|
“thou hast thy music too” John Keats, in writing To Autumn, epitomizes the Romantic notion that Nature is a pervading force which provides careful observers with powerful learning experience. His use of language is laudatory; his rhyme scheme complex. Addressing the season itself as “thee” and “thou,” he greets autumn in the same way that poets salute dieties and lovers. With his attention to the life in this season of impending death, Keats shows us the power and life-giving beauty that fills “all fruit with ripeness to the core.” The poem’s first stanza describes this fullness, implying the irony of abundant life so close to the season of death. His reference to the “maturing sun” reminds us that summer, the season we associate with life, grows old and dies. Yet the sun conspires with autumn “to load and bless / With fruit the vines.” His focus here is upon the rich ripeness rather than the harvest bounty -- autumn provides so much life that it seems that “warm days will never cease.” Shifting focus then to the bounty with “Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store,” Keats moves us to the thick of the harvest, where autumn resides comfortably in granaries, half-harvested fields, and cider-presses. The images here of autumn “sitting careless. . . hair soft-lifted. . . sound asleep, drowsed. . . steady. . . [and] patient,” bring us pause, letting us stop in the middle of the work at hand and fill ourselves with the calm presence of the season’s gifts. Like a deep cleansing breath, the second stanza reminds us that while autumn’s gifts are precious, the true gift is autumn itself. And “Where are the songs of spring?” Keats asks in his final stanza, perhaps alerting us to our rather singularly ordinary attention to that season’s association with life, bounty, and growth. By addressing spring, he brings images of its power of renewal to the front of our thoughts, but only for a single line, as this poem lauds the life, bounty, and growth of autumn. “Think not of them,” he says, for “thou hast thy music too.” Comparing the two seasons in this way, he attaches spring’s attributes to fall, reinforcing the warm and comfortable images of the previous stanza. But even as he describes the springness of autumn, he reminds us that as full of life as it is, it is still a season of dying. “[A] wailful choir of gnats mourns,” the impending end of this life cycle. Lambs, having lived long enough to experience the death of their youths, bleat from the hills; birds whistle in a soft treble, and swallows gather -- perhaps in prelude to migration -- to twitter in dying light. This music, beautiful and life-filled as it is, exists in an atmosphere of a “soft-dying day,” over “stubble-plains,” harvested and left dead for the winter. The songs of autumn are wistful, but are celebrations of life none the less. The three parts of this poem work together to describe the balance of life and death, celebration and mourning, bounty and barrenness in this season. Drawing our attention to this cycling complexity, Keats invites us to honor it, mindfully, from its inception at summer’s end to its conclusion at winter’s beginning. Presenting a long, slow, carefully rhymed and metered glance at the vibrance of these dying days, he creates, perhaps, a metaphor for lifecycles of the human spirit. The anthropomorphic qualities he lends to autumn, sunlight, and animal life lend themselves very easily to a reading in which “thee” is analogous to a singular humankind. A person in the autumn of life might tend to feel old and in the way rather than vibrant and helpful. The spring of youth and the summer of productive adulthood have passed, so what remains but the rush through the dying season into death itself? Perhaps, as Keats describes, what remains is a season of life filled with ripeness, patience, and music.
|
For more insight into To Autumn, try these sources:
Versions of Romanticism: Reading Keats' To Autumn (Newman Library, CUNY)
Keats's "To Autumn": An Exercise in Formal Criticism (Johann M. Moser)
reviews home page
TAOPOET home
© Wendy M. Blake 2000