On John Keats’ “To Autumn”
I thought before writing on this poem I must wait for the correct season. The months of fall would affect my mind, making it ultra-susceptible to the beauty in this poem.
I had no faith in my imagination! In part should the poem, with the aid of a reader who exercises fully the imaginative capacity, release the sensations and corresponding images that coursed through Keats when he wrote it.
This will be the approach, though you will find my descriptions to be inadequate to your personal delights. Let us start with the first line. It is an ode, and he treats Autumn as a being personified:
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Would that not be the first thing to notice if you glanced out the window or popped your head out-of-door to start a walk? The early morning fog settles across the forest wild, with many trees bobbing their tops over the cloudy sea as if searching for clearer air.
Then the other part of the line, the idea of mellow fruitfulness…what comes to my mind are the colors and quantity of popular autumn fruits and vegetables: the various shades of yellow, orange, and brown. Warm, soft, solid colors, which do not pop before the eye like a bright lime or ripe raspberries. In regards to quantity I feel a sufficient bounty, nothing to tempt one towards gluttony, but enough to go around, and then some. An atmosphere for sharing.
Close-bosom friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruits the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
The maturing sun: he is past his prime; his hottest, brightest days are behind him, but he is not yet done. Close-bosom suggests to me how tightly Autumn follows Summer, drifting forward, falling back, then pushing off again, with hot afternoons in decline and chilly mornings on the rise. These two are in kahoots, operating in secret to deliver the gifts of harvest. Do you hear them conspiring? Perhaps it is in the wind, newly chilled bursts of sighing toil, tossing about the leafy shavings of every new fruit carved.
The third line in the excerpt above with the mention of “thatch-eves” positions us in a particular location. We are somewhere in rural England, early 19th century. I think it is a small treasure to know how Keats first came to compose this poem. He mentions it in his letters. He was on a walk through a routine route and found the fields of autumn “warm,” and he went home to write a poem about it. I do not doubt that, in recalling the memory of sensation, what follows are particular parts of the memory of the walk which made their strongest impressions.
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
Evidence of the conspiracy, the richness of the results. With “bend” you can see the branch, the whole tree, being pulled downward from the weight of the blessings. And the term “moss’d”, as if someone came to dress the tree in the soft, spongy garment, refurbishing the tired brown bark like installing a new layer of green carpet. The second line of the excerpt is the pleasure in tasting ripe fruit, where its rich meat permeates through to the last bite. Or, ripeness is planted in the center of every fruit and its enriching power expands, spreads outwards.
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel…
The verbs here and their associations match well with the fruit and vegetables chosen. See the shape of a gourd and how it widens near the bottom like a grocery bag slowly filling with items. The hazel shells are more regularly round and earn the “plump” description with fruits like peaches and plums. Think also how a rather large kernel could fill the inside of one of your cheeks, plumping them like hungry squirrels. The use of verbs in this case gives Autumn actions, making her move and work like one of us, pushing an abstract presence onto a physical plane.
…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
Here is an example of a sympathetic imagination. He gives to an insect a train of thought that a human would follow. It would fall in line with the “hot-hand” fallacy. Sure we should know better, but when surrounded in abundance (“to set budding more / And still more) we act as though it was always so. See how eager a bee is in a flower, rummaging through the sweet-leafed loot. I wonder how close Keats got to a honeycomb for inspection before the thought of a sting shoved him off.
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;
This could be a farmer, anyone in the process of reaping, who embodies the spirit of Autumn, or it could be objects or aspects of autumn that emit her particular presence. I envision for the third line in the excerpt above bags of grain stacked willy-nilly, perhaps one or two accidentally knocked over, spilling their contents on the floor. This is another gift by Autumn and, like a Santa Claus of fall, has left little of her ever being there.
The fourth line has a couple gems. The wheat is her hair handled with care, for it is “soft-lifted”. The double “w” sound in the phrase “winnowing wind” seems to imitate the lightness of the breeze itself.
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:
Now we have the reaper, after working the poppy fields, exhausted, finding a space between labors to steal some sleep. Keats gives the scythe an intended action, offering an image of its past to further illustrate the present. This observation concerning the scythe has the same aspect as the line in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 12:
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd
The last lines in the second stanza go:
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.
Again, the further personification of the season. We cannot imagine it as an actual person because it says “like a gleaner,” so I tend to think of a spirit, or a particular light from that “maturing sun” which is keeping sight. Or perhaps “laden head” is another tree or plant fully stocked with nature’s sweets seeing its reflection in the river. The same spirit which came to bless the aforementioned trees now stays to watch her fruity gifts concentrated to something sweeter.
The last stanza is the most direct. Keats asks where the music of Autumn can be found, then proceeds to spell out where and what that music is.
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;
See how, before he goes to share the sounds, he gives us the setting that is paired with such music. Think of how oil paintings when paired with a particular classical composition will serve as a catalyst for a slew of images and sensations, like the entry point of a fantastical world, the poster ad for new imaginative lands.
The last two lines in the excerpt above is the instance when Keats found the fields “warm”. We are near the end of day, and the sun is setting. We have seen this time of day many times, and have taken photos with our phones of the sky when it burns that certain light gold, which transitions to darker blues higher in the sky, separated by long strips of cloud which catch the light on their undersides, burning orange and pink. It is those clouds which through their colors “bloom” or create the scene of a day nearing its end. In the “rosy” hue, the fields are painted in the same light as the clouds, their light tan and gold colored with inviting shades of pink, in the same tones as those bars of light which slip past the window shades and lay over the blanket and pillow, a kind of spontaneous sign for the warm embrace of sleep.
Now, with our mind calm and at rest, let the music play:
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.
If we follow the particular aspects of landscape noted in these lines, we will see our sight moves from the low “river sallows” all the way into the sky. For a moment on the walk we have stopped, our mind is clear of thoughts, and every sound of every player in this autumnal symphony slowly trickles in. We isolate every sound, then connect them with paired notes and tones, stitching together a complete song, heard externally, though tied together to one composition internally.
The gnats are around us and near the water’s edge, humming in sad tones; then sheep make their presence known, and we toss our sight higher into the hills. Close by or off in the grasses where the sheep graze, crickets are hiding, playing their repeated tunes. Before monotony can set in, another singer debuts: the red-breast, which occupies a garden-croft, perhaps connected to the cottage whose thatched roof was mentioned earlier. Now we are tuned into the birdsong, and hear the disorganized bursts of chirps from the swallows, who rise from bushes and trees, following each other into the “soft-dying” sky, then disappearing from view. Our sight has returned to the clouds, and with that our vision is over. What follows is our habitual state of mind, with their routine thoughts. But we dwell on what beauty we experienced, how wholesome to every sense, and how particular to the season! Such prolonged moments in our life are rare, and perhaps a long span of time has passed since we last felt such delight. Why not try to capture and relive the moment in a poem?
