To Autumn

“To Autumn” is an apostrophe to the autumn season—a literary device in which the poet addresses something outside their immediate surroundings which cannot reply, though the poet may imagine what the subject of the poem might say. Keats, through personification, begins by speaking to Autumn directly: “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” (Line 1). The mists suggest a calm tranquility, but also hidden things and that which lies beyond the veil. This hints at the complexity of the autumn season, the polarity of light and dark, life and death, which all exist in harmony. The speaker goes on to call the season “Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun” (Line 2), suggesting a warm and comfortable intimacy even as both friends grow older. The sun is slowly making its way towards the solstice, when it is at its most weak and ragged, but even in the later part of its cycle the two are able to play and create companionably as old friends. These actions that they take together are seen in the rest of the stanza: blessing the vines with bountiful fruit, hanging so many apples on the trees that they bow under the weight, ripening gourds and hazelnuts, and growing fields full of late-summer flowers. They grow so many flowers together that the beehives begin to overfill with honey, and the bees think that these days of golden prosperity will last forever. This stanza represents the early days of autumn when summer is just beginning to fade into the cooler, redder season and the land is at its most abundant. This is the time when we are aware of the autumn harvest and all the land has to offer in this season, but still clinging to the life-giving warmth of summer and not quite yet acknowledging the darker side of the season, the death and inevitable decay as the world turns towards winter.

The poem poses a question to Autumn: Who hasn’t noticed you sitting or wandering among your treasures? Anyone who goes walking will find Autumn sitting listlessly in the granary, the building where the harvested wheat is kept. There they will see her, Autumn’s hair lifted and pulled apart by the wind the way a winnower might separate grains of wheat. They might also find her taking a pause in the fields halfway through harvesting, drowsing under the scent of the sedative opium poppy. While Autumn sleeps, the world stills, and the flowers and fields are safe from the scythe a little longer. This is likely a reference to the “Indian summer,” the period of renewed heat that often comes in the late autumn and drains the energy of those who work outdoors. Sometimes, the poem continues, Autumn is like a “gleaner” (Line 19), an agricultural worker who picks up loose and discarded pieces of wheat after the field has been sheared. She may also sit and watch the apple cider being pressed, slowly over the course of many hours. Both these lines portray Autumn as patient, unhurried, and frugal, taking all the time she needs to reap everything the land is willing to offer. This stanza represents the mid to late autumn after the initial novelty of the harvest bounty has worn off, a period of weary stasis and patience before the first stirrings of winter make themselves known.

Paralleling the second stanza, the third stanza opens with a question. This time it is not the poet speaking, however, but Autumn herself, displaying the first signs of doubt as she compares herself to her sister the spring. The poet is quick to reassure her that each is beautiful in her own way. The backdrop for Autumn’s song is shadowed clouds across the evening sky and rosy sunsets that sprawl across the newly shorn fields. Her music is the choir of gnats that sing sorrowful songs amidst the willow trees on the riverside, which rise and fall with the movements of the wind. It’s worth noting here that willows are a tree traditionally associated with grief and mourning; paired alongside the word choices “wailful” and “mourn” (Line 27), this suggests a soft grieving for the passing year. Autumn’s music is also in the bleating of the full-grown lambs on the hillside, the singing of crickets, the gentle song of the robins, and the calling of swallows who gather for their hunt just as the sun is setting. These aspects represent something of a swan song for Autumn—the various chords join together in harmony, but every one is temporary, a note that exists only in that one ephemeral moment. The lambs will likely soon be butchered, the gnats and crickets will die of cold, the birds may fly to warmer climates, and the swallows are joining together against the darkening sky to begin hunting the other living things around them before they too disperse. The song is one of endings, of saying goodbye. Here we see that the music of Autumn is just as beautiful as the spring’s, but it is a different kind of beauty, one of growing shadows and life passing into the beyond.