In his short life, John Keats wrote some of the mostbeautiful and

enduring poems in the English

language. Among his greatest achievements is his sequence of sixlyric
odes, written between March and September 1819--astonishingly, when
Keats was only twenty-four years old.Keats's poetic achievement is
made all the moremiraculous by the age at which it ended: He died
barely ayear after finishing the ode "To Autumn," in February1821.

In Hampstead, he fell in love with a young girl namedFanny Brawne.

During this time, Keats began toexperience the extraordinary creative
inspiration thatenabled him to write, at a frantic rate, all his best poems
inthe time before he died. His health and his financesdeclined sharply,
and he set off for Italy in the Summer of1820, hoping the warmer climate
might restore his health.He never returned home. His death brought to
an untimelyend one of the most extraordinary poetic careers of
thenineteenth century-- indeed, one of the most extraordinarypoetic
careers of all time. Keats never achievedwidespread recognition for his
work in his own life (hisbitter request for his tombstone: "Here lies one
whosename was writ on water"), but he was sustained by a deepinner
confidence in his own ability. Shortly before hisdeath, he remarked that
he believed he would be among"the English poets" when he had died.

Keats was one of the most important figures of earlynineteenth-century

Romanticism, a movement thatespoused the sanctity of emotion and
imagination, andprivileged the beauty of the natural world. Many of
theideas and themes evident in Keats's great odes arequintessentially
Romantic concerns: the beauty of nature,the relation between
imagination and creativity, theresponse of the passions to beauty and
suffering, and thetransience of human life in time. The sumptuous
sensorylanguage in which the odes are written, their idealisticconcern for
beauty and truth, and their expressive agonyin the face of death are all
Romantic preoccupations--though at the same time, they are all uniquely
Keats's.

Taken together, the odes do not exactly tell a story--thereis no unifying

"plot" and no recurring characters--and thereis little evidence that Keats
intended them to standtogether as a single work of art. Nevertheless,
theextraordinary number of suggestive interrelations betweenthem is
impossible to ignore. The odes explore anddevelop the same themes,
partake of many of the sameapproaches and images, and, ordered in a
certain way,exhibit an unmistakable psychological development. Thisis
not to say that the poems do not stand on their own--they do,
magnificently; one of the greatest felicities of thesequence is that it can
be entered at any point, viewedwholly or partially from any perspective,
and still provesmoving and rewarding to read. There has been a
greatdeal of critical debate over how to treat the voices thatspeak the
poems--are they meant to be read as though a
single person speaks them all, or did Keats invent adifferent persona for
each ode?

There is no right answer to the question, but it is possiblethat the

question itself is wrong: The consciousness atwork in each of the odes is
unmistakably Keats's own. Ofcourse, the poems are not explicitly
autobiographical (it isunlikely that all the events really happened to
Keats), butgiven their sincerity and their shared frame of
thematicreference, there is no reason to think that they do notcome from
the same part of Keats's mind--that is to say,that they are not all told by
the same part of Keats'sreflected self. In that sense, there is no harm in
treatingthe odes a sequence of utterances told in the same voice.The
psychological progress from "Ode on Indolence" to"To Autumn" is
intimately personal, and a great deal ofthat intimacy is lost if one begins
to imagine that the odesare spoken by a sequence of fictional
characters. Whenyou think of "the speaker" of these poems, think of
Keats,as he would have imagined himself while writing them. Asyou

trace the speaker's trajectory from the numb drowsiness of"Indolence" to

the quiet wisdom of "Autumn," try to hearthe voice develop and change
under the guidance ofKeats's extraordinary language.

ODE TO AUTUMN
SUMMARY
Keats's speaker opens his first stanza by addressing Autumn, describing
its abundance and its intimacy with thesun, with whom Autumn ripens
fruits and causes the lateflowers to bloom. In the second stanza, the
speakerdescribes the figure of Autumn as a female goddess, oftenseen
sitting on the granary floor, her hair "soft-lifted" bythe wind, and often
seen sleeping in the fields or watchinga cider-press squeezing the juice
from apples. In the thirdstanza, the speaker tells Autumn not to wonder
where thesongs of spring have gone, but instead to listen to her
ownmusic. At twilight, the "small gnats" hum above theshallows of the
river, lifted and dropped by the wind, and"full-grown lambs" bleat from
the hills, crickets sing, robinswhistle from the garden, and swallows,
gathering for theircoming migration, sing from the skies.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS
In both its form and descriptive surface, "To Autumn" isone of the
simplest of Keats's odes. There is nothingconfusing or complex in
Keats's paean to the season ofautumn, with its fruitfulness, its flowers,
and the song of its
swallows gathering for migration. The extraordinaryachievement of this
poem lies in its ability to suggest,explore, and develop a rich abundance
of themes withoutever ruffling its calm, gentle, and lovely description
ofautumn. Where "Ode on Melancholy" presents itself as astrenuous
heroic quest, "To Autumn" is concerned with themuch quieter activity of
daily observation and appreciation.In this quietude, the gathered themes
of the precedingodes find their fullest and most beautiful expression.

