John Keats (1795-1821)

The Romantics asked a series of questions:- What is the meaning of life in a godless universe?- Can Nature serve as a substitute for God?- Can art/poetry be the new religion?- How does the mind work1?- What are the limits of reality?- How does drug-abuse relate to the previous questions?- How can the imagination protect us against an increasingly mechanized, materialistic

world?

Killing of the Keatses

1795 John Keats born at the Swan and Hoop tavern1802 Death of his brother Edward1804 Father dies after falling off a horse.

Mother remarries and leaves children with their grandparents.1805 Grandfather dies1810 Mother leaves her new husband, returns with children, then dies of TB2. John was

frequently involved in fights at school and suffered from what we would now call ‘anxiety attacks’.

1811 John leaves school and becomes an apprentice surgeon. Daily practice cutting up3 ‘snatched’4 bodies5 in various states of putrefaction.

1814 Begins to write poetry. Grandmother dies.1815 Student at Guy’s Hospital. During his medical training, he was further exposed to

suffering, for example in holding down conscious patients during operations.1816 Qualifies as an apothecary. First poem published1818 brother Tom dies of TB. Meets Fanny Brawne1819 Writes all his odes6 and most of his best poetry1820 February: severe haemorrhaging from TB. September leaves for Italy.1821 February: dies in Rome (aged 25).

1 to work – function 2 TB – tuberculosis 3 to cut up (cut-cut-cut) – dissect 4 snatched – (in this case) stolen by grave-robbers 5 body – corpse, cadaver 6 ode – a lyric poem (= non-narrative poem expressing the thoughts and feelings of a single speaker) of some length,

serious in subject, dignified in style and elaborate in its stanzaic structure; a lyric poem in rhymed stanzas, generally in the form of an address and exalted in feeling and expression. Keats’s odes are ‘private odes’ which celebrate intense, personal and subjective occasions (in contrast to ‘public odes’ which celebrate formal occasions like funerals, birthdays and state events).

Ode to a Nightingale (May, 1819)

I used to think, as birds take wing7,They sing through life, so why can’t we?

REM, I’ll Take the Rain

How can I escape from my present pains?What is the connection between beauty, poetry, melancholy and death?In what way is the beauty of nature linked to8 poetry and the poet?

Summary

An intense meditation on the contrast between the painful mortality that defines human existence and the immortal beauty found in the nightingale’s carefree song.

The Speaker wishes to - escape his past (through the waters of Lethe metaphor), - escape his body (through the metaphor of paralysis and death caused by hemlock).and we follow the movement of his mind as he meditates on these themes.

Stanza 1

The narrator is in liminal world of - evening (associated with the nightingale)- detachment sedation (opiates) and - forgetfulness (Lethe),

He hears the nightingale’s euphoric song and, ironically, it makes him melancholic because he knows that the joy it brings will be fleeting9.- Notice the ambivalent response: he feels both pleasure and pain.

By contrast the nightingale experiences the ecstasy that comes from living in the moment and instinctively anticipating the coming of summer.

Stanza 2

In this liminal world the speaker can visit, through his lucid-dream state and the associations of summer, the Arcadia of southern Europe with its wine, community and song.

The oblivion of alcohol, which would taste like the country and like peasant dances, would let him disappear into the dim forest with the nightingale.

7 to take wing (take-took-taken) – start to fly 8 to be linked to – be connected to 9 fleeting – transitory

Stanza 3

‘Fade’ carries over from the previous stanza and thus emphasizes the wish to dissolve (→ seeking a liminal).In the warm South he could find oblivion10 and forget about the death and disease11 of his reality.

Stanza 4

However, wine and the Mediterranean are not necessary. The speaker is a poet and poetry can transport him further, and nearer: - to the fairyland of nature invoked by the scent of flowers and the birdsong that he

smells and hears.

Stanza 5

In his mind’s eye he can reconstruct the restorative Shakespearean forest from the sounds and scents.

Stanza 6 The ecstatic music even encourages the speaker to embrace the idea of escaping from reality by painlessly succumbing12 to death while enraptured13 by the nightingale’s music - and never experiencing any further pain or disappointment.

Then he realizes14 that once dead he would no longer hear it. - He dreads15 death because – and only because – it would it would mean a loss of

contact with beauty.

Stanza 7

Through synecdoche16 the speaker conflates17 the bird and its song. While18 he is weighed down by the heavy tread19 of history and is time-bound20, - the birdsong moves easily21 through time and space (e.g. back to Ancient Israel).

