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…