TO AUTUMN

I

SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
        Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
    Conspiring with him how to load and bless
        With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
    To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
        And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
            To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
    With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
        And still more, later flowers for the bees,
        Until they think warm days will never cease,
            For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

II

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
        Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
    Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
        Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
    Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
        Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
            Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
    And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
        Steady thy laden head across a brook;
        Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
            Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

III

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
        Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
    While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
        And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
    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.

http://www.bartleby.com/106/255.html

ANALYSIS AND COMMENT of the poem

STRUCTURE

This poem is writen in a three-stanza-structure (stanza: is a unit within a larger poem. It consists of a grouping of lines, set off by a space, that usually has a set pattern of meter and rhyme). Here each stanza is eleven lines long.

RHYME

The first part of each stanza follows the rhyme scheme ABAB (the first line rhyming with the third line, and the second line rhyming with the fourth line). The second part of each stanza is not the same. In the first stanza the rhyme scheme is CDEDCCE. And in the second and third stanza the rhyme scheme is CDECDDE, so the second and third stanza keep the same rhyme scheme.

COMMENT

Firstly, the first impression that this poem has caused me is that for John Keats, the autumn is the perfect season.

John Keats states the natural process of the autumn, or what is the same, the course from the beginning of the autumn to the end of this season: it’s the process of changing summer to winter. We can observe throughout the poem that there are lots of changes that indicate this change of season.

For to show the wonderful things that take place in this season, John Keats uses personification because is the only way for to give life to the autumn such as it was a person.

John Keats wants to inmerse us through the feelings and sounds of the autumn. All these emotions inmerse the reader in his world, like if the reader was him, John Keats.

So, as conclusion, the poem is placed in the real worls because what John Keats relates in the poem is not a dream or an imaginary vision, but what Keats tells us is the course of this season, the autumn, in the real world.

Now, what I have done is to analyse each stanza of the poem ‘The Autumn’ to see of a detailed way what John Keats states in each one.

STANZA I

We can observe in this stanza that is the ongoing ripening. That is because the autumn is the season of the grape harvest, and we can see it on lines 3-4 (“…how to load and bless with fruit the vines…”). On lines 8-9 we see that flowers are blooming. The last two lines show that summer is what does that bees have been gathering honey since it and their cells are clammed (…”clammy cells”). Generally, apart of the ongoing ripening we see in this stanza images of the autumn: “maturing sun”, “ fruit the vines”, “to bend with apples”, “later flowers for the bees”…

STANZA II

Basically, this stanza show us that the end of the autumn is near. We see this because there is no action, no movement. We identify the no movement with some words/expressions of the stanza: “on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep” (line 5 of the stanza), “the last oozings” (last line), “winnowing wind” (line 4), “patient look” (line 10). In this stanza is where John Keats uses personification: the autumn as a person.

STANZA III

This stanza represents the end of the day, the end of the autumn,in a word: dying. The word spring is the start of a season, a season that is a new life, a rebirth. Why? Because the season before spring is winter, and this season is really gloomy, dark, is like death, therefore we can say that spring is a rebirth of life. But the most important here, is the sadness of the stanza: “barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day” (line 3), “wailful chair” (line 5), “gnats mourn” (line 5), “treble soft” (line 9).

Biography

Based on:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Autumn

http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/keats/section6.rhtml