ode on indolence

Ode on Indolence

·         The poem is an example of Keats's break from the structure of the classical form.

·         Rhyme scheme ABABCDECED-> it is in fixed form however stanzas 5 and 6 are different – the changes in the rhyming scheme shows and is a representation of the changing in Keats’ mood/ indolence.

·         ten-line stanzas, in a relatively precise iambic pentameter.

·         “Ode on Indolence” was probably the second ode.

·         It was composed in the spring of 1819, after “Ode on Melancholy” and a few months before “To Autumn.

·         On 19 March Keats wrote of his ‘sort of temper indolent’ in a letter to his brother George and sister-in-law Georgiana. And on 9 June, he told one Miss Jeffrey that ‘the thing I have most enjoyed this year has been writing an ode to Indolence’.

·         The ode was first published in 1848.

·         In the letter to George and Georgiana, Keats described his indolence: ‘This is the only happiness; and is a rare instance of advantage in the body overpowering the Mind.’

·         Most critics consider it the least accomplished of the group

·         The romantic ode evolved from the ancient Greek ode, written in a serious tone to celebrate an event or to praise an individual. The Greek ode was intended to be sung by a chorus or by one person. The odes of the Greek poet Pindar (circa 518-438 BC) frequently extolled athletes who participated in games at Olympus, Delphi, the Isthmus of Corinth, and Nemea. Bacchylides, a contemporary of Pindar, also wrote odes praising athletes.

·         Poem stems from Keats' own struggles and conflicting impulses

·         Keats was influenced by James Thomson’s ‘The castle of indolence’ – this poem depicts indolence as a place of luxury and the weakening of both the body and soul- there was also a sense of wasting powers and the potentialities of life.

Analysis

·         The epigraph of the poem ‘They toil not, neither do they spin’- is from the bible, from the gospel of Mathew.

·         Addressee of the poem is: Love, Ambition and Poetry.

·         ‘One Morn’ – morning is the beginning- time when people start their days- it has connotations to new starts.

·         ‘bowed necks and joined hands, side faced’ – the action of the figures are related to one praying, immediately readers begin to question/become curious. Keats is creating suspense- are the figures angel Or have religious relevance?- ‘bowed neck’ also shows a sense of defeat and guilt

·         The point above is reinforced by the semantic field of spirituality in the first stanza: ‘serene’, ‘white’, ‘graced’

·         ‘white robes’ and ‘placid sandals (open)’ hints that there is purity and honesty in these 3 figures

·         There is a sense of gracefulness because of the iambic pentameter.

·         In Lines 5-8, there is an image of figures rotating on the urn creating a cyclic movement ‘They came again’, ‘the first seen shades return’- there is a sense of repetition and monotony that is a result. Monotony of life maybe the representation that Keats wants to portray and the cause of this is indolence.

·         The references to the ‘Marble urn’ has similarities to Keats’ ‘ode on a Grecian Urn’ that was written later.

·         Sibilance runs through the first stanza of the poem, it highlights the supernatural sense of the figures that he is dreaming about, it also adds to the gracefulness.

·         Stanza 2 begins with rhetorical questions and the anaphora of ‘How’ 

·         The figures have changes to ‘shadows’- shadows are

·         ‘Ripe was the drowsy hours’ ripeness has connotation to sweetness. His laziness is luxury for him, its effects are sweet.

·         the speaker describes his existence prior to the figures’ appearance.  Here the language is warmly sensuous, characterised by long vowel sounds and soft consonants, as in:

Ripe was the drowsy hour;

The blissful cloud of summer-indolence

Benumbed my eyes;

·         However, the descriptions above can also be of death: ‘pulse grew less’, ‘Pleasure’s wreaths no flowers’ ‘Pain had no sting’ -> the indolence that he is going though is having a negative effect. Keats knew of him impending death at this point.

·         Stanza one consisted of a lethargic syntax but in stanza to there is more of an emotionally perturbed syntax due to the increase in punctuation- the punctuation breaks up the natural flow of the line -> this is a symbolism to his emotion – anger toward the 3 figures for ‘stealing away’ ‘idle days’.

