Keats’s Ode to Autumn

Ø  The work has been interpreted as

o   a meditation on death;

o   as an allegory of artistic creation;

o   as Keats’s response to the Peterloo Massacre, which took place in 1819;

o   as an expression of nationalist sentiment.

Ø  The poem marks the final moment of his career as a poet.

Ø  In a letter to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds, Keats described the composition of the poem: “How beautiful the season is now – How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it […] I never lik’d stubble fields so much as now […] Somehow a stubble plain looks warm – in the same way that some pictures look warm – this struck me so much in my sunday’s walk that I composed upon it.”

Ø  “”To Autumn” describes, in its three stanzas, three different aspects of the season: its fruitfulness, its labour and its ultimate decline.

Ø  “To Autumn” describes, in its three stanzas, three different aspects of the season: its fruitfulness, its labour and its ultimate decline.

Ø  Through the stanzas, there is a progression from early autumn to mid autumn and then to the heralding of winter. Parallel to this, the poem depicts the day as it turns from morning to afternoon and into dusk. These progressions are joined with a shift from the tactile sense to that of sight and then of sound, creating a three-part symmetry which is not present in Keats’s other odes.” Walter Jackson Bate

Ø  “(It)….most closely describes a paradise as realized on earth while also focusing on archetypal symbols connected with the season. Within the poem, autumn represents growth, maturation, and finally an approaching death. There is a fulfilling union between the ideal and the real”.

Ø  Harold Bloom emphasized the “exhausted landscape”, the completion, the finality of death, although “Winter descends here as a man might hope to die, with a natural sweetness“.

Ø  According to Bewell, the landscape of “To Autumn” presents the temperate climate of rural England as a healthful alternative to disease-ridden foreign environments.

Ø  Thomas McFarland: “Most important about “To Autumn” is its concentration of imagery and allusion in its evocation of nature”, conveying an “interpenetration of livingness and dyingness as contained in the very nature of autumn”.

Ø  Helen Vendler, in 1988, declared that “in the ode ‘To Autumn,’ Keats finds his most comprehensive and adequate symbol for the social value of art.”

Ø  According to Helen Vendler, “To Autumn” may be seen as an allegory of artistic creation. As the farmer processes the fruits of the soil into what sustains the human body, so the artist processes the experience of life into a symbolic structure that may sustain the human spirit. This process involves an element of self-sacrifice by the artist, analogous to the living grain’s being sacrificed for human consumption.”

Like the other odes, “To Autumn” is written in iambic pentameter with five stressed syllables to a line, each usually preceded by an unstressed syllable.

……..1…………………2……………3…………..4…………..5
Close BOS,..|..om-FRIEND..|..of THE..|..ma TUR..|..ing SUN

Keats used a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable at the beginning of a line, including the first: “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”; and employing spondees in which two stressed syllables are placed together at the beginnings of both the following stanzas, adding emphasis to the questions that are asked: “Who hath not seen thee…”, “Where are the songs…?”

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness (line 1)
Conspiring with him how to load and bless (line 3)
With a sweet kernel to set budding more (line 8)
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? (line 12)

Apostrophe

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?  (lines 12)
The speaker addresses autumn.

Assonance

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep (line 19)

Metaphor

later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease
Comparison of bees to humans. (Only humans can think.)

Personification

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, 
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; 
Conspiring with him how to load and bless 
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run (lines 1-4)
Comparison of autumn and the sun to persons

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn (line 27)
Comparison of gnats to humans. (Only humans can mourn.)

Hyperbole

To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,

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 cider-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.

Expl: The plants and fruits that were born in spring attain maturity in autumn. The rays of the sun help the fruit ripen. The poet imagines that autumn and the sun act together to supply the vines with grapes.

• “Until ten…clammy cells.”

Expl: In autumn, when the late flowers are still in bloom, the bees go on collecting honey in spite of the fact that during summer they had collected enough honey. They mistake autumn for summer and think that summer will never come while their cells are overflowing with honey.

• How does the poet personify autumn in the poem?

Expl: Keats here presents autumn in its four striking aspects of the seasonal activities. First, autumn is seen as the harvester, seated carelessly on the granary floor with the gentle breeze playing with her hair. Secondly, autumn is personified as a tired reaper who falls asleep, drugged by the fragrance of poppy. Thirdly, autumn is imagined as a gleaner on her way home across a brook with a load of corn on her head. Fourthly, autumn is seen as a cider-presser who, seated beside a vat, watches the apple-juice oozing out.

·       “Where are the songs of Spring?”

Expl: In the final stanza of the poem, the poet reaches the understanding that with the attainment of maturity of everything in nature, the resourcefulness in nature is on the verge of giving way to bareness and scarcity of winter. So nature is visibly taking the shape in that direction. This prompts the poet to mourn, comparing the vitality and vibrancy of spring with those of autumn.

·       “…barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day/And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue…”

Expl: The declining autumnal sun casts its glow on the clouds, which take a rosy flavour. When this glow of the setting sun is cast on the bare fields with stumps, everything looks rosy.

·       “…thou hast thy music too…”? What constitutes the music of autumn?

Expl: In the final stanza of the poem, the poet reaches the understanding that with the attainment of maturity of everything in nature, the resourcefulness in nature is on the verge of giving way to bareness and scarcity of winter. However, he is also aware that autumn has its beauty and music. The numerous sounds produced by the gnats, swallows, lambs, crickets and Robin Red Breast collectively produce the autumnal symphony.

·       What characterises the music of autumn? Why does the autumnal music bear a melancholic overtone?

Expl: In the final stanza of the poem, the poet reaches the understanding that with the attainment of maturity of everything in nature, the resourcefulness in nature is on the verge of giving way to bareness and scarcity of winter. The insects and animals instinctively understand this, and that is why the sounds made by them are marked by apprehension and sadness.

A.    Use of natural images

B.     a shift from the tactile sense to that of sight and then of sound

C.    Autumnal images

D.    Romantic images

A.    Romantic

B.     Classical

C.     Archetypal

D.    Sensuous

A.     Harvester, reaper, gleaner and cider-presser

A.     four striking aspects of the seasonal activities

A.     trees and plants that produce edible nuts

B.     A kind of black deer

C.    A kind of shrub flower producing honey

A.     Infection of sweat producing eastern diseases for the westerners to distant eastern places running for more profit

B.     The journey of the western people in the east

C.    The greed of the western people in the colonised countries

D.    Introduction of new diseases in England

A.     An archetype

B.     A metaphor

C.    A journey

D.    A dream

A.     Emphasis

B.     Alliteration

C.    Speed

D.    Modulation

A.     Ubi sunt

B.     Rondo

C.    Interrogation

D.     Ubi hunt

A.     An alcoholic beverage

B.     A tree

C.    A kind of wood

D.    An instument

A.     A kind of willow trees

B.     Shallow places of the river

C.    Mild waves of the river

D.    A kind of river flowers

A.    King Lear

B.     The Fool

C.     Edgar

D.    Cordelia

A.     small gnats, full-grown lambs, hedge-crickets, the red-breast, swallows

B.     small gnats, full-grown lambs, hedge-crickets, the red-breast, nightingale

C.    Bees, full-grown lambs, hedge-crickets, the red-breast, nightingale

D.    Bees, full-grown lambs, hedge-hogs, the red-breast, nightingale

A.    Fertility cult

B.     The myth of Adonis

C.    The myth of Hyperion

D.    Death cult