10 oblivion – unconsciousness, insensibility11 disease – illness, sickness 12 to succumb – capitulate, yield, give in 13 enraptured – captivated, mesmerized, enthralled, delighted14 to realize – (false friend) become conscious 15 to dread – fear 16 synecdoche /si’nekdəki/ – when a part of sth. represents the whole 17 to conflate – combine18 while – where, although 19 heavy tread – slow march20 time-bound – limited by time 21 easily – (in this case) freely

Stanza 8

Suddenly22 his solipsism constructed of sound, scent and thought collapses and the word ‘forlorn’ brings him abruptly back to his immediate reality.- he accuses his imagination of deceiving23 him but being unable to maintain the

deception as the birdsong fades24.

The boundaries25 between reality and fantasy are much more blurred26 by the end of the poem.- Moreover, the narrator remains in the liminal state, unsure of his reality.

Further27 Comments

The poet himself dominates the poem; the word ‘I’ occurs in almost every stanza, and the poem opens and closes on a note of acute self-consciousness.

At first reading this ode appears to be a perfect example of Wordsworth’s definition of poetry: “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (and the egotistical sublime?!)

There are elements of the green nature/red nature paradigm:- the forest and its dryad, the nightingale, are self-renewing- Keats is keenly aware of28 his own mortality. - However, the flowers in the poem could also symbolize momentary intoxication and

fleeting29 beauty.

The nightingale exists in and of the moment, oblivious30 of past and future- yet its song is immoral and unchanging.

Keats, by contrast, is acutely31 aware of his painful past (the recent death of his brother Tom) and his painful future (his own decline towards TB), - yet he is time-bound and earth-bound, unable to share the immortality of the birdsong.

The nightingale sings in “full-throated ease” (l. 10), - while Keats was suffering from a chronic sore throat that spring, which he almost

certainly knew was an incipient sign of consumption32.

22 suddenly – abruptly, unexpectedly 23 to deceive – cheat, fool 24 to fade – gradually disappear 25 boundary – frontier 26 more blurred – less precise 27 further – additional 28 to be keenly aware of – be intensely conscious of 29 fleeting – momentary, transitory 30 oblivious – unconscious, ignorant 31 acutely – very, intensely 32 consumption – tuberculosis, TB

Moreover, the bird can “live of33 sensation rather than34 thoughts”35 - but Keats needs words and thoughts to construct his escape to the warm South and to

fairyland.

How does Keats’s experience of altered nocturnal perception compare to Gray’s in The Elegy?

The paradox that the world of the imagination offers a release from the painful world of actuality36,- but at the same time it renders37 the world of actuality more painful through contrast.

In this ode, the transience of life and the tragedy of old age (“where palsy38 shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies”) is set against the eternal renewal of the nightingale’s fluid music (“Thou wast39 not born for death, immortal bird!”).

Hearing the song of the nightingale, the speaker longs to flee40 the human world and join the bird.

The rapture of poetic inspiration matches the endless creative rapture of the nightingale’s music and lets the speaker, in stanzas five through seven, imagine himself with the bird in the darkened forest.

The ‘art’ of the nightingale is endlessly changeable and renewable; - it is music without record, existing only in a perpetual present.

As befits his celebration of music, the speaker’s language, sensually rich though it is, serves to suppress the sense of sight in favor of the other senses. - synesthetic images.

33 of – (in this case) through 34 rather than – instead of, as opposed to 35 what Keats said was his intense desire in a letter to Benjamin Bailey, dated 22nd November, 181736 actuality – (false friend) reality 37 to render – make 38 palsy – (in this case) trembling 39 thou wast – (archaic) you were 40 to flee (flee-fled-fled) – escape

Empathy can rob us of any agency, of the idea of a coherent self.The speaker recognizes that complete empathetic identity with the bird deprives him of personal existence; - the desire for imaginative transcendence comes into conflict with the desire to retain

self-awareness.

This suppression will find its match in Ode on a Grecian Urn, which is in many ways a companion poem to Ode to a Nightingale. In the later poem, the speaker will finally confront a created art-object not subject to any of the limitations of time; in Ode to a Nightingale, he has achieved creative expression and has placed his faith in it, but that expression – the nightingale’s song – is spontaneous and without physical manifestation.

Permanence can be achieved through imaginative vision but it is in opposition to the transience endemic to the human condition.

The ode celebrates the beauty and vigour of natural life.

The bird can enjoy the moment and is so freed from time and death.- the speaker is tied down by the painful memories of the past and the knowledge of

future infirmity and death.

How can he escape from memory and foreknowledge41 to achieve the eternity that is the bird’s now?

