Keats turned autumn into a drowsy farmhand dozing among the poppies
Keats's ode never mourns the end of summer. Autumn conspires with the sun to crack hazelnuts open with sweetness, dozes on a half-cut field drugged by poppy fumes, and watches cider drip for hours. When the speaker asks where spring's songs have gone, he answers that autumn has music of its own.
Each of the three eleven-line stanzas takes a different angle. The first is all abundance. The season is the sun's close friend, plotting with it to weigh down vines along the thatch, bend cottage apple trees, swell gourds and plump hazel shells. It keeps coaxing late flowers for the bees until they believe warm days will last for ever, their honeycombs brimming over.
In the second stanza autumn becomes a person caught in the middle of harvest. Sometimes the figure sits carelessly on a granary floor with hair lifted by the winnowing breeze; sometimes it sleeps in a half-reaped furrow, its hook sparing the next row of grain and tangled flowers. It balances a loaded head like a gleaner crossing a brook, or keeps patient watch over a cider press as the final drops ooze out.
The last stanza turns to sound as the day fades. Barred clouds glow over the stubble fields, and small gnats hover over the willows in a mournful choir, rising and sinking with the wind. Grown lambs bleat from the hills, crickets sing, a robin whistles, and swallows gather overhead, a hint of departure left unspoken.
Such calm is striking given the money troubles that dogged Keats. From 1814 he was owed two bequests held in trust until he turned 21: £800 from his grandfather John Jennings, and a share of £8000 his mother left to her children. He apparently never learned of the £800 and never claimed it. William Walton, the family solicitor, knew about it and had a duty to tell him, yet seems not to have done so, and Keats struggled to keep out of debt for the rest of his life.
Source: Ode to Autumn