·         Last 2 lines are stressed on ‘vanish’ and ‘fade’ this results in a trochee meter-> it disrupts the iambic pentameter.

·         There is an inherent need for Keats to feel and be ‘nothingness’- to not feel: ‘benumb’d’

·         The figures of his mind have disturbed the poet and his idle dream in the ‘morn’, they have ‘muffled’ and is distracting him.

Stanza 3

·         ‘to follow them I burn’d and ached for wings’ – there is a need to follow the 3 figures in his dreams now . to burn, is a form of destruction, Keats’ feels that leaving this state of laziness will evoke feelings that will eventually destroy him.

·         Plosive sounds and the alliterations are harsh.

·         He breaks the meter as he realises the figures of his dreams, there is an irregular meter.

·         ‘Love her name’ – Love is personified as a ‘fair maid’- maid= servant love and ambition aere given fairly positive comparisons, however Poetry is describes to be ‘demon’.

·         Gender of the 3 figures are women. Are women associated with the Arts more than men or some would say that- women destroy men’s sense of happiness and laziness?

·         He is most attracted to ‘maiden unmeek’

·         ‘Demon Poesy’- use of 2 nouns, without the separation of punctuation, indicates the Poesy is the personification of Keats’s demon rather than a synonym

·         In stanza 5, the disappearance of the 3 figures in Keats’ dream results in frustration and anxiety- ‘O Folly!’ and the repeated rhetorical question as well as he caesura reinforces it. The poet is confused at this point.

·         His indolence is gains describes as ‘sweet’ and ‘evening steep’d in honied indolence’- seen as lustrous is comparison to his greatest love ‘poesy’

·         Imagery used to describe Keats’s state of mind: sleep embroider’d with dim dreams’ ‘soul…lawn besprinkled’ ‘baffles beams’- sense of light and growth in his life- there is a change in attitude from the indolence that surrounded his life.

·         ‘open casement’ – freshness from the wind. More of an openness in life?- to face and feel his problems than staying in a state of indolence?

·         However in the final stanza : thee does not seem to be a resolution to the poem. Keats want to stay in him ‘idle spright’ with his ‘head cool-embedded in the flowery grass’ (rather than in love’s bosoms like Phorphyro in ‘Eve of St. Agnes’

·         Indolence is constantly compared to a cloud- e.g. metaphor: ‘The blissful cloud of summer-indolence’

Keats was to stay in an immutable state of pure relaxation and that is what the poem is about overall.  The overall strict form structure of the poem that addresses a opic like indolence shows that conflicts in Keats’s mind that lasts throughout the poem.

When I have fears that I may cease to be

When I have fears that I may cease to be

Lyric Poem, written in the form of a Shakespearean Sonnet.

Not published by Keats

·         Originally enclosed in a letter to John Hemilton Reynolds- Keats’s Close friend

·         Poem shows keats’s description of success and love but also shows his understanding that he will die before he achieves either of the two- this results in the sadness/melancholy tone that runs throughout the poem. (Keats was suffering from TB).

·         This poem was written in 1818- time when keats’s brother Tom was dying of TB

·         The centrality of the poem is the focus that Keats brings in on dying young -> he fears that his wishes will not be fulfilled as a writer (line 1-8) and his fear of losing his loved ones/ not having anyone to love (line 9-12)

Themes:

The poem’s themes echo those found in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

Keats’ fear that death will rob him of success and fame as a poet – as well as denying him the opportunity to enter into a full and loving relationship - is similar to the concerns of Sonnet 64 (‘When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defac’d’) and Sonnet 60 (‘Like as the waves makes towards the pebbled shore’).

Like Shakespeare, the poem’s writer seems not only to fear the ravages of time and inevitability of death, but also feels anxiety about his poetic achievement and reputation.

