Today’s Poem: To Autumn

Where are the songs of Spring? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too.

John Linnell, Reapers, Noonday Rest, 1865 (Tate Britain)

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To Autumn

by John Keats

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
    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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Common enough to call this the perfect English poem. Common enough to point out that it marks the last major work by a young poet (as heart wrenching as his late “living hand” fragment may be). Common enough, for that matter, to read the poem as an idyllic picture of England in the fall.

But perhaps when we consider the quite unbelievable run of odes that the twenty-three-year-old John Keats (1795–1821) wrote in 1819 — beginning with “Ode to Psyche,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode on Indolence,” “Ode on Melancholy,” and “Ode to a Nightingale” — we can add something more.

Perhaps we can add that “To Autumn” is the most personal poem that Keats wrote in his miraculous year, even though it lacks the I, the first-person, that’s present in the odes about Psyche, indolence, and even the nightingale: “Fled is that music: — Do I wake or sleep?”

And perhaps we can add that “To Autumn” is Keats’s most profound poem, for all that it never rises to grand statements on philosophical abstractions, of the kind to be found, most famously, in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

The five odes, Keats’s most significant breakthrough, came in the spring of 1819, and “To Autumn” stands a little apart, written a few months later and not given “Ode” in its title. More, the poem was composed, I am convinced, in full knowledge of the poet’s impending death. Having lost his mother to tuberculosis in 1810, and nursed his brother Tom till his tubercular death at the end of 1818 — for that matter, trained in medicine at Guy’s Hospital — Keats understood that his own tuberculosis was well established and fatal. He would be dead, after long suffering, fourteen or fifteen months after writing “To Autumn.”

And with that knowledge, the personal self-possession and the profound acceptance of the poem come clear. This is Keats’s version of assent to the cycle of life: the turn of summer to autumn, the turn of life to death.

Given the autumn’s fruit, we might be tempted to remember Shakespeare’s “Men must endure / Their going hence, even as their coming hither; / Ripeness is all” (King Lear 5.2.10–12), but more precise is “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all. (Hamlet, 5.2.219–224). In “To Autumn” gives us a man who is ready. And all without ever speaking of himself or rising to abstraction. All by describing the sights — and the smells and the sounds — of fall.

In three eleven-line pentameter stanzas (rhymed ababcdedcce in the first verse and ababcdecdde in the second and third), Keats gives us an autumnal English countryside as it might be in the fantasy of perfection: Still falling from summer to winter, but an ideal place (as desired as Yeats’s Lake Isle of Innisfree) in itself: “Where are the songs of Spring? . . . / Think not of them, thou hast thy music too.” Summer (personified with words suggesting the masculine) has “o’er-brimm’d” the beehives with honey, but Autumn (personified with suggestions of the feminine) is quieter and more accepting: “sitting careless on a granary floor,” or drowsing “with the fume of poppies,” or patiently watching “the last oozings” of a cider-press, “hours by hours.”

The critic Walter Jackson Bate has pointed out the artistry of such runs of monosyllabic words as “With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run,” and the long vowels that slow the poem the way that the fall is slowed from summer: “while barred clouds bloom the soft dying day.”

Statue of Keats at Guy Hospital (Wikimedia Commons)

In further scholarship, we could explore the poem’s connections to the five odes Keats wrote in the spring of that year, tracing themes across them. We could even (most annoying of readings) explore the relation of “To Autumn” to politics, as though Keats were making a political statement by deliberately ignoring the political events of 1819.

But all this would be to lose sight of the profound in the poem. In “To Autumn,” the dying young man feels the beauty of the fall — its sights, its smells, its sounds. Without melancholy, without anger, without fear, he dares to end his last great poem simply with a description of the “gathering swallows” that “twitter in the skies.”

Herbert James Draper, Autumn, c. 1890 (Wikimedia Commons)

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