To Autumn by John Keats

First published: 1820

Type of work: Poetry

Type of plot: Ode

The Work:

John Keats wrote one of his best poems, “To Autumn,” on Sunday, September 19, 1819. Its remarkably quick completion exemplifies Keats’s accomplishments generally. The poem was written rapidly in a life notable as one of the briefest and most compact of all the great poets’ lives. It is the last of the odes that Keats composed from May to September of 1819 and thus one of the last poems he ever wrote. At the beginning of the following year, the signs of his tuberculosis appeared, and on February 23, 1821, he died in Rome at the age of twenty-five. Keats’s poetic career lasted only five years, and he wrote intensively for only three of those years.

Keats wrote five poems that he called odes during these middling months of 1819; “To Autumn” is designated by its title as an ode, and its form and manner echo those other poems, so critics generally classify it thus. The ode is a Greco-Roman classical form. Its two greatest early practitioners were the Greek Pindar and the Roman Horace. Keats’s odes resemble Horace’s more than they resemble Pindar’s. They comprise stanzas that incidentally bear some resemblance to the very nonclassical sonnets he had already written. In all the odes except “Ode to Psyche” (1820), the stanzas are of regular length.

For “To Autumn,” Keats chose an eleven-line length instead of his more usual ten-line pattern. He always begins his odes with an initial abab rhyme scheme, then switches to a different pattern in the second four lines and reuses rhymes from this second set of lines in the two or three following lines. In “To Autumn,” the seventh and eleventh lines rhyme. Having established a scheme for one stanza, he repeats it in the others. Many poets do not like rhymes at all, and Keats himself refers to “dull rhymes” in one of his poems, but once he establishes such a pattern, he repeats it precisely, with different rhyming words in each stanza—in as many as ten stanzas in “Ode to Indolence” (1848).

In addition to the end rhymes and the varied iambic movement of the lines, Keats creates many sound effects such as internal rhymes (“reap’d” and “sleep”), alliteration (“mists” and “mellow”), and assonance (“touch” and “stubble”). These patterns, intricate and subtle, may be studied at great length. Most of these effects can be found in an early version of the poem, suggesting that although they are to some extent calculated, they primarily demonstrate an ear innately sensitive to sound.

A more important characteristic of the ode as Keats practiced it is its dedication to a specific theme, well reflected in the titles he chose for his work. However, to say that “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820) is only about an urn is to neglect the intense provocativeness of the figures on the urn. The emotional appeal of “To Autumn” is similarly rich. In the first of the poem’s three stanzas, Keats develops the “mellow fruitfulness” of autumn; in the second, he considers nature’s gifts, both those heaped in a granary and those in the immediate surroundings. The third stanza contrasts autumn’s “songs” with those of spring, strongly emphasizing the beauty of the end of the season of natural growth that began months earlier.

The imagery of “To Autumn” is an important resource in conveying its theme. The sensory appeals in the poem are multiple. One particularly important such appeal in the first stanza is the sense of motion reflected in many of the verbs, such as “load,” “bind,” “run,” “fill,” “plump,” and “swell.” The summer sun and the bees have generated a harvest. In the second stanza, nature’s store is depicted as “sitting” on the floor of a granary, and the air is full of the smell of flowers. The growing apples in the first stanza give way to a “cyder-press” in the second. The harvest is not depicted as gleaned but as itself a “gleaner,” the grain itself personified in the image of a girl with hair swept by the wind.

In the third stanza, aural imagery predominates. Autumn, like spring, has its songs: bleating lambs, crickets, and birds. The scene has shifted away from granary and cider press to the outside world after the harvest, a principal image being the stubble of the harvested grain. Keats, describing one of his walks, also praised the sight of this stubble in a letter to a friend written only two days later. “To Autumn” includes no image of the actual cutting of the grain. Stubble is not for him a mere aftermath, for the stubble is “rosy” under the sun, as significant and admirable as the grain that has been harvested. Perhaps no poet has depicted natural change so brilliantly and yet managed at the same time to sustain the abiding presence of the temporal moment.

The movement of the poem from ripeness, to garnering, to the stubbly field is just one of the processes that unfold in “To Autumn.” Autumn represents the culmination of the year’s propagating forces, and the poem’s imagery also marks a trend from morning, with an image of the sun ready to shine upon and “bless” the fruit that is ripening, to afternoon details of heat and summer listlessness, and finally to the evening scene of crickets and gathering birds. Thus, the poem’s movement might also be reckoned as directional: from east to west, the course of the sun as it appears to the human eye. Also implied is movement from the sun’s “maturing” to its southward recession in autumn, when the swallows gather to fly in that direction.

Another process pertains to the working life of the poet. In a sonnet written early in the preceding year—“When I have fears that I may cease to be” (1818)—Keats uses much of the same imagery to refer to his own work. He portrays the poet as a gleaner and his poem as comparable to ripe grain. As a former medical student, Keats had considerable insight into his own physical condition, and he sensed that his poetic mission might be aborted. The tubercular disorder that would kill him showed its warning signs only a few months after he wrote “To Autumn.” Therefore, although the poem is not overtly metaphorical, any reader familiar with Keats’s health and prior poetry is likely to see the poem as pertaining to the autumn of his life. It does not, however, refer in any explicit fashion to his approaching infirmity or death, for he catches and holds in place the splendor of the season at hand. Like a fine painting, it makes an enduring spectacle.

The tone of this poem is quite different from that of “When I have fears.” There is nothing negative, nothing morbid in the later work. The stubble is not a ruined field but a beautiful evening sight. The poem is not about an interrupted harvest or the fear of its failure but about its fulfillment. The swallows depicted in the last line of the poem are “gathering.” An Englishman lives in a latitude that sees this gathering as an October preparation for a retreat to the south; the swallows will return the following spring. Keats, in an earlier version, used the past tense, saying the swallows “gather’d.” The result of the change is an emphasis not on a finished act but on a living, moving one. A phase of nature is retained as indelibly here as the dancers are held in place in “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, ed. The Odes of Keats. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. “To Autumn” is discussed in several essays in this collection of scholarly work, particularly in Geoffrey H. Hartman’s “Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats’s ’To Autumn.’”

Bush, Douglas. John Keats: His Life and Writings. New York: Collier Books, 1967. This biography by a Keats critic is one of the earliest studies to judge the poem the most mature and flawless of the poet’s odes.

Hebron, Stephen. John Keats: A Poet and His Manuscripts. London: British Library, 2009. The process by which the poet’s shaping imagination and artistic sense effectuate the development of the final poem is here on display.

Hirst, Wolf Z. John Keats. Boston: Twayne, 1981. Argues that in “To Autumn” time triumphs over Keats’s usual balance between time and eternity.

Stillinger, Jack, ed. John Keats: Complete Poems. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1982. This authoritative and handy edition of Keats’s poems also has useful commentaries on “To Autumn” and other odes to which it can be usefully compared.

Vendler, Helen. The Odes of John Keats. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1983. The final chapter on “To Autumn” shows how the poet’s acquaintance with poems by William Shakespeare, John Milton, William Wordsworth, and other poets contributed to this last of Keats’s odes.