The poem falls in 2 thought groups:

1)      Keats expresses his fear of dying from lines 1-12

2)      Keats resolves his fear by asserting the unimportance of love and fame in the concluding two and a half lines of this sonnet

1^st quatrain: expresses how fertile his imagination is and his love to express this is the reason for the imagery of harvest.

·         There is an imagery throughout the quatrain of harvesting. E.G. “glean’d”, “garners”( storerooms for grains) ,”full-ripened grain;” -> alliteration of ‘g’ is repeated, reinforces this imagery, as an earthly fell is given in the lining of the vocabularies.  Harvest is a time of fulfilment- cultivation produces valued outcome. 

·         ‘teeming’ – plentiful, overflowing or produced in large quantities.

·         Gleaning- collecting left over crops from field that have already been harvested.

·         Metaphor of harvest contains a paradox, Keats is like the grain field (ready to be harvested) and he is the harvester (writer of poetry)

·          Abundance is also apparent in the adjectives "high-piled" and "rich."

·         Like the soil in which crops are planted, the human brain produces a rich harvest to be ‘gleaned’ by the poet’s pen and stored for posterity on the printed pages of books. The choice of images from the world of nature further suggests that the process is an essential part of Keats’ being. Creativity for him is inevitable and lies beyond his conscious control.

2^nd Quatrain: he ses the world as full of material he could transform into poetry with his ‘magical hand’ , The second quatrain has language which is more abstract as he contemplates the beauty of the stars: ‘symbols’, ‘romance’, ‘shadows’, ‘magic’, ‘chance’

·         ‘Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance’- Keats finds inspiration in the world in into darkness. His most ambitions, visions and imaginations come to him in the quietest moments of reflection.  The sibilance that runs across this line shows the calmness that keats experiences in his time of reflection by nature. Nature almost soothes him his fears.

·         ‘night’s starr’d face’ – personification of night, Also juxtaposition of darkness and light.

·         ‘There Shadows, with the magic hand of chance’- caesura in the middle of the line

·         ‘To trace| Their shadows’- shadows represent something that keeps moving-> referred ti life cycle. Life keeps moving, it is not infinite.  Keats has only little time to ‘trace their shadows’ that will fulfil his life goals.

The third quatrain focuses on feminine beauty and human love and the sorrow of loss. Notice the poignant effect of the stressed ‘f’s in ‘feel, fair’, ‘faery’ and ‘unreflecting’ and the repetition of ‘never’ in lines 10 and 11 (the latter gaining emphasis by being an inverted foot.

·         ‘Unreflecting love’-> the fact that there is no reflection in his love implies the purity in its nature. this is like love at first sight, it is abrupt and spontaneous.

·         ‘Faery power’- creatures of gentle beauty

(In the Romantic and Renaissance period, faeries were fairly common – mostly due to Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.) (Faeries also appear in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was Keats’s favourite play. He held Shakespeare as his presider) William Blake, Keats’s older contemporary, painted the scene from Shakespeare

 Faries are a Romantic idea- even in this painting they are light against the darkness of the background suggesting that they are innocuous and beautiful. They have the power to light up the painting.

The final couplet’s desolation is enhanced by all the long vowel sounds in ‘wide world … alone’ and the clipped endings of ‘think’ and ‘sink’. The poem ends rather abruptly and he almost ends up not caring of the love or fame that he craves at the start of the poem.

Structure

·         This sonnet shows the extent of Shakespeare’s influence on Keats. It adopts the rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet (abab cdcd ef ef gg).

 Each quatrain is heralded by a ‘when’, building an anticipation in the reader which is addressed by the final resolution signalled by ‘then’. The first quatrain focuses on concrete ideas of creative harvest; the second on intangible metaphors for passion; the third relates the intangible with a concrete object, though the speaker’s feelings are still unrealised. The final idea starts in the middle of line 12 as the poet sets the personal against the immensity of the wide world.

Most of the lines are end-stopped, the ends of lines coinciding with grammatical pauses. However, the [enjambment between l.1/2 indicates the urgency of the speaker’s feelings, whilst the same technique in l. 7/8 and 11/12 conveys the speaker’s desire to live out his dreams and experience realised human love (as well as write creatively about it).

