Keats's To Autumn moves from ripening fruit to a sky full of swallows
Keats's To Autumn travels through a whole season in three stanzas. It starts with fruit swelling on the branch, pauses on a drowsy figure sprawled across a granary floor, and ends at dusk with gnats, lambs, crickets, a robin and gathering swallows. There is no complaint about decline, only close, patient looking.
The first stanza is all abundance. Autumn, the "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness", is imagined as the sun's close friend, plotting together how to load the vines around cottage eaves, bend mossy apple trees and fill every fruit to the core. Gourds swell, hazelnuts plump up, and late flowers keep budding so that the bees believe warm days will never end, their honeycombs brimming over from summer.
In the second stanza the season becomes a person, glimpsed at work or, more often, not working. Autumn sits careless on a granary floor with hair lifted by the winnowing wind, or lies asleep on a half-harvested furrow, dazed by the scent of poppies, the reaping hook sparing the next row and its tangled flowers. Elsewhere the figure steadies a loaded head while crossing a brook like a gleaner, or watches a cider press drip its last drops, hour after hour.
The third stanza opens with a question, "Where are the songs of Spring?", and answers it by refusing to mourn. Autumn has its own music. Barred clouds glow over a dying day and tint the stubble fields pink; small gnats rise and sink over river willows in a wailing choir; full-grown lambs bleat from the hills, hedge-crickets sing, a robin whistles from a garden, and swallows gather overhead. The ending hints at departure without ever saying so.
The density of sound, taste and texture is typical of a poet whose style has been called heavily loaded with sensualities, especially in his odes. Keats's time was brief. He died of tuberculosis at 25, in 1821, after less than four years in print, and his work met an indifferent reception while he lived. His reputation rose quickly after his death, and by the end of the century he stood in the canon of English literature.
Source: To Autumn
