To Autumn

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1820

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Personification

“To Autumn” uses personification at both a line level and a larger thematic level. As a whole, the poem is a personification of the season of autumn, showing her with emotions, relationships, physical fatigue, and insecurities. The poem opens with the image of the Autumn and the sun as “close bosom-friend[s]” (Line 2) working together to bring the world to fruition. The poem chooses to use the word “conspiring” (Line 3), which brings with it a feeling of playfulness and intimacy between Autumn and the sun, much like two siblings or two friends playing together at building a tiny world of their own. In the third stanza, Autumn is seen to ask a direct question to the writer: “Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?” (Line 23). This breaks the tone of the poem up to this point and suggests an awareness, and perhaps an insecurity, that Autumn might have about her own failings. This could easily be seen as a reference to age and to lost youth as the year approaches the descent of its life, but the poet is quick to reassure Autumn that she has a unique beauty and music of her own.

On a smaller level, the poem uses personification in some of its vivid imagery. The bees are shown to “think warm days will never cease” (Line 10), lost in the hedonic pleasure of their full honey stores. We also see the gnats wailing and mourning, perhaps for the dying day or the dying year.

Alliteration, Assonance, and Consonance

This poem effectively uses auditory devices for both rhythm and tone. The poem opens with the lines “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun” (Lines 1-2), where the M in “mists,” “mellow,” and “maturing” is repeated, as well as the FR in “fruitfulness” and “friend.” This immediately lends the poem a coherency and rhythm that almost has a nursery-rhyme quality. Later we see the lines “To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells / With a sweet kernel; to set budding more / And still more” (Lines 7-9), which makes clever use of repeated sounds. The SW repeats in “swell” and “sweet,” as well as the slant rhymes of S...LL echo in “swell,” “shells,” and “still.” Other examples in the first stanza include the repeated C in “close” and “conspiring”; the plethora of soft S in “season,” “mists,” “bosom,” and “sun”; and the effective use of MM in the last few lines: “summer,” “brimm’d,” and “clammy.”

The second stanza uses more soft vowels and consonants to support the image of rest and solitude. The first line, “Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?” (Line 12) uses the repeated TH as well as the repeated S in “seen” and “store,” as well as the vowel sound of EE in “seen” and “thee.” The S continues in “sometimes,” “seeks,” “sitting,” and at the end of “careless.” The line “Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind” (Line 5) effectively uses repeated sounds of FT in “soft-lifted” as well as the repeated W and N sounds in “winnowing” and “wind.” The W continues through “drows’d,” “swath,” and “twined,” lending the stanza a soft and dreamy quality. The line early in the third stanza, “Think not of them, thou hast thy music too” (Line 24), echoes the TH sounds at the start of the second stanza. This section also uses repeated vowel sounds in “music,” “too,” “bloom,” and “hue,” as well the O sound in “sallows,” “borne,” “grown,” and “swallows.”

Form and Meter

“To Autumn” is a traditional ode, a loose form that praises a person, object, or aspect of nature. It comprises three 11-line stanzas (compared to Keats’s other 1819 odes, which are broken into 10-line stanzas), each opening with four standard ABAB rhyming lines. After these initial four lines, however, the rhyme scheme becomes more free verse, though the ninth and tenth (second- and third-last) lines of each stanza form rhyming couplets (“bees” and “cease,” “brook” and “look,” “soft” and “croft”). The poem also makes use of internal slant rhymes, such as “reap’d” and “asleep,” “sallows” and “swallows,” and “flowers” and “hours.”

The poem loosely follows iambic pentameter, but with several variations. Some lines follow a steady, traditional iambic pentameter, such as “With fruit the vines that round the thatch eves run” (Line 4) (unstressed-stressed over 10 syllables). Others, such as the opening line “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” (Line 1), remain 10 syllables but have variations in stresses—here the stress is on the first syllable of “season,” rather than the second. “Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store” (Line 12) is another example, in this case where the first two syllables are stressed equally. Though most lines follow the pattern of 10 syllables, there is variation here too; several lines including the final one, “And gathering swallows twitter in the skies” (Line 33) are 11 (although this could be read as “gath’ring” to bring it back to a standard iambic pentameter), and an earlier line, “While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day” (Line 25), is nine syllables. These deviations in form are not necessarily out of place in a poem that draws so resonantly from a pastoral, transformative, ever-shifting landscape.