 Although iambic pentameter predominates, Keats draws our attention to the fecundity of his mind with two spondees in l.4: ‘rich garners’ ‘full-ripened’ and then to the arresting impact of the darkened sky with a triple stress – ‘night’s starr’d face’, followed by a spondee, ‘Huge cloudy’. Twice he focuses the reader’s thoughts by having two stresses either side of a caesura – ‘feel, fair’ (l.9) and ‘love; - then’ (l.12). By contrast, although one would expect to have an [iamb3], there is naturally no additional stress in the word ‘nothingness’ in l. 14, conveying the ‘sinking away’ of significance.

On first looking into Chapman’s Homer

On first looking into Chapman’s Homer

Keats thought that poetry had to be separate from ordinary speech. This poem is a sonnet- a Petrarchan sonnet. The sonnet was written after spending all night with a friend reading Chapman’s translation of Homer. Keats was 20 when writing this sonnet. Keats Passion toward poetry is the main realisation that the readers get from this sonnet. Critic John Middleton Murry called it ‘one of the finest sonnets in the English language’

Cortez did not discover the Pacific Oceans, Balboa did according to the ‘History of America’, and this is a mistake in the poem however critics have pointed out that ‘in poetry one looks for truth in human nature rather than in historical truths’. Ideally both should go hand in hand.

·         two actual discoveries in the poem - one astronomical, the other terrestrial

·         Hunt printed the poem as an example of a ‘new school’ of poetry.

Themes in the poem:

Ø  Exploration and discovery

Ø  Poetry and writing, art and music.

Ø  Ambition – he wants to be the Bard that follow Apollo completely.

Language

Ø  A lot of Latinate words are used in the poem – these words have association with cleverness (Keats was a new young poet and wanted this was one of his early sonnets, hi might have wanted to show off his abilities as a writer). Context: For cockney poets,  learned Latin

·         ‘Much have I travelled in the realms of gold’- the realm of gold describes the word of poetry? It talks of Keats knowledge with poetry, and his reading habits. The fact that it is portrayed as ‘gold’ suggests that poetry itself is inert, it does not rust or diminish. This metaphor also talks of a word of imagination- both the inferences of the quotation can be used together – when reading poetry Keats is taken to another world of imagination.

·         ‘Realms’ ‘states’ ‘kingdoms’ ‘demesnes’ -> images clusters of locations. These words as well as ‘in fealty’ suggest political organisations, the vocabulary is used to symbolise the world of poetry and in turn imagination. The immenseness of the world of poetry is inferred to in the poem. And the ‘l’ sound that is linked in the words ‘travelled’ ‘realms’ and ‘fealty’ emphasises these ideas and ties the words and the huge world of poetry together.

·         ‘Goodly’ and ‘gold’ = alliterative sounds this will chime with each other

·         ‘Fealty’ historical reference to fidelity to a lord, the obligation to be faithful to a lord, in this case to Apollo. ‘Bard’ archaic noun used for a poet, it is a Romantic idea. ‘Fealty’ too is an example of archaism, archaic language is used because it is spiritual and above understanding to a regular reader.

·         ‘And in many goodly states and kingdom seen’ example of syntactic inversion (reversal of the normal order of words) EFFECT: allows Keats to create rhyme where he needs them. This has an effect of being grand. John Milton does this a lot in Paradise Lost -> it was done to elevate tone and was an imitating of Greek and Latin grammar -> inflected grammar AKA Accidence.

·         ‘which bards in fealty to Apollo hold’ the holy function of a poet is indicated in his following of a God. Apollo is recognized as a god of music, truth and prophecy, healing, the sun and light, plague, poetry.

·         EPITHET

·         Several praises to Homer: ‘Oft of one wide expanse had I been told’ – emphasis of Homer’s genius and his literary accomplishments to words with the same meaning of extensive is used. The two words= the adjective ‘wide’ and the modified word ‘expanse’. ‘the deep-browed Homer rules as his demesne’ -> ‘deep-browed’ refers to Homer’s intellect. The verb ‘ruled’ highlights that he was the best in the world of epic poetry.

