Historical-Biographical Approach:

John Keats wrote “To Autumn” in September, 1819, while living alone in Winchester. One of the leading poets of the Romantic period, Keats unfortunately died at the young age of twenty-five. He had long foreseen his eventual death by tuberculosis because he was familiar enough with the disease to recognize the symptoms immediately. It had killed two members of his family—his mother and his younger brother Tom—the latter of whom Keats had nursed personally. In fact, while living in Winchester, Keats was already aware that he had the terrible disease and incidentally, it was during that period of time that he wrote his most famous works.

Keats was inspired to write an ode to autumn after taking a walk in the woods one day. The subject matter reflects one of the major themes of Romantic works: Nature. Romantics also loved the ode because it celebrated its subject, and Keats especially used it in many of his works. “To Autumn” has many themes, but one of them is the passage of time and the fruition of all things. The first stanza presents autumn as a generalized concept, and it describes all the ripeness of the season. “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” (5-8). In essence, Keats is celebrating all of autumn’s life in his depiction of its early stages. The second stanza introduces Autumn as a personified deity, “[…] sitting careless on a granary floor” (14). The time is harvest, and Autumn is in the midst of it all as grain is reaped and stowed away for the winter to come. The final stanza conveys elements of despair and nostalgia. While Autumn laments its lack of music compared to Spring, the speaker of the poem rushes to reassure her that she indeed “[…] hast thy music too” (24). However, even while reassuring Autumn, the “[…] wailful choir [of] the small gnats mourn […] as the light wind lives or dies” (27, 29). Keats was most likely drawing a parallel between Autumn and his own life in this poem. Autumn has reached her peak and is bringing the harvest to fruition just as he has reached his own poetic pinnacle, but must now accept his encroaching death. But even though the animals mourn for Autumn’s passing, they accept it without discontent because death is the natural end of all things. Keats also shares this acceptance, and he is ready to make the most out of the time he has. The speaker reassures Autumn of her own beauty, but while doing so Keats foreshadows the death that will eventually come “while barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day” (25). Therefore, in writing a poem dedicated to the season that is bound to yield to the barren winter, Keats acknowledges the grip time has on all things—including nature and himself.

Formalist Approach:

“To Autumn” is said to be Keats’s greatest ode, reaching a technical perfection that none of his other works could aspire to. The poem begins with the start of a new day and of a new season and follows those through fruition, leading to both the close of the day and to the advent of winter. The first stanza portrays Autumn while everything is coming to repletion; the second personifies Autumn in four separate scenes; the third brings about the end of the season at sunset.

The opening stanza begins with, “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,” (1) which automatically informs the reader on the subject of the poem. Autumn is full of “mist,” meaning its complete meaning is shrouded, and the connotations of the word convey a sense of mystery. However, it is also “fruitful,” which introduces one of the major themes of the poem—that of nature’s power to control life because nature decides what blooms or does not bloom. Autumn is a “close bosom-friend of the maturing sun” (2) which alludes to the Greek goddess Demeter and to Apollo. By “maturing,” Keats means that the sun matures both the day and the season, but that he is also maturing himself because his days are growing shorter. Autumn and the sun “conspire” together in order to bring about the harvest. The stanza continues to catalogue all of Autumn’s achievements in a series of infinitive phrases: “[…] to load and bless” (3), “To bend with apples […]” (5), and “To swell the gourd […]” (7). “With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run” (4) has an interesting play on sounds which forces the reader to maneuver his tongue just as the vines would have to maneuver around the eves. The “gourd” and “hazel shells” (7) are metonymy for the harvest that is taking place. “[…] to set budding more/And still more, later flowers […]” (8, 9) has repetition which conveys the thought that harvest will never end, and that it is a perpetual thing. The last line presents an interesting juxtaposition in“For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells” (11) because the harvest has produced an abundance of crops, and yet it is described to be in “clammy cells” which foreshadows a tone shift later on. The stanza portrays a scene in the early morning because the sun is rising and all the animals are lively in their work. However, it could also be about the beginning of the harvest and all the ripening that will take place. The entire stanza is replete with imagery in order to extend the idea of the harvest’s permanence. The speaker also has a tone of awe as it praises Autumn for making such a rich and fertile season. However, even as the speaker seeks to extol Autumn, there lies an undertone of puzzlement as if to ask why she should ever have been concerned about her status in the first place.

