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Poem 4 - To Autumn - by John Keats

About the Poet:

"To Autumn" is an ode by the English Romantic poet John Keats written in 1819. It is the last of his six odes (which include "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn"), which are some of the most studied and celebrated poems in the English language. The poem praises autumn, describing its abundance, harvest, and transition into winter, and uses intense, sensuous imagery to elevate the the fleeting beauty of the moment. "To Autumn" is the last major work that Keats completed before his death in Rome, in 1821, where the 25-year-old succumbed to tuberculosis.

About the Poem:

You work to make so much fruit grow that it weighs down the branches of the mossy apple trees that grow outside the farmhouses. Together, you and the sun make every fruit completely ripe. You make gourds swell and hazel shells grow fat with a sweet nut inside. Autumn is the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. With the help of the maturing sun, it ripens apples, grapes, gourds, hazelnuts and flowers. We see her playing different roles of a farmer, a gleaner and a cider-maker Her music though sad, is in no way inferior to the sweet melody of spring. In autumn We find that the gnats mourn by the river, the lambs bleat from the hills, the grasshoppers sing in the lanes, the rob in whistles in the garden and the swallows twitter in the sky.

SUMMARY

Autumn, the season associated with mists and a general sense of calm abundance, you are an intimate friend of the sun, whose heat and light helps all these fruits and vegetables grow. You work closely with the sun to make lots of fruit grow on the vines that wrap around the roof edges of the farmhouses. You work to make so much fruit grow that it weighs down the branches of the mossy apple trees that grow outside the farmhouses. Together, you and the sun make every fruit completely ripe. You make gourds swell and hazel shells grow fat with a sweet nut inside. You make the flowers grow new buds and keep growing more, and when these buds bloom, bees gather the flowers' pollen. Those bees think your warmth will last forever because summer brought so many flowers and so much pollen that the beehives are now overflowing with honey.
Who hasn't noticed you, Autumn, in the places where your bounty is kept? Any person who finds themselves wandering about is likely to find you sitting lazily on the floor of the building where grain is stored, and notice your hair lifted by a light wind that separates strands of hair in the same way a harvester might separate the components of a grain of wheat. Anyone might also find you asleep in the fields, on an incompletely harvested crop row, fatigued because of the sleep-inducing aroma of the poppies. In that case, your scythe, which you'd been using to cut the crops, would be cast to the side—it would just be lying there, and therefore the next section of the twisted flowers would be saved from being cut. Sometimes, Autumn, you're like the agricultural labourer who picks up loose cuttings from the fields after the harvest—like this labourer, who has to be observant, you watch the stream with your full, heavy head of fruit and leaves. Other times you patiently watch the machine that juices the apples for cider, noting how the juice and pulp slowly ooze out of the machine over the course of many hours.
Where is the music that characterizes spring (for example, birdsong)? I repeat, Where is it? Don't think about the spring and its typical music—you have your own music. The background for your music is a scene in which beautiful, shadowed clouds expand in the evening sky and filter the sunlight such that it casts pink upon the fields, which have been harvested. Your music includes gnats, which hum mournfully among the willows that grow along the riverbanks, and which rise and fall according to the strength of the wind. It includes mature, fully grown lambs that make their baah sound from the fence of their hilly enclosure. It includes crickets singing in the bushes and a red-breasted bird that softly whistles from a small garden. And lastly, it includes the growing flock of swallows, which rise and sing together against the darkening sky.
Video Lecture Links:
https://youtu.be/157ib2M595s

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