Page 330 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

Unit 28: John Keats: Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale and Ode to Autumn

incessantly working and their honeycombs are overflowing since summer. Notes
In the second stanza, there is an evident personification. The poet starts asking a rhetoric question
(line 12) to autumn which now is not only a woman but a gleaner. However, this woman is apparently
resting in a granary or in the landscape:

‘Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies…’
As she is not working with her hook, some flowers, that were going to be cut, remain untouchable
(lines 17 and 18). Also we can see an image of her hair gently moving. The stanza ends with autumn
patiently watching the ‘last oozings’ of cider.
The third stanza continues again with rhetoric questions. In the first one Keats asks the woman
where the sounds of the spring are. And the second one is just a repetition of the same question.
However, the poet tells autumn that she has her own sounds, although some of them are sad:
‘Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn’
On the contrary, the ‘full-grown lambs’ bleat loudly, the crickets sing, a red-breast whistles, and
swallows warble in the sky. Keats also describes a day that is dying, ending, and, as a consequence,
is getting rose (lines 25 and 26). The last lines of this stanza consist of a combination of the autumn
sounds, of the animal sounds (lines from 30 to 33) as I said before few lines above.

Self Assessment

Multiple Choice Questions:
11. He devoted his free time to studying work such as Robert Burton’s ...... to further his own
ideas.
(a) Aristotle (b) The Anatomy of Melancholy
(c) Medicine (d) Major depressive disorder
12. His...... lacks hiatus and there is only a single instance medical inversion of an accent within
the poem.
(a) Syntax (b) Grammar
(c) Morphology (d) Generative grammar
13. To Autumn is a poem written by English Romantic poet ...... .
(a) George Gordon Byron (b) Romantic poetry
(c) Percy Bysshe Shelley (d) John Keats
14. The ...... follows a pattern of starting with a Shakespearian ABAB pattern which is followed
by CDEDCCE rhyme scheme.
(a) English poetry (b) French poetry
(c) Poetry (d) Rhyme
15. The poem also defends art’s role in helping society in a manner similar to Keats’s ...... and
ode to Psyche.
(a) Ode on a Grecian Urn (b) Ode to Nightingale
(c) Ode on Indolence (d) John Keats
John Keats was simply describing the main characteristics of autumn, and the human and animal
activities related to it, a deeper reading could suggest that Keats talks about the process of life.
Autumn symbolises maturity in human and animal lives. Some instances of this are the ‘full-grown
lambs’, the sorrow of the gnats, the wind that lives and dies, and the day that is dying and getting
dark. As all we know, the next season is winter, a part of the year that represents aging and death,

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