·         ‘Yet did I never breathe its pure serene’- ‘breathe’ made the poem part of himself, almost absorbed it. Breathing is a necessity in life, one cannot live without the act of breathing, Keats, using this analogy suggests that poetry too is a necessity of life.

·         The adjectives: ‘pure serene’, and ‘loud and bold’ are used to describe Homer’s poem and Chapman’s translation of it. The majority of the descriptions are monosyllabic in contrast to the archaism and complexity of other description in the play. The simple beauty of poetry is showed through this.

·         ‘Till I heard Chapman’- although poetry is in written form and is an art to be read, Keats ‘heard’ it, for Keats poetry is the art of sound and this gives him life (‘breath’ connection) in speech the tone of voice can be sensed by the listener, similarly in homer’s poetry Keats can hear the flow and the voice of Homer himself. To Keats reader too, this sonnet concentrates on the tone and the rhyme of the poem and genuine effort for his work to flow and the tone to be highlighted can be identified, which Keats tries to mimic/ is influenced by homer/Chapman.

Sestet- there is a turn in the direction of the poem from this point: Keats compares his feeling and excitement when reading Chapman’s translation of Homer to other magnificent things that have taken place in history.

·         ‘Then’ – used to mark the turn, but also links the sestet and the octet together.

·         ‘like some watcher of the skies/ When a new planet swims into his ken’- the consequence of reading Chapman’s translation of Homer’ epic reveals a new dimension to Keats, another world opens up. ‘watcher of the skies’ have a biblical allusion to the story of the 3 wise kings following a start to see Jesus’ – it is a romantic idea including the nature leading the way to reveal a source of power and protection.  The discovery of a new planet is rare and for a new planet to ‘swim’ into the ‘watcher’ evokes a sense of wonder.

·         ‘Swim’ gives a watery imagery (the linking of water and the sky gives a sense of unity in the world both the physical one and the poetic world).

·         ‘Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes’=  ‘eagle eyes’- suggest sharp vision, roman allusions. The eagle is the king of all birds, therefore is royalty, it is the most noble. (Keats suggests that the reader also needs sharp focus to discover a unique quality of a poem) Cortez-> Spanish conquistador and explorer who defeated the Aztec empire and claimed Mexico for Spain.

·         ‘Silent’ – contrast to the ending of the Octet which was ‘loud and bold’ the overwhelming feeling of Cortez and his men are shown and is emphasised in the last 2 lines of the poem. Poetic technique caesura used on the last line ‘silent,’ it is an imperative but also in the context it is used as a description.  

·         Caesura also used ‘-and all his men’.

·         The semantic field of vision is reoccurring factor toward the end of the sestet – ‘staring’ , ‘Look’d’, ‘eagle eyes’ -> Keats reinforces the power of searching within a poem to discover the unknown indirectly, he cleverly links this thought to the historic incident of the discovery of the Pacific Oceans.

·         The rhythms of the Chapman sonnet convey a wide-sweeping sense of movement – of planets circling the heavens, and ships circumnavigating the earth. These patterns were perhaps already implicit in the Petrarchan sonnet. But the last object to move physically in the poem is the planet that "swims into" the watcher's ken at the start of the sestet.

·         Rhyme scheme:

Hanson, Marilee. "John Keats Critical Opinion: ‘Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine’" <a href="https://englishhistory.net/keats/critical-opinion-blackwoods-edinburgh-magazine/">https://englishhistory.net/keats/critical-opinion-blackwoods-edinburgh-magazine/</a>, February 28, 2015

On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again

On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again

It is a sonnet about Keats’ relationship with the drama that became his idea of tragic perfection, and how it relates to his own struggle with the issues of short life and premature death. Keats uses the occasion of the rereading this play to explore his seduction by it and its influence on himself and his ways of looking at himself and his situation in spite of his negative capability.

