To Autumn by John Keats (1820): an ode to autumn as it ripens, harvests and fades, written after a September walk in 1819, and how Keats moves through the season and through one day across three stanzas.
Key quotations and how to analyse them, and the poems in the collection it compares well with, and on which themes.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness', 'Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun', 'Conspiring with him how to load and bless', 'And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core', 'Until they think warm days will never cease', 'Thee sitting careless on a granary floor', 'Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours', 'Where are the songs of Spring? Aye, where are they?', 'While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day', 'And gathering swallows twitter in the skies'.
Form and structure: an ode in three eleven-line stanzas that move from ripening to harvest to the season's end, and from morning to afternoon to dusk, with autumn addressed as 'thou' and the senses moving from touch to sight to sound.
Language: autumn personified as a friend, a worker and a gleaner, lists and verbs of swelling and filling, rhetorical questions, and the final stanza's sounds of evening.
Context: Keats's walk near Winchester on 19 September 1819 and his letter about the warm-looking stubble fields, the last of his 1819 odes, his money troubles and his death from tuberculosis in Rome in 1821, aged 25, and readings of the poem as a meditation on death.
Compares well with: Where the Picnic was (seasons, time and loss), Adlestrop (a still, rich moment in nature and its birdsong), Nothing's Changed (time passing and what changes) and Home Thoughts from Abroad (the senses and the English countryside).
