ODE TO AUTUMN – JOHN KEATS

ODE TO AUTUMN – JOHN KEATS

·         “To Autumn” was composed on 19 September 1819 and published in 1820 in a volume of Keats’s poetry that included Lamia and The Eve of Saint Agnes.

·         It is the final work in a group of poems known as Keats’s “1819 odes”.

·         Although he had little time throughout 1819, he was suffering from a multitude of financial troubles throughout the year, including concerns over his brother, George, who, after emigrating to America, was badly in need of money. Despite these distractions, on 19 September 1819 he found time to compose “To Autumn”.

·         The work marks the end of his poetic career.

·         Keats’s declining health and personal responsibilities also raised obstacles to his continuing poetic efforts.

·         On 19 September 1819, keats walked near Winchester along the river Itchen.

·         In a letter to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds written on 21 September, keats described the impression the scene had made upon him and its influence on the composition of “To Autumn”.

·         The poet knew in September that he would have to finally abandon Hyperion. Thus in the letter that he wrote to Reynolds, keats also included a note saying that he abandoned his long poem.

·         Keats did not send “To Autumn” to Reynolds, but did include the poem within a letter to Richard Woodhouse, keats’s publisher and friend, and dated it on the same day.

·         A little over a year following the publication of “To Autumn”, keats died in Rome.

·         Harold Bloom, in 1961, described “To Autumn” as “the most prefect shorter poem in the English language”.

·         The poem has three eleven line stanzas which describe a progression through the season, from the late maturation of the crops to the harvest and to the last days of autumn when winter is nearing.

·         It is the season of the mist and in this season fruits are ripened on the collaboration with the sun.

·         Autumn is a close friend of the sun.

·         Autumn loads the vines with grapes, apples with juice, flowers with honey, hazel-shells with mellow.

·         Autumn has been personified and compared to women farmer sitting carefree on the granary floor; there blows a gentle breeze and the hairs of the farmer are fluttering.

·         Autumn is personified as winnower, gleaner and cider-presser.

·         Keats feels the absence of the songs of spring. He overcomes this by listening autumnal music.

·         The sound of gnats, lamb’s sound, chirping of grasshoppers and twittering of Swallows are autumn’s music.

·         The poet advises autumn not to be jealous of spring.

·         He describes in his three stanzas, three different aspects of the season: its fruitfulness, its labour and its ultimate decline.

·         Through the stanzas there is a progression from early autumn to mid autumn and then to the heralding of winter.

·         Parallel to this, the poem depicts the day turning from morning to afternoon and into dusk. These progressions are joined with a shift from the tactile sense to that of sight and then of sound, creating a three-part symmetry which is missing in Keats’s other odes.

·         It is written in iambic pentameter with five stressed syllable to a line, each usually preceded by an unstressed syllable.

·         Keats varies this form by the employment of Augustan inversion, sometimes using a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable at the beginning of a line, including the first: “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”.

·         The rhyme of each stanza with ABAB pattern which followed by rhyme scheme of CDEDCCE in the first verse and CDECDDE in the second and third stanzas. In each case, there is a couplet before the final line.

·         Keats calls the urn a beautiful piece of Greek art.

·         “Thou still unravished bride of quietness”- opening line of thepoem.

·         “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter”, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty- that is all”, “when old age shall this generation waste Thou short remain in midst of otherwise” – most famous lines of the poem.

·         Keats says that the urn is a friend to man.

·         The theme of maturity, the ripeness is of all are the themes of the poem.

·         Personification is often used in this poem.