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.
MEANING OF DIFFICULT WORDS
1.
O’er-brimm’d – overflow
2.
Drows’d – full
3.
Poppies – opium(drugs)
4.
Swath – The width of a cut made
by a sicke. Eg: tall grass
5.
Gleaner – Someone who picks the
harvested fruits
6.
Cider - an alcoholic drink made from the
fermented juice of apples
7.
Gnats – small insects
8.
Sallows – a willow tree/to turn
yellow
9.
Bourn – a boundary/a small hill
10.
Treble-soft – the pitch
11.
Red-breast – a bird that sings
12.
Garden-croft – a small patch of
land adjacent to the house. Used as a kitchen garden/ herb garden
POETIC/LITERARY DEVICES
1.
Images
- Budding flowers
- Ripe fruit
- “To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees.” This imagery gives about the season such that apples are picked in the fall and you get a mental picture of a place during the season. In the first stanza, there are pretty mental images of fall, but by the final stanza, you have images of noisiness and leading into the next season, which represents the progression of death, from good to bad.
2. Metaphors
o
“Hedge-crickets sing; and now
with treble soft”- to compare the
sounds made in autumn to music. Keats compares the
noises made by hedge-crickets to musical notes.
3.
Personification
o
Used in the second stanza of “To Autumn”. Autumn is brought to life
as a person by giving the season human characteristics and even physical
features.
o
“And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue”. Normally, a rosy hue would
refer to a person being cheerful and happy and stubble would signify a male’s
facial hair. Here, they personify clouds in order to symbolize how death can
destroy all former happiness.
4.
Rhetorical question
o
“Where are the songs of spring?
Ay, where are they? This is a simple question merely asking when are there
going to be more births and less deaths. Spring represents a new beginning and
birth. At this season, death opens the question of “where did my life go?”
5.
Diction
o
Many of the words used by Keats
in this poem have connections to fall and the harvest season. A granary is a
place to store grain after being husked. A gourd is the hard shell of fruits,
normally picked during the harvest season. Cyder-press is also used which is a
crusher used to make cider. By using this, Keats has the characteristics of
fall and what people normally do during the season
6.
Similes
o
“And sometimes like a gleaner
thou dost keep” (19)
7.
Repetition
o
“[…]to set budding more/ And
still more” (8)
STANZA BY STANZA ANALYSIS
STANZA 1: The speaker addresses autumn as
if it were a person. He notes the autumn and the sun are like best friends
plotting how to make fruit grow and how to ripen crops before the harvest. The
ripening will lead to the dropping of seed which sets the stage for spring
flowers and the whole process starting over again. He tells about the bees that
think summer can last forever as they buzz around the flower.
STANZA 2: Describes the period after the
harvest, when autumn just hangs out around the granary where harvested grains
are kept. Most of the hard work has already been done, and autumn can just take
a nap in the fields, walk across books or watch the making of cider.
STANZA 3: Autumn sound with those of
spring. The sounds that are presented are not only those of autumn but
essentially the gentle sounds of the evening. As the night approaches, within
the final moments of the song, death is slowly approaching alongside of the end
of the year. The last stanza reminds reader that the seasons are a cycle,
widening the scope of this stanza from a single season to life in general.
CRITICAL APPRECIATION
In ‘To Autumn’, a super-facial reading
would suggest that John Keats writes about a typical day of this season,
describing all kinds of colorful and detailed images. The author makes an
intense description of autumn at least at first sight. Although John Keats’s
first impression was simply describing the main characteristics of autumn and
the human and animal activities related to it, a deeper reading could suggest
that he talks about the process of life. Autumn
symbolizes maturity in human and animal lives. Some instances of this are the
‘full-grown lambs’, the sorrow of the gnats, the wind that lives and dies, and
the day that is dying and getting dark. As all we know, the next season is
winter, a part of the year that represents aging and death, in other words, the
end of life. However, in my opinion, death does not have a negative connotation
because Keats enjoys and accepts ‘autumn’ or maturity as part of life, though
winter is coming.
