Page 331 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes in other words, the end of life. However, in my opinion, death does not have a negative connotation
because Keats enjoys and accepts ‘autumn’ or maturity as part of life, though winter is coming.

All of the seasons have found poets to sing their praises, or at least their significance.
But what is special to Keat’s speaker about Autumn?

28.3.5 Themes

In both its form and descriptive surface, “To Autumn” is one of the simplest of Keats’s odes. There
is nothing confusing or complex in Keats’s paean to the season of autumn, with its fruitfulness, its
flowers, and the song of its swallows gathering for migration. The extraordinary achievement of
this poem lies in its ability to suggest, explore, and develop a rich abundance of themes without
ever ruffling its calm, gentle, and lovely description of autumn. Where “Ode on Melancholy” presents
itself as a strenuous heroic quest, “To Autumn” is concerned with the much quieter activity of daily
observation and appreciation. In this quietude, the gathered themes of the preceding odes find
their fullest and most beautiful expression.
“To Autumn” takes up where the other odes leave off. Like the others, it shows Keats’s speaker
paying homage to a particular goddess—in this case, the deified season of Autumn. The selection of
this season implicitly takes up the other odes’ themes of temporality, mortality, and change: Autumn
in Keats’s ode is a time of warmth and plenty, but it is perched on the brink of winter’s desolation,
as the bees enjoy “later flowers,” the harvest is gathered from the fields, the lambs of spring are now
“full grown,” and, in the final line of the poem, the swallows gather for their winter migration. The
understated sense of inevitable loss in that final line makes it one of the most moving moments in
all of poetry; it can be read as a simple, uncomplaining summation of the entire human condition.
Despite the coming chill of winter, the late warmth of autumn provides Keats’s speaker with ample
beauty to celebrate: the cottage and its surroundings in the first stanza, the agrarian haunts of the
goddess in the second, and the locales of natural creatures in the third. Keats’s speaker is able to
experience these beauties in a sincere and meaningful way because of the lessons he has learned in
the previous odes: He is no longer indolent, no longer committed to the isolated imagination (as in
“Psyche”), no longer attempting to escape the pain of the world through ecstatic rapture (as in
“Nightingale”), no longer frustrated by the attempt to eternalize mortal beauty or subject eternal
beauty to time (as in “Urn”), and no longer able to frame the connection of pleasure and the sorrow
of loss only as an imaginary heroic quest (as in “Melancholy”).
In “To Autumn,” the speaker’s experience of beauty refers back to earlier odes (the swallows recall
the nightingale; the fruit recalls joy’s grape; the goddess drowsing among the poppies recalls Psyche
and Cupid lying in the grass), but it also recalls a wealth of earlier poems. Most importantly, the
image of Autumn winnowing and harvesting (in a sequence of odes often explicitly about creativity)
recalls an earlier Keats poem in which the activity of harvesting is an explicit metaphor for artistic
creation. In his sonnet “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” Keats makes this connection
directly:

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactry,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain...

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