Ode to Autumn........

Ode to Autumn ...



Intro...


John Keats "Ode To Autumn"


The Composition of "To Autumn"

Keats wrote "To Autumn" after enjoying a lovely autumn day; he described his experience in a letter to his friend Reynolds:


"How beautiful the season is now--How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather--Dian skies--I never lik'd stubble fields so much as now--Aye better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow a stubble plain looks warm--in the same way that some pictures look warm--this struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it."



General Comments


This ode is a favorite with critics and poetry lovers alike. Harold Bloom calls it "one of the subtlest and most beautiful of all Keats's odes, and as close to perfect as any shorter poem in the English Language." Allen Tate agrees that it "is a very nearly perfect piece of style"; however, he goes on to comment, "it has little to say."

This ode deals with the some of the concerns presented in his other odes, but there are also significant differences. (1) There is no visionary dreamer or attempted flight from reality in this poem; in fact, there is no narrative voice or persona at all. The poem is grounded in the real world; the vivid, concrete imagery immerses the reader in the sights, feel, and sounds of autumn and its progression. (2) With its depiction of the progression of autumn, the poem is an unqualified celebration of process. (I am using the words process, flux, and change interchangeably in my discussion of Keats's poems.) Keats totally accepts the natural world, with its mixture of ripening, fulfillment, dying, and death. Each stanza integrates suggestions of its opposite or its predecessors, for they are inherent in autumn also.


Because this ode describes the process of fruition and decay in autumn, keep in mind the passage of time as you read it.




Summery of the ode...

Keats is a great poet of Romantic period. In his poem” Ode to Autumn” he describes the special qualities of the season like abundant fruitfulness, different activities of the farmers and music of the autumn season.

               The Poet says that the autumn season is full of mists and mellow fruitfulness.  It is a close friend of the Sun.  It conspires with the Sun to bless and load the trees with fruits. It fills the fruits with juice. The grapes, the apples, the gourds and hazel nuts are perfectly ripened in this season. It is also season for later flowers.  They attract bees.  The bees think that it is still summer because they gather much honey from the later flowers.  Their hives are over flowed with honey.

                The autumn is personified as a busy farmer.  He is seen sitting carelessly on the granary floor and whose hair is lifted by the winnowing wind.  Next he is seen as a reaper overcome by the strong smell of poppies and dozes in the field.  He is also seen as a gleaner carrying sheaves of corn on his head and crossing a brook carefully.  Finally he is seen sitting beside a cider-press and watching patiently the oozing out of the juice.

                 The autumn season has its own music.  The small gnats make sorrowful sounds.  The full-grown lambs bleat from distant hills.  The hedge crickets sing and the red breast whistles from the garden.  The swallows twitter in the Sky, as they are ready for migration. Thus the poet describes the features of the autumn season.

Themes
Season of Fruition


.......Autumn is the season of fruition. It yields the bounty that sustains life—grapes, apples, pumpkins, squash, nuts, and honey—and fills the granaries with the field harvest. Then, to the mournful sound of gnats riding the wind, the sun sets on the season and “gathering swallows twitter in the skies.”
.......People also bear fruit—children, poems, scientific and technological advancements. They teach, build, heal, entertain, and advocate for change; they give time and money.  And then they fall asleep on a furrow as “barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day  / And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue.”


Contentment


.......Because autumn is a season of fulfillment, when the fruits of labor abound, it is also a season of contentment. Personified autumn reflects this contentment when it sits, careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies (lines 14-16)

End Rhyme

.......The end rhyme of the first stanza is abab cde dcce. The end rhyme of the second and third stanzas is abab cde cdde.


Internal Rhyme


.......The poem also contains internal rhyme. Here are examples.


To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells (line 7)
Until they think warm days will never cease (line 10)
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? (line 12)
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind (line 15)
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep (line 16)
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook (line 17)
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep (line 19)

Meter

.......The meter of the poem is iambic pentameter, as the second line demonstrates.