Ode to Autumn

 

In both its form and descriptive surface, “To Autumn” is one of the simplest of Keats’s odes. There is nothing confusing or complex Keats’s paean to the season of autumn, with its fruitfulness its flowers, and the song of is swallows gathering for migration. The extraordinary achievement of this poem lies in its ability to suggestion explore, and develop a rich abundance of themes without ever ruffling its calm gentle, and lovely description of autumn, where “ Ode on Melancholy ” presents itself as a strenuous heroic quest “ To Autumn” is concerned with the much quieter activity of daily observation a appreciation. In this quieted the gathered themes of the preceding odes find the fullest and most beautiful expression.

                             “To Autumn” takes a where the other odes leave off. Like the other, it shows Keats’s speaker paying homage to a particular goddess in this case, the deified season of autumn. The selection of this season implicitly takes up the other ode’s themes of temporality, and change: Autumn in Keats’s ode is a time of warmth and plenty, but it is perched on the brink of winter’s desolation, as the being enjoy. “Later flower”, the harvest is gathered from the fields, the lambs of spring are now “full grown” and in the final line of the poem the swallows gather for their winter migration. The understated sense of inevitable loss in that final line makes it one of the most moving moments in all of poetry; it can be read as a simple uncomplaining summation of the entire human condition.

                              In this poem, the act of creation is pictured as a kind of self harvesting; the pen harvests the fields of the brain and books are filled with the resulting “grain”. In “To Autumn”, the metaphor is developed further; the sense of coming loss that permeates the poem confronts the sorrow underling the season’s creativity. When autumn’s harvest is over, the fields will be bare, the swaths with their “twined flower” cut down, the cider press dry, the skies empty. But the connection of this harvesting to the seasonal cycle softens the edge of the tragedy. In time, spring will come again, the fields will grow again, and the bird song will return.  The development the speaker so strongly resisted in “Indolence” is at last complete: He has learned that an acceptance of morality is not destructive to an appreciation of beauty and has gleaned wisdom by accepting the passage of time.