Continuing my inadvertent tradition of posting a famous fall poem every year (see past selections: 2015, 2016), today I’m taking a look at “To Autumn” by the great Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821).
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.
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 Context
“To Autumn” is the last of the great odes that Keats wrote in 1819. It was composed in Winchester on September 19 and published the following year in a collection titled Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems.
Here’s what Keats had to say about the inspiration for the poem in a letter to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds (1794-1852): “How beautiful the season is now – How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it … I never lik’d the stubbled fields as much as now – Aye, better than the chilly green of spring. Somehow the stubble plain looks warm – in the same way as some pictures look warm – this struck me so much in my Sunday’s walk that I composed upon it” (From Houghton, Richard (Ed.) (2008). The Life and Letters of John Keats, quoted by Wikipedia).
The Manuscript(s)
On her site EnglishHistory.net Marilee Hanson has posted Keats’ handwritten manuscript of “To Autumn.”
Another copy of the poem, also handwritten by Keats, can be found in a book held by the British Library.