He has a number of ways of avoiding reality: - he could end it all with poison- he could take drugs and achieve a private momentary bliss42

- he could somehow provoke amnesia - he could drink in company and achieve a bliss through carefree revelry- he could simply use his imagination to free himselfYet it is only the working of his mind which allows43 him to gain momentary pleasure from the bird song/nature/fancy44.His ability to enjoy beauty is tied to his knowledge that it is transitory.

41 foreknowledge – knowing that sth. is going to occur 42 bliss – ecstasy, euphoria 43 to allow – enable, permit 44 fancy – (in this case) imagination

Symbolism of the Nightingale

In Classical legend the nightingale, or Philomel (literally ‘lover of song’), was a beautiful girl whom the gods turned into a bird after she had been raped45 and had had her tongue cut out46 by her attacker; - hence47 the association with melancholy and with unhappy love which figures in many

poems about the nightingale.

For instance48, in Il Penseroso (1632) Milton called the nightingale, “Most musical, most melancholy”. - In 1645 in his sonnet To the Nightingale Milton wrote of the bird’s “liquid notes that

close the eye of Day.”

But both Wordsworth and Coleridge, in poems which Keats probably knew well, reversed the tradition of the melancholy nightingale and described its song as an exuberant outburst49 of joy50.

In O Nightingale (1807) Wordsworth referred to its “Tumultuous harmony and fierce!”And in The Nightingale: a Conversation Poem (1798) the song reminded Coleridge that “In Nature there is nothing melancholy” and seemed “always full of love / And joyance51”.

For them, as for many poets before them, the nightingale’s song was a source of poetic inspiration and a stimulus to meditation on, for example, nature, love and mortality.

So, in making the apparent happiness of the nightingale’s song the focus of his longing52

to escape from the world of human suffering, Keats is, characteristically, creating something individual and personal out of a long-established poetic tradition.

Over the course of the poem, the bird symbolizes:- freedom (a bird can fly away)- pure joy- the artist (bird’s voice = self-expression)- imagination (a journey)- the beauty of nature- the ideal

45 to rape – sexually assault 46 cut out – amputated 47 hence – (formal) this explains 48 for instance – for example 49 outburst – spontaneous expression 50 joy – happiness, euphoria 51 joyance – (archaic) enjoyment, joy, delight 52 longing – desire

Form

Like most of the other odes, Ode to a Nightingale is written in ten-line stanzas.

However, unlike most of the other poems, it is metrically variable.

The first seven and last two lines of each stanza are written in iambic pentameter; the eighth line of each stanza is written in trimeter, with only three accented syllables instead of five. Ode to a Nightingale also differs from the other odes in that its rhyme scheme is the same in every stanza. Each stanza in Ode to a Nightingale is rhymed ABABCDECDE, Keats’s most basic scheme throughout the odes.

Negative Capability

= a concept which prizes intuition and uncertainty above reason and knowledge.

= open-mindedness

= the ability to contemplate the world without the desire to try to reconcile its contradictory aspects, or fit it into closed and rational systems.

= acceptance of free association of ideas without rationalizing.

= An acceptance of an insight into beauty without rationalization.

= “remain content with half-knowledge.”

= the capacity to forget one’s own personality and enter imaginatively into the existence of others and other kinds of existence.

= the ability to let poetry be suggestive rather than53 conclusive.

Negative capability gives the imagination the ability to search out mysteries, doubts and uncertainties without transforming them into their opposites: solutions, assurance and certainties.

It is in this half-light that poetry and the mysteries of poetry reside, - the ability to explore this half-light is what Keats consistently praised in Shakespeare.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pkQYLVqBms- well-read by Cumberbach but with irritating music.

53 rather than – as opposed to, instead of

Ode on a Grecian Urn

The contrast between art and life.Are the virtues of durability outweighed by the disadvantages of fixity?

The Urn & the Nightingale

The pervading feeling of Ode to a Nightingale is darkness, it focuses on ‘I’ and the working of the mind, and it ends in doubt

The pervading feeling in Ode on a Grecian Urn is light and clarity, it focuses on the work of art and it ends with a declaration of certainty.

The nightingale represents creative mood (fugitive and evanescent54), the urn eternal stasis.- however, there may be an element of stasis about the nightingale’s unchanging song,

which is not reworked by ‘hungry generations’ of poets as “fragments shored up against [their] ruin” (to misquote T.S. Eliot).

Remember the urn was made to hold the ashes of the dead.

If the Ode to a Nightingale portrays Keats’s speaker’s engagement with the fluid expressiveness of music, the Ode on a Grecian Urn portrays his attempt to engage with the static immobility of sculpture.

The Grecian urn, passed down through countless centuries to the time of the speaker’s viewing, exists outside of time in the human sense - it does not age, it does not die, and indeed it is alien to all such concepts.

