ODE TO
AUTUMN
-John Keats
In this poem Keats describes
the season of Autumn. The ode is an address to the season. It is the season of
the mist and in this season fruits are ripened on the collaboration with the
Sun. Autumn loads the vines with grapes. There are apple trees near the moss
growth cottage. The season fills the apples with juice.
The
hazel-shells also grow plumb. These are mellowed. The Sun and the autumn help
the flowers of the summer to continue. The bees are humming on these flowers.
They collect honey from them. The beehives are filled with honey. The clammy
cells are overflowing with sweet honey. The bees think as if the summer would
never end and warm days would continue for a long time. Autumn has been
personified and compared to women farmer sitting carefree on the granary floor;
there blows a gentle breeze and the hairs of the farmer are fluttering. Again
autumn is a reaper. It feels drowsy and sleeps on the half reaped corn. The
poppy flowers have made her drowsy. The autumn holds a sickle in its hand. It
has spared the margin of the stalks intertwined with flowers. Lastly, autumn is
seen as a worker carrying a burden of corn on its head. The worker balances his
body while crossing a stream with a bundle on his head. The autumn is like an
onlooker sitting the juicy oozing for hours. The songs and joys of spring are
not found in autumn seasons. But Keats says that autumn has its own music and
charm. In an autumn evening mournful songs of the gnats are heard in the
willows by the river banks. Besides the bleat of the lambs returning from the
grassy hills is heard. The whistle of the red breast is heard from the garden.
The grasshoppers chirp and swallow twitters in the sky. This indicates that the
winter is coming. Every stanza has a sense of finality when it closes. In every
stanza a quatrain is followed by a sestet. The first stanza indicates the rich
powers of the season. In the second stanza there is a suggestion of the gradual
passing away of time. This makes the ode dramatic. Different postures are shown
with the help of personification. Here we find imaginative elements in a series
of images. A sense of sadness comes in the soft dying day, willful choir of
small gnats etc. 'Bloom' and 'Sunset' symbolized twilight and darkness. Ode to
autumn is an unconventional appreciation of the autumn season. It surprises the
reader with the unusual idea that autumn is a season to rejoice. We are
familiar with Thomas Hardy's like treatment of autumn as a season of gloom,
chill and loneliness and the tragic sense of old age and approaching death.
Keats sees the other side of the coin. He describes autumn as: "Season of
mists and mellow fruitfulness! / Close bosom friend of the maturing sun".
He understands maturity and ripeness as one with old age and decay. Obviously
thin, old age is a complement to youth, as death is to life. Keats here appears
as a melodist; he seems to have accepted the fundamental paradoxes of life as
giving meaning to it. The very
beginning of the poem is suggestive of acceptance and insight after a conflict.
The subject matter of this ode is reality itself at one level: Keats depicts
the autumn season and claims that its unique music and its role of completing
the round of seasons make it a part of the whole. Although autumn will be
followed by the cold and barren winter, winter itself will in turn give way to
fresh spring. Life must go on but it cannot continue in turn give way to fresh
spring. Life must go on but it cannot continue without death that completes one
individual life and begins another. This is indirectly conveyed with the
concluding line of the ode: "And gathering swallows twitter in the
skies". In one way, this gives a hint of the coming winter when shallows
will fly to the warm south. The theme of ripeness is complemented by the theme
of death and that of death by rebirth. So, in the final stanza, the personified
figure of autumn of the second stanza is replaced by concrete images of life.
Autumn is a part of the year as old age is of life. Keats has accepted autumn,
and connotatively, old age as natural parts and processes them. 
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