To Autumn

“To Autumn,” sometimes called “Ode to Autumn,” was written by the English poet John Keats in 1819 and published in 1820. It is his final work in a collection of six poems known as the “1819 Odes” and was his last major poetic work completed before his death in 1821. Keats composed “To Autumn” after an evening countryside walk, where he was moved and astonished by the minute and uncelebrated beauty all around him. Since this would have been around the time his illness began making itself known, Keats may have been looking at the world and the turning seasons through the filter of his own mortality.

The poem is characterized by its rich sensory imagery in celebration of a personified Autumn, which may be represented by a goddess of the harvest. The season is shown in three distinct snapshots, each an 11-line stanza focusing on the beginning, middle, or end of autumn’s cycle. This cycle could be considered an allegory for life, the end of life, or artistic creation. It teaches us to be present within the moment, to accept the passage of time, and to find beauty even in dying things.

Poet Biography

John Keats was an English Romantic-era poet, a contemporary of poets like Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Despite his enduring fame and influence, his poetry was only published for a period of about four years preceding his early death from tuberculosis.

Keats was born in London at the end of the 18th century. While his parents wanted him to study at a prestigious school like Eton or Harrow, they could not afford the tuition and so instead sent Keats to a smaller school in Enfield, which was more open-minded and progressive. There he developed his love for history and classic literature. He left school at 14, after his mother died of tuberculosis, the disease that would take his life just over a decade later. He went on to study medicine and found work as a surgeon’s assistant. In 1816 he received his own apothecary license, but he ultimately decided to put his efforts towards poetry instead.

His first work was published in 1816, a traditional sonnet called “O Solitude.” His first collection, simply titled Poems, was a critical failure but garnered enough interest for Keats to continue in his career. He became enmeshed in an artistic social circle along with other writers of his day including Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, and John Hamilton Reynolds. During this time he published three volumes of poetry, none of which became widely circulated until after his death.

In 1820, Keats began showing more and more signs of his disease, and at the suggestion of his doctor, he moved from London to Rome. There he lived out his final days until he died in the winter of early 1821. The six “Odes” are considered his best and most influential work.

Poem Text

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-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.

Keats, John. “To Autumn.” 1820. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

“To Autumn” opens by personifying and addressing Autumn directly as a season of calm prosperity, one who works intimately with its friend the sun to make the fruit of the season grow. Together Autumn and the sun grow grapes, apples, hazelnuts, and late-blooming flowers. The bees gather nectar from the flowers and think that these early-autumn days will last forever, because there is so much bounty and their hives are full of honey.

Once all the growing is done, Autumn may take a rest in a storage pantry or in the fields, tired out by the sleep-inducing poppies. While Autumn sleeps, the flowers and fruits are spared their harvesting for the moment. Other times, Autumn is more like a farmer who patiently picks up the discarded cuttings from the field and watches the slow process of apple cider being made.

In the last stanza, the poem turns its attention to spring and the lost sights and sounds that come with it. However, the poet consoles autumn by praising its own unique music: humming gnats and whispering willow leaves, the bleating of lambs within their enclosures, crickets singing, and robins whistling, all against a shadowy evening bathed in rosy light. Finally, a flock of swallows gathers together to sing against the autumn sky.