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
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