King Lear- old king with 3 daughters (Cordelia, Regan, and Goneril) who were told they could have land in return for telling him how much they loved him.                                                  http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/kinglear/kinglearps.html

Romance- narrative fiction, including love, betrayal and forgiveness, it is set in a exotic locations which may involve travel and adventure. Normally comprises of a happy ending.

Romanticism- is an artistic and cultural movement, in a period in European cultural history.

Keats want to turn away from Romance into the realities of tragedy. He ‘burns through’ King Lear, and by using the particular verb ‘burn’ Keats describes himself as fire- it is also considered a form of suffering – ‘to burn through’- hinting in the fact that he is reading through pain.   Keats want the outcome of reading of the poem to transform him, ‘ give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire’.

Keats sits down to read King Lear Again- it is not his first time. J

-          From the first few lines Keats alludes to the great romances of the previous ages as opposed to William Shakespeare’s great tragedies. While it could be discerned that Keats is referring to his poem Endymion: A Poetic Romance, the underlying meaning of the lines remains. Keats writes "O golden tongued Romance, with serene lute!/ Fair plumed Syren Queen of far-away!/ Leave melodizing on this wintry day,/ Shut up thine olden pages and be mute." (Lines 1 - 4)

-          Romance is made to sound attractive: ‘golden tongued’- gold is rare and expensive | ‘Queen’ – name of power.

-          Keats rejects Romance in this poem, the genre is called a ‘Fair plumped Syren’ Syren- in Greek mythology is beautiful but dangerous. In the mythical story, soldiers are lured by the beauty of syrens just as how the readers too are fascinated and entranced by romantic poetry.

-           ‘Lute’ and ‘mute’: they are like binary opposites. ‘lute’ make beautiful noise and ‘mute’ makes none- however there is also beauty in silence, which needs to be accounted for too.

-          ‘Shut up thine golden pages’- Keats admits that romantic poetry are exquisite and desirable to the mind, he sound almost angry in the demand ‘shut up’. - shows not only the strong attraction romance holds for Keats, but also Keats’ recognition of the Romance as a personified thing he can converse with and bid "Adieu!" (5).

-          ‘Shut up’, ‘be mute’ ‘Adieu’ ‘Leave’ -> repetition of imperative language throughout the poem.

-          Syren- used in the sonnet to introduce the beauty and the attraction one feels to Romantic poems

-          From the line ‘betwixt damnation and impassioned clay’ – there is a change in the tone of in the poem, the beauty of Romanticism is no longer the key focus and Keats’s fear of death etc is taking precedence. 

The second quatrain gives the reader the insight of the reasons why he must pull himself away from the pull of the Romance and focus on the tragedy.

-          Keats writes "once again, the fierce dispute/ Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay/ Must I burn through," (5 - 7). This shows that while tragedy, in this case King Lear, may not be as attractive as the "fair plumed Syren" (2) he forsakes, it is much more necessary for Keats to "burn through" (7) tragedy in order to concentrate on his own impending mortality.

-          Keats’ use of the term "Albion" (9) identifies England in the terms used in an earlier time by the ancient Kelts. As King Lear is set in Keltic Britain we can see which piece of "Shakesperian fruit" (8) Keats is bearing here.

-          ‘Begetters of our deep eternal theme!’ – Keats refers to how he will remain in England eternally.

-          "Let me not wander in a barren dream" (12) could be an allusion to Lear’s stupefied wanderings after being dethroned and humiliated, but it is probably also a use of imagery to describe his lack of desire to wander through the afterlife unaccompanied by those who live, but to accompany the living within their memories.

-           The ending couplet uses the image of the Phoenix whose death brings new life. "When I am consumed in the fire,/ Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire." (13 - 14) reinforces Keats’ need to live to live on past his inevitable youthful death in the only way he knows how, through his writing.

Rhyme: ABBA ABBA CDCD EE Form: sonnet divided traditionally into an octet and a sestet with the final 2 lines being the resolution in the focus of the poem.

