important because it is only a faint whiff of what is to come. This stanza goes from being sublime and blissful to towards the end being almost despaired and yearning for it to be summer once more.
In the third stanza the day is ending, which means that probably the harvester has done the harvesting. This signifies the ending of autumn and the close approach of winter. Winter has always been a symbol of dying and rebirth in literature. The speaker states to not think of Spring, implying that there will not be one. Keats writes, “Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too.” Keats also uses the dying of the day to imply the dying of life. He depicts birds chirping as the sun is setting. Often times birds are used to symbolize a soul making its way over to the next world. The tone of this final stanza is not despairing or mournful, however it feels content and it is as if the speaker has made peace with the inevitable death. Knowing that Keats wrote this poem about a year and a half before his death, already showing signs of Tuberculosis, it is safe to say that this poem is a look into his mind on how he himself was working through his impending death. At the end of the poem, the speaker has accepted his mortality and made peace with it, much like Keats seemed to do.
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