The second stanza begins with a direct address to Autumn herself. This apostrophe heightens Autumn’s personification before she is presented in four different harvest scenes in the rest of the stanza. In this stanza, Autumn is personified as being the granary keeper, the reaper, the gleaner, and the cider press operator. By beginning the stanza by asking, “Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?” (12), the speaker seems to be answering Autumn’s implied question of, “But who really notices me?” The question serves to reassure Autumn that she is indeed noticed by all, but the need to encourage Autumn suggests that Autumn is already growing worried. Keats writes, “Sometimes whoever seeks […]” (13) which can mean that Autumn is not noticeable at all times. Already Keats is distinguishing his voice from that of his speaker’s by more fully exploring Autumn’s doubt and her ultimate demise. This dramatic situation is an ingenious devise on Keat’s part because it allows for all facets of Autumn to be explored. Autumn is personified as “[…] sitting careless on a granary floor” (14), “[…] on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep” (16), keeping her “[…] laden head across a brook” (20), or “[…] [watching the cider press]” (22), which presents a tone of ease and relaxation. The last line, “Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours” (22) has a slow pace which imitates the rhythm of the day. There is no rush in those four scenes and in fact, they are so still that they can almost be taken as individual pictures of Autumn. The visual imagery helps to arrest time because it captures Autumn in certain clear moments. By holding off time, the speaker essentially attempts to hold off winter for Autumn. This middle stanza can also be interpreted as representing the middle of the day, when things are slow and drowsy. “[…] while thy hook/spares the next swath and all its twined flowers” (17, 18) has the image of the reaper with her scythe ready to strike, but not striking. In this scene Autumn ironically acts as the one who brings death instead of fulfilling her usual role of producing the harvest. It is now apparent that the “conspiring” (2) she did with the sun could actually be interpreted as murder because she was preparing the plants and animals as crops. However, she postpones the day that the harvest will end by sleeping, which is Autumn’s own attempt to delay the onset of winter. The tone of this stanza is still very complimentary, and the seeker seeks to assure Autumn that she still has plenty of time by reminding Autumn of her leisure. However, the last line of the stanza with “[…] the last oozings” (22) has a sense of dread, as if it were holding off winter.

Autumn speaks for the first time in the third stanza by asking, “Where are the songs of Spring?” In introducing the third and final speaker, Keats's dramatic situation is now complete. They each share a voice in their perspective of the aging season in order to create a complete picture. Autumn alludes to the cycle of the seasons, which introduces Keat’s theme of progression. Again, the speaker seeks to placate Autumn by saying, “Think not of them, thou has thy music too” (24). Incidentally, the imagery of the last stanza is mostly sound, which is a contrast to the silence of the previous stanza. Keats makes his presence much more evident in this stanza because there is much juxtaposition between the music of life and the signs of death. “And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue/Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn” (26, 27) illustrates that while the day is ending beautifully, the animals recognize and accept its death so while they mourn its passing, they still celebrate what it gave them by making music. The music that the “[…] lambs loud bleat […]” (30), the “Hedge-crickets sing[…]” (31), the “red-breast whistles […]” (32), and the “[…] swallows twitter […]” (33) are in the speaker’s voice while the macabre undertones of “soft-dying day” (25) and the “light wind lives or dies” (29) are Keat’s allusions to the fast approaching death. This juxtaposition creates foil characters in the original speaker and Keats, but the foil works to perpetuate the theme of progression which means that fruition always leads to decline. Another theme of the poem is that of the convergence of joy and melancholy into one work, a theme which Keats explores in his other poetry as well. In this case, the joy is that of the harvest, but the melancholy is the approaching winter. The poem ends by lifting the reader’s eye higher and higher, finally ending with “And gathering swallows twitter in the skies” (33). Finishing the poem in heaven while the sun sets points to the idea of rejuvenation, which is another part of the theme of progression. Although it is easy to imagine Keats as playing the part of the devil’s advocate, he is actually only subtly pointing to the inevitable future in order to balance out the speaker’s naively optimistic tone. The last stanza has a dramatically different tone because it its imagery, both visual and auditory, explore the possibilities of decline. Keats and the others in the poem recognize death as a natural end for all things so they gently ease Autumn into accepting it as they already have.