READING MATERIAL
In both its form and descriptive surface, “To Autumn” is one of the
simplest of Keats’s odes. There is nothing confusing or complex in Keats’s
paean to the season of autumn, with its fruitfulness, its flowers, and the song
of its swallows gathering for migration. The extraordinary achievement of this
poem lies in its ability to suggest, explore, and develop a rich abundance of
themes without ever ruffling its calm, gentle, and lovely description of
autumn. Where “Ode on Melancholy” presents itself as a strenuous heroic quest,
“To Autumn” is concerned with the much quieter activity of daily observation
and appreciation. In this quietude, the gathered themes of the preceding odes
find their fullest and most beautiful expression.
“To Autumn” takes up where the other odes leave off. Like the others, it
shows Keats’s speaker paying homage to a particular goddess—in this case, the
deified season of Autumn. The selection of this season implicitly takes up the
other odes’ themes of temporality, mortality, and change: Autumn in Keats’s ode
is a time of warmth and plenty, but it is perched on the brink of winter’s
desolation, as the bees enjoy “later flowers,” the harvest is gathered from the
fields, the lambs of spring are now “full grown,” and, in the final line of the
poem, the swallows gather for their winter migration. The understated sense of
inevitable loss in that final line makes it one of the most moving moments in
all of poetry; it can be read as a simple, uncomplaining summation of the
entire human condition.
Despite the coming chill of winter, the late warmth of autumn provides
Keats’s speaker with ample beauty to celebrate: the cottage and its
surroundings in the first stanza, the agrarian haunts of the goddess in the
second, and the locales of natural creatures in the third. Keats’s speaker is
able to experience these beauties in a sincere and meaningful way because of
the lessons he has learned in the previous odes: He is no longer indolent, no
longer committed to the isolated imagination (as in “Psyche”), no longer
attempting to escape the pain of the world through ecstatic rapture (as in
“Nightingale”), no longer frustrated by the attempt to eternalize mortal beauty
or subject eternal beauty to time (as in “Urn”), and no longer able to frame
the connection of pleasure and the sorrow of loss only as an imaginary heroic
quest (as in “Melancholy”).
In “To Autumn,” the speaker’s experience of beauty refers back to
earlier odes (the swallows recall the nightingale; the fruit recalls joy’s
grape; the goddess drowsing among the poppies recalls Psyche and Cupid lying in
the grass), but it also recalls a wealth of earlier poems. Most importantly,
the image of Autumn winnowing and harvesting (in a sequence of odes often
explicitly about creativity) recalls an earlier Keats poem in which the
activity of harvesting is an explicit metaphor for artistic creation. In his
sonnet “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” Keats makes this connection
directly:
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactry,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain...
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactry,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain...
In this poem, the act of creation is pictured as a kind of
self-harvesting; the pen harvests the fields of the brain, and books are filled
with the resulting “grain.” In “To Autumn,” the metaphor is developed further;
the sense of coming loss that permeates the poem confronts the sorrow
underlying the season’s creativity. When Autumn’s harvest is over, the fields
will be bare, the swaths with their “twined flowers” cut down, the cider-press
dry, the skies empty. But the connection of this harvesting to the seasonal
cycle softens the edge of the tragedy. In time, spring will come again, the
fields will grow again, and the birdsong will return. As the speaker knew in
“Melancholy,” abundance and loss, joy and sorrow, song and silence are as
intimately connected as the twined flowers in the fields. What makes “To
Autumn” beautiful is that it brings an engagement with that connection out of
the realm of mythology and fantasy and into the everyday world. The development
the speaker so strongly resisted in “Indolence” is at last complete: He has
learned that an acceptance of mortality is not destructive to an appreciation
of beauty and has gleaned wisdom by accepting the passage of time.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
