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‘ To Autumn ’
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 .
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‘ To Autumn ’ has been variously interpreted as , inter alia , a meditation on death , an allegory of artistic creation , a response to the Peterloo Massacre ( which took place that year ), an expression of nationalist sentiment , a reflection on the weather and climate change , or a farewell to the artistic life – and indeed life altogether . A further interpretation is surely possible . Here was Keats , in Winchester , the city of the Warton brothers ; passing daily Joseph ’ s monument , and the College , nursery of poets and scene of a Peterloo-style demonstration in 1808 , before proceeding alongside a river beloved by Bowles . Surely Keats noted the footsteps ? |
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John Keats , by William Hilton , after Joseph Severn ;
© National Portrait Gallery , London .
To John Hamilton Reynolds he wrote , on 22 September 1819 , with more detail :
“ How beautiful the season is now – how fine the air . A temperate sharpness about it … I never liked stubble fields so much as now … Somehow a stubble field 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 ”.
The resulting poem is ‘ To Autumn ’.
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Keats Listening to a Nightingale on Hampstead Heath , Joseph Severn ; photo credit : City of London Corporation , licensed under CC BY-NC-ND . |
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 .
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Keats ’ s poem is distinctive . Its form , the ode , is one of those detested by Johnson – ‘ Ode and Elegy and Sonnet ’. The diction too is Wartonian , which is to say non-Miltonic . “ Paradise Lost is a corruption of our language ”, Keats was to argue . “ Chatterton is the purest writer in the English language ”, he continued , “ Tis genuine English idiom in English words . … I somehow always associate Chatterton with Autumn ”. Thatch , moss , kernel , clammy , reap , swathe , brook , hook , sallows , bleat , croft , swallows . These are indubitably sturdy old words which Keats would have associated with Chatterton ’ s English .
All of Bowles ’ s themes and images reproduce themselves in ‘ To Autumn ’: love of nature and the picturesque ; an emphasis on its mildly melancholy aspects ; a fondness for solitude and pensive contemplation ; and a ternary timescale of past , present , future , accompanied by intrinsic recognition of interconnectedness . But the school of Warton and Bowles also involves topography , Gothic , churches , and ruins ; an autobiographical narrator presence ; and an
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