Response on Keats’ “To Autumn”

by Fancy Free

John Keats is my favorite Romantic poet thus far in this course. I can’t believe such a young mind brought forth so many wonderful poems and odes. I chose “To Autumn” because of the time of the year that it is now. I grew up back east so the imagery in this ode made me long for the change in the season that we do not get to experience in quite the same way here in Los Angeles.

In the first stanza, I love the personification given to the season of autumn and how Keats’ portrays it as being a friend to the sun; how they work together to create what us east coasters call “Indian Summer”. The feeling that summer will never end even though the days grow shorter and the darkness falls faster. The connotation of the earth being almost pregnant in it’s over abundance from this bountiful time of the year, the last full harvest. In lines seven through eleven there is clear imagery of the plentitude the season brings of things being full to the brim with life and possibility along with it. “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.” These lines make me think of Mother Nature pouring forth her bounty just before she must retreat and die in the coldness of winter. The inevitable changing of the seasons and the glorious transition that the earth goes through every year are dignified with eloquence and romance in this verse.

In stanza two, the tone becomes a bit tinged with the browness of autumn with the scene of a granary or mill involved in the description of where the bountiful harvest may find itself, in storage. The image of autumn lazily lounging in fields, completely oblivious to his actual duties is beautifully written with “Drowsed with the fume of poppies while thy hook/ Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;” (16-17).  Seeing how poppies is used as something that makes one sleepy brings to mind the state of being drugged like some of Keats’ contemporaries and their use of opium. It is clear how not only his physical surroundings but how his social surroundings affected his writing. The continual personification of the season throughout the poem, gives the reader a clear image of autumn almost quite like an actual being in this world. Keats’ breathes life into a fickle season on the brink of bearing life and death.

“Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they” (23). Keats asks this in the first line of stanza three. And then he adds the reply “Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, - “(24). It is as if he is consoling Autumn that he is just as important, if not more important than Spring. He is in tune with nature and the cycle of it and how all things must live only to die and then yet again be reborn and renewed in the spring.

There is a distinct move from the life of this “Indian Summer” to the must of death as Keats’ describes some of the nature that he observes with, “Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn/Among the river sallows, borne aloft/ Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;” (27-29) ties in the idea once again of life and death with how the wind will choose to blow, soft and warm or strong and cold, as autumn often brings the uncertainty of everything to fruition. Nature begins to reflect on itself and turns inward for stillness and solitary reflection before retreating to the Underworld to accept the chilled embrace that is Death, the silent partner of Life.

All is accepted in nature by nature and I believe Keats to be accepting and knowing of all living things and their fate in this life. He is explicating and interpreting his take on the cycle of life and how it must merge with death, that to know one, one must know the other. The epitome of a juxtaposed ying and yang poem of life, spilling over into understanding of the fragility of human life and the fleeting period we have on this earth to enjoy the fruits while they bloom and take nothing for granted. I think I would like to reflect more deeply on Keats’ odes and form my term paper around this poet and his particular works.