Page 329 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes 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

28.3.2 Summary

Keats’s speaker opens his first stanza by addressing Autumn, describing its abundance and its intimacy
with the sun, with whom Autumn ripens fruits and causes the late flowers to bloom. In the second
stanza, the speaker describes the figure of Autumn as a female goddess, often seen sitting on the
granary floor, her hair “soft-lifted” by the wind, and often seen sleeping in the fields or watching a
cider-press squeezing the juice from apples. In the third stanza, the speaker tells Autumn not to
wonder where the songs of spring have gone, but instead to listen to her own music. At twilight, the
“small gnats” hum among the “the river sallows,” or willow trees, lifted and dropped by the wind,
and “full-grown lambs” bleat from the hills, crickets sing, robins whistle from the garden, and swallows,
gathering for their coming migration, sing from the skies.

28.3.3 Form
Like the “Ode on Melancholy,” “To Autumn” is written in a three-stanza structure with a variable
rhyme scheme. Each stanza is eleven lines long (as opposed to ten in “Melancholy”, and each is
metered in a relatively precise iambic pentameter. In terms of both thematic organization and rhyme
scheme, each stanza is divided roughly into two parts. In each stanza, the first part is made up of
the first four lines of the stanza, and the second part is made up of the last seven lines. The first part
of each stanza follows an ABAB rhyme scheme, the first line rhyming with the third, and the second
line rhyming with the fourth. The second part of each stanza is longer and varies in rhyme scheme:
The first stanza is arranged CDEDCCE, and the second and third stanzas are arranged CDECDDE.
(Thematically, the first part of each stanza serves to define the subject of the stanza, and the second
part offers room for musing, development, and speculation on that subject; however, this thematic
division is only very general.)

28.3.4 Analysis

In ‘To Autumn’, a superficial reading would suggest that John Keats writes about a typical day of
this season, describing all kind of colourful and detailed images. But before commenting on the
meaning of the poem, I will briefly talk about its structure, its type and its rhyme.
The poem is an ode that contains three stanzas, and each of these has eleven lines. With respect to
its rhyme, ‘To Autumn’ does not follow a perfect pattern. While the first stanza has an
ABABCDEDCCE pattern, the second and the third ones have an ABABCDECDDE pattern. However,
it is important to say that a poetic license appears in the third stanza. The word ‘wind’ (line 15) is
pronounced [waind] to rhyme with ‘find’.
With regard to the meaning of the poem, as I said above, the author makes an intense description of
autumn at least at first sight. The first stanza begins showing this season as misty and fruitful,
which, with the help of a ‘maturing sun’, ripens the fruit of the vines. Next, we can see clearly a
hyperbole. Keats writes that a tree has so many apples that it bends (line 5), while the gourds swell
and the hazel shells plumps. Finally, Keats suggests that the bees have a large amount of flowers.
And these flowers did not bud in summer but now, in autumn. As a consequence, the bees are

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