To autumn. Jonh Keats

 

1

 

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.

 

2

 

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.

 

3.

 

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.

 

Extracted from: http://www.bartleby.com/126/47.html

 

 

 

The poem that we are going to analyse is To Autumn, by John Keats, written on 1819. To Autumn,  strucutured in three stanzas, is a poem describing  this season. It’s an ode to autumn. In each stanza the narrator is speaking about this season, the autumn. In the first stanza the speaker is describing the autumn, how it is and its close relationship with the sun (close bosom-friend of the maturing sun). In the second stanza, the narrator describes the autumn as a sort of divinity, who is watching everything it’s happenning, relaxed, half-asleep. And, in the third and last stanza, the spaker tells the Autumn not to think of the songs of Spring, Autumn has to listen its own music, watch what it has.

The poem is three stanza-structured. The three stanzas have eleven verses and all the verses, the thirty-three verses are decasyllabic. The rhyme scheme of each stanza is the same, ABABCDECDDE. All of them have the same strcuture; the first part of the stanza is ABAB, the first verse rhymes with the third and the second with the fourth, and the second part of the stanza, the last seven lines, is organized CDECDDE. The fifth verse rhyne with the eighth, the sixth with the ninth and the tenth and the seventh verse rhymes with the eleventh. The poem is written by a third-person narrator, but he or she is calling the Autmn, he or she is speaking with the Autumn and, because of this, uses the old form of the second person of singular (Thee sitting careless, verse 14; Thy hair soft-lifted, verse 15) and imperative (Think not of them, verse 24).

In the first stanza Keats starts his narration with a short description of the season (Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun, verses 1 and 2), as a summary of the speaker is going to to talk about. The poet  doesn’t describe the Autumn as the season of sadness, where the warm days are the last warm days of the year, because the winter is very close to him. It is not a season of change, it an unique season, as the spring or the summer, with its fruit (To bend with apples the moss’d cottage trees / And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core, verses 4 and 5), his animals (the bees in the later flowers). It is a beautiful season, so beautiful that people may think that the Cold is not coming, that the Hot will always be near (Until they think warm days will never cease / For Summer has o’er brimm’d their dammy cells, verses 10 and 11.

In the second stanza, the narrator speaks to the Autumn directly, telling to the Autumn that it, sometimes, is observing everything it happens. Autumn is, as we said before in the text, a divinity, observing everything, relaxed, in a peaceful way (Thee sitting careless on a granary floor / Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind, verses 14 and 15; Steady thy laden head across a brook / Or by a cyder press, with a patient look, verses 20 and 21). The narrator suggests that the Autumn is not the responsible of what is happening, but a silent observer, sometimes sleepy, but sometimes Autumn is so absorbed in its view that it’s watching for hours.

In the third stanza, the speaker continues speaking to the Autumn, telling it not to remember the beauty of the Spring, the Autumn has its own beauty, too (Where are the songs of Spring? Where are they? / Think not of them, thou hast thy music, too, verses 23 and 24). It has beautiful animal, as the Spring has, such as the choir of small gnats (the wailful choir of small gnats, verse 27), the lambs or the hedge-crickets or the red-breasts (And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn, verse 30; Hedge-crickets sing, verse 31; the red-breast whistles from a garden-croft, verse 32), it has to enjoy all this.

In this ode, Keats treats the Autumn as a season of change but, instead of comparing autumn with season, Keats meakes Autumn not a sad, ugly season, where the leaves fall and everything is brown, but a beautiful season, where the hot, the warm days are dying (Winter is coming), and we have to make profit of those days that now are precious, not to be sad because Hot is ending, we habve to enjoy the last warm days, with their own creatures, more beautiful than Spring’s, but different.