Ode to Autumn, by John Keats
As the Light Wind Lives or Dies
Underlying this Ode is not only a celebration of the life of Autumn, but also an acceptance that ‘the river sallows’ and the swallows which ‘twitter in the skies’ at dusk will outlast our consciousness, which in this moment may be lively and bright, though some day will surely darken and dwindle.
Hello all, I thought I would provide a few thoughts on John Keats’ famous Ode to Autumn (1819). This is a poem which, for all that literary critics seem to disagree about, has been astoundingly well received, with ‘each generation [having] found it one of the most nearly perfect poems in English.’ (Bate, 156). After providing the Ode itself for you to read, I will then offer a brief analysis, exploring the process of its composition, and what I think are some interesting themes and concepts to take away from this reading.
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.
The Ode was written in September of 1819, during ‘The Living Year’ of Keats, ‘the greatest year of living growth of any English poet’ (Gittings, 511), in which he wrote nearly all of his great Odes. I think Ode To Autumn is wonderfully summarised by Keats scholar, Robert Gittings, who described the poem as ‘a set of warm pictures’, retaining an essentially ‘pictorial quality’ (Gittings, 508). The feel, too, is distinct among Keats’ body of work, differing from the rest of the ‘May Odes’ (To a Nightingale, On a Grecian Urn, ect.) in notable ways. He goes on to explain that Nightingale and Grecian Urn were ‘written in […] a fever, a beating at the bars of life’, full of searching, curiosity, and poetical experimentation, while To Autumn is remarkably simple: ‘a poem of acceptance […] written in the style of acceptance, in which the poet has lost himself in the poem.’ (508). Lost himself in the poem. Quite right. Like the cycles of nature, these lines seem natural, easeful, with ‘no striving, either in thought or in technique’ weighing down the poem’s purpose, which is simply to luxuriate in the sensations and tactility of the season (509). In a letter to his brother, George, written on Monday, 20th September, Keats outlined a fundamental principle behind poetry which I think runs through the above stanzas quite vividly: ‘The great beauty of Poetry is that it makes everything [and] every place interesting’ (Quoted by Gittings, 509). The multitude of images which comprise To Autumn certainly rise to this principle.
Both Walter Jackson Bate and Robert Gittings quote the following passage from Keats’ September 1819 letter to the George Keatses, when providing some essential context for the poem’s composition:
How beautiful the season is now—how fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it . . . I never liked stubble fields so much as now—aye, better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow a stubble plain looks warm—this struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it. (Quoted by Bate, 156).
The wonderful lightness of this entry conveys well the ability of Keats to transfer vivid mental states and experience into his poetry. The warmth of the surrounding fields, and the ‘fine air’ of the ‘beautiful’ season, are recalled in the ‘warm days’ of stanza I. The opening lines are concerned especially with themes of ripeness, fertility and fullness, and begin with a kind of invocation to this nature spirit, Autumn. Keats addresses, in a mode which is simultaneously careless and caring, the ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’, and does so with a glad heart. Autumn itself is personified, and elsewhere in stanza II she is described in more obviously anthropomorphic ways, as one who sits ‘careless on a granary floor’, or one who lazes about in a field, ‘Drows’d with the fume of poppies’—one among many intoxicating images! One should also note that the poem is set just as the season is fading away, hence the images of an idle Autumn laying about, watching ‘the last oozing’ of a ‘cyder-press’, or ‘sound asleep’ in a field ‘half-reap’d’, as if tired and worn out near the end of a great effort. Yes, part of the sense of calm which permeates this Ode is in its subtle themes of death and transition, exploring that familiar time in the late afternoon and evening where earth’s cycles are made evident, and we notice that the world, and our lives, are winding down. By stanza III, ‘barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day’, and ‘wailful’ gnats mourn the passing of Autumn, amounting to a kind of ‘funeral dirge for the dying year’, and also of the dying day (Bate, 158).
I agree with Bate when he notes that the Ode To Autumn, in its flurry of calm, almost mournful images, may have been anticipated in his earlier sonnet, After Dark Vapours Have Oppressed Our Plains (1817):
The calmest thoughts came round us; as of leaves Budding — fruit ripening in stillness — Autumn suns Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves — Sweet Sappho's cheek — a smiling infant's breath — The gradual sand that through an hour-glass runs — A woodland rivulet — a Poet's death.
Ripening fruit, Autumn suns, and the gradual darkening of the final lines, I think are interesting parallels in his body of work. While in To Autumn, it is the season and the day which fade and undergo transition, in After Dark Vapours he seems to have been more occupied with mortality and the transience of human life. Along with this sense of fading, or winding-down, is also the fullness of harvest and husbandry imagery. Almost every image in the first stanza is packed full to its limit, and as we read, our mind is almost overcome with the sheer richness and abundance on display. The cottage trees are so full that they ‘bend with apples’ (as readers we almost hear the creaking of the branches as they droop under this immense weight). And in stanza III the memorable scene of the ‘full-grown lambs’ bleating loud from the hills; 'the ‘Hedge-crickets’ singing; the red-breast whistling as the ‘gathering swallows twitter in the skies’, all amounts to kind of dizzying whirl of sense and sound. Like so much of Keats’ poetry, it is within the image, scene, and feeling that we find the meaning. This Ode is not at all complicated, and its effect is lasting and permanent precisely because it is a vivid retelling of natural states, contemplation of which has the effect of calling us out of ourselves and into a deeper relation with the world of physical things.
In these images I see anew, with clear eyes what Harold Bloom has called Keats’ ‘heroic priesthood of the visible’; his intimate appreciation of the physical, and his keen sense ‘of an outward world that would survive his perception of it’ (Bloom, 458-459). Underlying this Ode is not only a celebration of the mists and cycles of Autumn, but also a thoroughgoing acceptance that ‘the river sallows […] the soft dying day’, and the swallows which ‘twitter in the skies’ at dusk will outlast our frail consciousness, which in this moment may be lively and bright, though some day will surely darken and dwindle. Like in his early sonnet, After Dark Vapours (1817), ‘The calmest thoughts [which] come round us’ must eventually lead to a contemplation of ‘The gradual sand that through an hour-glass runs’, and with it the final acceptance of ‘a Poet’s death.’
Works cited:
Bate, Jackson Walter. Keats: A Collection of Critical Essays. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1964.
Bloom, Harold. The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Robert Frost. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.
Gittings, Robert. John Keats. London: Penguin Books, 1968.
Love a bit of quality education. Appreciate it.
🩷 I adored this analysis