The regular rhyming scheme in the octet is used when the focus of the poem is on Romantic poetry and one’s attraction toward it – the rhyming scheme is a representation of these attraction because as tragedy and the realities of life comes into attention the rhyming scheme too changes. (poem doesn’t fully flow) 

To Autumn

To Autumn

·         Written in September 1819.

·         Keats write this poem after enjoying an autumn day- he describes his experience to his friend Reynolds in a letter.

“How beautiful the season is now- How fine the air..”

·         Lyric poem written in the form of a ode.

·         This ode is an example of negative capability (phrase first used by Keats)- keats is so distant from this poem that the pronoun ‘I’ is never used- there is no narrative voice or persona.

Themes:

·         mortality

·         Death

·         Change/ transformation

·         Nature

Stanza 1

It is the description of the plenitude of nature, the focus is on the time of harvest.

·         Semantic Field of Abundance: ‘load and bless’, ‘ripeness to the core’, ‘to swell’ ‘plump’, ‘o’re-brimmed’, ‘fill’-> the verbs and images are of fullness.

·         Sound pattern- there is the repeated usage of assonance this give it richness. E.g. ‘to sewLL the gourd, and pLump the hazel sheLLs’  Effect: this creates a rhyme not just through the stanza but also in the line, resulting in the imitation of flow and movement which is a symbolism of how the season too is causing movement and change. The mentioning of ‘summer’ on the last line also shows the movement and flow of the seasons.

·         ‘maturing sun/Conspiring’: increasing brightness of the sun results in the ripening of more fruits. THE SUN ‘CONSPIRING’, is a personification, it hints that there is a secret, of nature? There is a relationship between the season and the sun ‘close bosom-friend’

·         ‘Load and bless’: Monosyllabic. The easiness of the season to ripen the fruit is hinted at because of the monosyllabic nature. the ambiguousness of the word ‘bless’ is noticeable, there is a religious aspect is included. The season is shown as having the power of God, hence autumn is being praised. 

·         Lines 4 and 5: ‘thatch-eves’- thatched houses have a pastoral setting – the “pastoral” as a literary genre originates from Ancient Greece, the ode too are from a Greek form= appropriate including of the pastoral themes.

·         ‘to bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees’, - the tree has bend because of the weight of apples. ‘bend’ alludes to the excessive growth and maturity of the season= this is a contributing images of the reoccurring theme of excess of plenitude throughout the poem. From this point, Keats also includes the idea of spoil and excess. – ‘swell the gourd’-the verb has connotation to pain and breakage.

·         The dangers of excessiveness is key in the poem. The cells of the bees are ‘o’re-brimm’d’ as a result of the excess of the flowers, emphasised repeatedly as ‘more’ ‘And still more’ lso the verb ‘budding’ is active because of the –ing. This suggests the process of the flower budding is ongoing. Also the hazel nus are ‘plump’ and the gourds are swollen- these are all damaging to the plants/fruits.

·         The first stanza is punctuated as one sentence, and clearly it is one unit. It is not, however, a complete sentence; it has no verb. By omitting the verb, Keats focuses on the details of ripening. In the first two and a half lines, the sun and autumn conspire (suggesting a close working relationship and intention). From lines 3 to 9, Keats constructs the details using parallelism; the details take the infinitive form (to plus a verb): "to load and bless," "To bend...and fill," "To swell...and plump," and "to set." In the last two lines, he uses a subordinate clause, also called a dependent clause (note the subordinating conjunction "until"); the subordinate or dependent clause is appropriate because the oversupply of honey is the result of--or dependent upon--the seemingly unending supply of flowers.

Stanza 2

Autumn, personified as a reaper or a harvester, crosses a brook and watches a cider press. Keats describes a reaper who is not harvesting and who is not turning the press. There is a feeling of slowing down.

·         ‘Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?’- questioning autumn . the question mark singals unresolved fear/tension? At the point od writing this poem Keats was suffering from TB- poet may be referring to him oncoming death. (end of Autumn results in the death of nature too).