"To Autumn" takes up where the other odes leave off. Likethe others, it
shows Keats's speaker paying homage to aparticular goddess--in this
case, the deified season
of Autumn. The selection of this season implicitly takes upthe other odes'
themes of temporality, mortality, andchange: Autumn in Keats's ode is a
time of warmth andplenty, but it is perched on the brink of winter's
desolation,as the bees enjoy "later flowers," the harvest is gatheredfrom
the fields, the lambs of spring are now "full grown,"and, in the final line of
the poem, the swallows gather fortheir winter migration. The understated
sense of inevitableloss in that final line makes it one of the most
movingmoments in all of poetry; it can be read as a
simple,uncomplaining summation of the entire human condition.

Despite the coming chill of winter, the late warmth ofautumn provides
Keats's speaker with ample beauty tocelebrate: the cottage and its
surroundings in the firststanza, the agrarian haunts of the goddess in the
second,and the locales of natural creatures in the third. Keats'sspeaker
is able to experience these beauties in a sincere
and meaningful way because of the lessons he haslearned in the
previous odes: He is no longer indolent, nolonger committed to the
isolated imagination (as in"Psyche"), no longer attempting to escape the
pain of theworld through ecstatic rapture (as in "Nightingale"), nolonger
frustrated by the attempt to eternalize mortal beautyor subject eternal
beauty to time (as in "Urn"), and nolonger able to frame the connection
of pleasure and thesorrow of loss only as an imaginary heroic quest (as
in"Melancholy").

In "To Autumn," the speaker's experience of beauty refersback to earlier

odes (the swallows recall the nightingale;the fruit recalls joy's grape; the
goddess drowsing amongthe poppies recalls Psyche and Cupid lying in
the grass),but it also recalls a wealth of earlier poems. Mostimportantly,
the image of Autumn winnowing andharvesting (in a sequence of odes
often explicitly aboutcreativity) recalls an earlier Keats poem in which
theactivity of harvesting is an explicit metaphor for artisticcreation. In his
sonnet "When I have fears that I maycease to be," Keats makes this
connection directly:

“When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,

Before high-piled books, in charactry,

Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain...”

In this poem, the act of creation is pictured as a kind ofself-harvesting;

the pen harvests the fields of the brain,and books are filled with the
resulting "grain." In
"To Autumn," the metaphor is developed further; the sense ofcoming
loss that permeates the poem confronts thesorrow underlying the
season's creativity. When Autumn'sharvest is over, the fields will be
bare, the swaths withtheir "twined flowers" cut down, the cider-press dry,
theskies empty. But the connection of this harvesting to theseasonal
cycle softens the edge of the tragedy. In time,spring will come again, the
fields will grow again, and thebirdsong will return. As the speaker knew
in "Melancholy,"abundance and loss, joy and sorrow, song and silence
areas intimately connected as the twined flowers in the fields.What
makes "To Autumn" beautiful is that it brings anengagement with that
connection out of the realm ofmythology and fantasy and into the
everyday world. Thedevelopment the speaker so strongly resisted
in"Indolence" is at last complete: He has learned that anacceptance of
mortality is not destructive to anappreciation of beauty and has gleaned
wisdom byaccepting the passage of time.

"To Autumn" is written in a three-stanza structure with avariable rhyme

scheme. Each stanza is eleven lines long(as opposed to ten in
"Melancholy", and each is meteredin a relatively precise iambic
pentameter. In terms of boththematic organization and rhyme scheme,
each stanza isdivided roughly into two parts. In each stanza, the
first partis made up of the first four lines of the stanza, and the
second part is made up of the last seven lines. The firstpart of each
stanza follows an ABAB rhyme scheme, thefirst line rhyming with the
third, and the second linerhyming with the fourth. The second part of
each stanza islonger and varies in rhyme scheme: The first stanza
isarranged CDEDCCE, and the second and third stanzasare arranged
CDECDDE. (Thematically, the first part ofeach stanza serves to define
the subject of the stanza,and the second part offers room for musing,
development,and speculation on that subject; however, this
thematicdivision is only very general.)