‘To Autumn’ by John Keats: A Beginning and an Ending of a Season

Autumn is given a beautiful poem by John Keats. LilKar/Shutterstock

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.

We recently enjoyed the usual festivities of Oct. 31, which, as we know, is a day worthy of great celebration. I am, of course, referring to the fact that it is the birthday of John Keats and thus a very momentous occasion indeed.

A portrait of romantic poet John Keats, 1819, by Charles Brown. Public Domain

As a seasonally appropriate means of celebration, I reflect on Keats’s ode “To Autumn,” the last of the odes for which Keats is so famous. As Keats’s biographer W.J. Bate noted, this poem is not only one of Keats’s greatest works but is also, as each subsequent generation has found it, “one of the most nearly perfect poems in English.” Bate was not alone in this opinion; many literary critics have declared the ode, a lyric poem written in celebration of a person or thing, usually in an elevated style, to be as close to perfect as an English poem can be.

Among Keats’s odes, “To Autumn” is distinctive as the one that achieves resolution by the end, but even more broadly speaking, it’s particularly masterful because “in this short space, so many different kinds of resolution are attained,” as Bate observed. Written in 1819, the poem was inspired by Keats’s walks around the St. Cross meadows in Winchester, England, but the ode is more than an illustration of the autumn scenery he beheld.

An illustration for "To Autumn" by John Keats, 1899, painted by W. J. Neatby. Public Domain

It is difficult to neatly and concisely extract the essence of the poem in a few brief words. So many different factors are at work and play within the ode, each of them performing an essential function to the whole, that it is difficult to give a broad overview of the poem without, fatally, disregarding some of these essential elements. However, what Keats achieves in the poem is a sort of perfection within the imperfections that leaves us as the season does: looking forward to a revisiting in the future when still other undiscovered aspects of its beauty will be revealed.

The Harvest Season

One can easily fall into either an interpretation of the poem as a simple depiction of a beautiful autumn scene or as a metaphor for death and the acceptance of mortality. However, the poem is far more complex than these interpretations would suggest. Keats chooses every word with great thought, crafting the poem to be a many-layered whole.

“Autumn,” 1900, by John William Godward. Public Domain

To start, the poem features a “deity” in the figure of autumn personified, and we see that her character is immediately apparent as beneficent co-conspirator with the sun. Her every act is directed by the goal of blessing her subjects, and she fills to overflowing whatever emptiness she finds, setting “budding more, and still more, later flowers for the bees.” Even the sound of the words, especially the assonance in the first stanza, produces a feeling of fullness.

The poem allows us to experience this feeling of abundance for ourselves. Unlike Keats’s other odes, “To Autumn” does not feature the narrator, the impersonal “I” who presents us with the scene through his own perspective and emotions. Instead, the speaker addresses autumn with the aim of extolling her character without revealing his own.

In fact, the first stanza is entirely a description of the action of autumn in nature, and the stanza is surprisingly dynamic given that it isn’t, strictly, a complete sentence.

All of the senses are engaged throughout the poem: the taste of the hazelnuts, the feeling of hair being swept back by the wind, the tapestry of autumn garden imagery, and the perfume of poppies all interweave throughout the first two stanzas.

The last stanza focuses on sound, and Keats compels us to hear the music of autumn and urges the season to listen to its own music too: the polyphony of gnats, lambs, hedge-crickets, and birds emerges insistently from the last few lines. The speaker almost has to remind the season of itself, to call her attention to these voices to show her her own beauty and value rather than longing for the beauty of spring.

Undoubtedly, we are urged to simply bask in the beauty of the abundant autumn harvest. But beyond this, how are all these details working together within the poem? What is the point of arranging them in the complexity of this system?

"Cresheim Glen, Wissahickon, Autumn," 1864, by Thomas Moran. Public Domain

Tensions and Contradictions

So much movement is taking place in the poem, and on closer examination, it happens in opposite directions and creates tension within the ode. In the first line, we have the “maturing sun,” which could reference that the sun is closest to Earth during the winter. The year is drawing to a close and dying even as nature moves toward a certain sort of fullness. The “clammy cells” of the bees create a closed, cloister-like image even while they are “o’er-brimmed” and open, and summer is the agent of what has poured life into them, pulling the time backward when it seemed to be moving toward winter.

In the language of flowers, poppies symbolize eternal sleep and oblivion, and the river sallows (or willows) are also often used as a symbol of mourning. The choir of gnats sends up a mournful wail in the midst of all this life. The gathering swallows indicate that autumn is drawing to a close, even while the speaker is using them to inspire an appreciation for the current music of autumn. The word “bourn” indicates a seasonal, intermittent stream and itself points to a stopping and starting in one concentrated place. The light wind also “lives or dies” intermittently.

Why, therefore, does Keats use all these intimations of mortality to illustrate the fullness of life?

All this simultaneous movement in opposing directions, the tensions between living and dying, opening and closing, maturing and declining, is what creates the sensation of energy and life within the poem. Those things that constitute the beauty of autumn are the very things that signal its departure. The songs of spring, with newborn lambs and the first appearance of budding flowers, easily remind us that there is much of life to come. The songs of autumn face us inescapably with the fact that none of these songs will last forever, but Keats deliberately mentions spring to remind us that we aren’t supposed to forget that it exists even while experiencing fall.

All of these things exist simultaneously, just as everything in this world is dying and living at the same time. The resolution that the poem achieves is the rest and contentment in the paradox of dynamic movement in a stationary moment. Keats draws forth the beauty of this particular season, but to accept and love that very beauty is to accept the end that shapes it.

First page of John Keats's autograph manuscript of his poem "To Autumn," 1819. Harvard University. Public Domain

Space and Time

As literary critic Helen Vendler points out, the poem is guided first by a temporal motion and then by a spatial one. The poem opens with a flashback to the budding of the flowers, moves to the first harvest of nectar from these flowers by the bees, and finally moves to the harvest of fruit that later produces cider. The spatial movement of the poem proceeds from the expansive view of the mists and sunlight to the cottage whose eaves are encircled by vines. In the next stanza, we move from the granary, at once enclosing the grain and open to the wind that lifts autumn’s tresses, to the open orchard, fields of poppies, and the brook. Finally, the last stanza moves from the open stubble-plains to the smaller garden-croft with a view upward to the sky crossed with swallows.

Ms. Vendler observes, “Besides the temporal passage from flowering and fruition to cider-making and stubble-plains, besides the spatial expansion of perspective from the central thatched cottage to the perimeter of the farm and its upper bounding by the sky, the poem seems to sketch, though lightly, a passage through a season-spanning day—from the mists of dawn, through the noon heat in which the reaper drowses to a sunset.”

The sunset and autumn season are no less to be enjoyed because they are drawing to a close, as does the beauty of the poem. As Keats shows, reality governs time and space just as life and death are tangled up in each other, and we experience this beauty fully even as we know it will soon end.

In fact, Keats’s effort to place us within the autumn scene is only effective because he does not omit the reality of mortality. If he had not included the season’s movement toward its end, we would be incapable of fully experiencing the moment in the poem. From the bounds of a garden-croft, we receive the beauty of an expansive sunset, and we aren’t saddened by the fact that we can’t see more of it past the limits of the horizon that makes it.

“Autumn,” 1875, by Frederic Edwin Church. Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid. Public Domain

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