·         Autumn is ‘sitting careless on a granary floor’- peaceful action but there is also a lack of vitality.  There is a complete contrast to the movement that goes through out stanza 1- ‘sitting’ is a passive action.

·         The use of ‘winnowing wind’ here is ideal; to winnow means to separate the chaff from the grain, a process which would be undertaken during autumn.

·         ‘hair soft – lifted’ personification of autumn.

·         ‘Or on a half-reaped forrow sound asleep/ drows’d with the fume of poppies’’- another passive action. Also ‘half-reaped’ suggests that the work is not yet finished and overall feeling of laziness and calmness can be felt. The laziness is further confirmed by the verb ‘drows’d’ the word is not even completely spelled by Keats.

·         ‘Fume of poppies’- poppies are the source of opiates such as Opium and Heroin. Eventhough there is a sense of peacefulness, it is accompanied also by some sort of a numbness

·         ‘Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours’. - Last oozings suggests the final ebb of life, the word ‘oozings’ almost Gothic in their connotations of slow, thick, substances.

The assonance employed by Keats in the repetition of ‘hours’ also works to slow the whole line down, forcing a lethargy in the reader in keeping with the stanza’s overall tone

Stanza 3

Feature on the sound of autumns, it also brings in the season of spring  and compared the two.

·         Tarts with 2 questions, - rhetorical questions are repeated like in the last stanza. ‘What are the songs of Spring?’ in this question he season of spring is a symbolic name for life and vitality- in stanza 2 to the depletion of life can be seen, Keats is finding it hard to deal with the decay after the ‘blessing’ of the ‘maturing sun’. the second question: “where are they?” utilises Ubi sunt- it is Latin for ‘where are they’ and was used in medieval poetry to reflect mortality and the transience of life by question the fate of the strong and the beautiful- in this case spring. The tone of these question are sad!

·         Immediately in the second line, Keats focuses back on Autumn and appreciates the music of autumn. you(the autumn) have your own music which can be heard when the clouds are blowing and reaching the farness end of the fields when the sun is setting and spreading its red dusk on grassy hills and fields.

·         Juxtaposing of ‘boom’ and the ‘soft-dying days’, the contrast of life and death. The adjective ‘soft’ used to describe the process of ‘dying’, allows the reader to admire the beauty of death. The phrase sounds natural and the alliteration of the ‘d’ results in the phrase to flow- Keats hints that death is a process of movement and should not be feared.

·         ‘And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;’-Nature’s contradiction: the autumnal introduction of red at once seems to set the land on fire, to give it a vital “rosy hue” (the way a person’s cheeks might be flushed with life), but also to signal the beginning of descent into winter.

Keats loves the ambivalence: he was the father of “negative capability,” in which the artist “is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

·         ‘Wilful choir’- funeral imagery

·         ‘light wind lives or dies;’ - Keats is freezing in time that moment in the balance BETWEEN life and death, highlighted by the ‘aloft/ sinking’ ‘lives/ dies’ juxtapositions. key idea here is that things are not simply on a decline towards death.

·         ‘Full-grown lambs’- lambs are never meant to be fully grown, they either become sheep or meat. ‘Bleating’- harsh sound, cry for help/death wail. However this is also an image of maturing of nature.

·         ‘red beast’- AKA robin, it’s songs are heard at dusk- the final song before darkness, just like the is Keats’s final stanza. Robins are also the harbingers of winter- the seasons are changing, end of autumn.

·         ‘And gathering swallows twitter in the skies’- Last line. Swallows are preparing for migration, sign that autumn is over. ‘Swallows’ ‘flocking’ and ‘twittering’ sounds associated with winter.

·         The dying of day is presented favourably, "soft-dying." Its dying also creates beauty; the setting sun casts a "bloom" of "rosy hue" over the dried stubble or stalks left after the harvest.

Keats blends living and dying, the pleasant and the unpleasant, because they are inextricably one; he accepts the reality of the mixed nature of the world…