Before I Go: Exploring Keats’s “To Autumn”

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.

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.

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.

Keats wrote this poem on September 19, 1819, at 23 years old. He had buried his brother in December of the prior year and his mother in 1810: both died of tuberculosis, which Keats himself had likely already contracted, although the poet would not know that he was dying until early 1820. Keats would die on February 23, 1821, about 17 months after writing this poem.

I first read “To Autumn” a year ago as part of a craft session in the Writers.com Community, and it has become one of my very favorite poems. It is, of course, exceedingly rich and vivid, and masterful in its use of the English language. But I love it most for what it says, at least to me: for what I come away knowing and feeling about life from reading it. I’ll try to explain that here.

The Missing Item

“To Autumn” has three equal stanzas, with rhyme schemes (ABABCDEDCCE in the first stanza, ABABCDECDDE in the second and third) organized around an odd 11-line structure.

As a way into the poem, before we even look closely at its content, note the formal strangeness of writing a poem to a season—one of four equal units occupying a 12-month span—and structuring that poem in three equal units of 11.

Three seasons are mentioned in the poem: spring in the third stanza, summer in the first, and of course autumn in the title itself. The fourth season, winter, is not. In the poem’s content, and in two elements of its formal construction, one item is missing to complete the set.

Autumn’s Three Seasons

Structuring a seasonal poem in three stanzas does make a different kind of formal sense: if you consider a season as comprising three equal months.

This would give autumn three sub-seasons in itself—the rise of autumn, mid-autumn, and falling autumn—and that, in fact, is exactly what the poem depicts.

The first stanza depicts an explosion of life: autumn’s spring. Lines like “to set budding more, / And still more, later flowers for the bees,” sound like they’re written about spring itself, with only “later” marking that this is a second spring and not the first one.

Anytime I return to this poem after a few weeks away, I am jarred by this stanza’s oddly curtailed eleven-ness, which seems to cause concern, confusion, a traffic jam. Spring and growth seem like they could go on forever—and then the stanza ends abruptly, sewed shut with the strange 7/11 rhyme of “shells” to “cells.” We end with the bees in their combs (which are suddenly inadequate, overrun, and the unpleasant “clammy”), deceived by present abundance into the misapprehension that it will continue.

The second stanza depicts the stasis of autumn’s summer. Autumn will take, eventually—its hook cuts swaths; it is a reaper—but for now it is still, sparing the flowers by passivity, napping, sitting carelessly, observing the lazy happening of things.

The third stanza presents the dimming of autumn—the fall. This is the only stanza that makes direct mention of death (“soft-dying day,” “wind lives or dies”) and its attendant grief (“in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn,” the Romantic “Ay”). Death is near here, but has not yet arrived: it is something incipient, coming soon.

What It All Means

Throughout “To Autumn,” winter is present: as the unmentioned word to match the three mentioned ones; as the missing fourth stanza that would shape the poem like the seasons themselves; as the missing twelfth line that would give each stanza the year’s three-by-four evenness. Winter is absence, implication, negative space. When it does arrive, it is as silence.

If you see the poem this way, then you see its structure and every line within it as leaning toward silence, cessation, the unspoken: toward death.

What does Keats do with the coming of winter, of silence, of death? “To Autumn” does not end on an idea—like “beauty is truth, truth beauty” from his “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” written four months prior—or on any other effort to float a potentially satisfying conclusion, a summation, a takeaway. (Interestingly, Keats himself coined the term “negative capability” for the artistic merit of not doing this.)

Instead, Keats ends with image: with what actually is. The swallows are gathering in the skies for a specific reason—to depart, to begin their winter migration 6,000 miles to southern Africa. They will not return to England until after autumn has given way fully to winter’s long silence, to the barrenness of its empty fields; and when they do return, it will be to entirely new life, to the spring of spring rather than of autumn.

But the swallows are here now. They are in the skies, and the skies are here.

As speech gives way to silence—as the eleventh line rolls to the twelfth, the third stanza to the fourth—Keats speaks of existence, of what now exists.

He shares what a young man already knew about human life: later, there is death; now, everything is.

Author’s statement

Frederick Meyer

Since I first read it last year, “To Autumn” has become one of my favorite poems—specifically the final stanza, which feels to me like a jewel-tone painting of a landscape that, at the same time, does much to convey the feeling of all life. I wrote this craft essay to explore why it has this impact on me.