The speaker attempts three times to engage with scenes carved into the urn; - each time he asks different questions of it.

Initially, immortality is glimpsed in the silence of classical sculpture.- but eventually55 silence is equated with loss, with desolation.

54 evanescent – ephemeral, transitory55 eventually – (false friend) in the end

The First Stanza

The speaker stands before an ancient Grecian urn and addresses it as:a bride of quietnessa child of timea teller of pastoral tales.

He is preoccupied with its depiction56 of moments frozen in time. It is the “still unravish’d57 bride of quietness”, the “foster-child of silence and slow time”.

He also describes the urn as a ‘historian’ that can tell a story.

He wonders about the figures on the side of the urn and asks what legend they depict58

and from where they come.

He looks at a picture that seems to depict a group of men pursuing a group of women and wonders what their story could be: “What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels59? What wild ecstasy?”

Of course, the urn can never tell him the whos, whats, whens, and wheres of the stories it depicts, and the speaker is forced to abandon this line of questioning.

56 depiction – representation 57 unravished – virginal 58 to depict – represent 59 timbrel – tambourine

The Second Stanza

The speaker looks at another picture on the urn, this time of a young man playing a pipe, lying with his lover in the shade of trees. - He tries to imagine what the experience of the figures on the urn must be like; he tries to

identify with them.

The speaker says that the piper’s ‘unheard’ melodies are sweeter than mortal melodies because they are unaffected by time. - He is tempted by their escape from temporality and attracted to the eternal newness of

the piper’s unheard song and the eternally unchanging beauty of his lover.

He tells the youth that, though he can never kiss his lover because he is frozen in time, he should not grieve60, because her beauty will never fade61.

The Third Stanza

He looks at the trees surrounding the lovers and feels happy that they will never shed62

their leaves63. He is happy for the piper because his songs will be ‘for ever new’, and happy that the love of the boy and the girl will last forever, - unlike64 mortal love, which lapses into ‘breathing human passion’ and eventually65

vanishes, leaving behind only a wearied physicality: a sorrowful heart, a ‘burning forehead, and a parching tongue’.

He thinks that their love is ‘far above’ all transient human passion, which, in its sexual expression, inevitably leads to66 an abatement67 of intensity.

His recollection of these conditions seems to remind the speaker that he is inescapably subject to them, and he abandons his attempt to identify with the figures on the urn.

The pleasure from sexual passion (stanza 1) or courtly love (stanzas 2 and 3) comes from their anticipation. - However, if this anticipation is made eternal – there is never any consummation – it

loses its value.

60 to grieve – mourn, be sad 61 to fade – gradually disappear 62 to shed (shed-shed-shed) – lose 63 leaves – foliage 64 unlike – in contrast to 65 eventually – (false friend) in the end 66 to lead to (lead-led-led) – result in 67 abatement – decline, decrease

The Fourth Stanza

The speaker examines another picture on the urn, this one of a group of villagers leading a heifer to be sacrificed. He wonders where they are going (“To what green altar, O mysterious priest...”) and from where they have come. He imagines their little town, empty of all its citizens, and tells it that its streets will ‘for evermore’ be silent, for those who have left it, frozen on the urn, will never return.

The speaker attempts to think about the figures on the urn as though they were experiencing human time, imagining that their procession has an origin (the ‘little town’) and a destination (the ‘green altar’).

But all he can think is that the town will forever be deserted: If these people have left their origin, they will never return to it.

In this sense he confronts head-on68 the limits of static art; - if it is impossible to learn from the urn the whos and wheres of the ‘real story’ in the

first stanza, it is impossible ever to know the origin and the destination of the figures on the urn in the fourth.

The speaker shows a certain kind of progress in his successive attempts to engage with the urn. - His idle curiosity in the first attempt gives way to a more deeply felt identification in the

second, and in the third, the speaker leaves his own concerns behind and thinks of the processional purely on its own terms, thinking of the ‘little town’ with a real and generous feeling.

But each attempt ultimately69 ends in failure.

The third attempt fails simply because there is nothing more to say – once the speaker confronts the silence and eternal emptiness of the little town, he has reached the limit of static art; - on this subject, at least, there is nothing more the urn can tell him.

Notice that the thought of the emptiness and silence of the deserted town is a deciding factor which turns an eternity of joy and delight into an eternity of desolation. This is similar to ‘forlorn’ in Ode to a Nightingale.

The town is in fact doubly dead; it is dead because it is eternally emptied of its people and it is dead because – like everything else of the urn – it is in eternal stasis.

68 head-on – directly 69 ultimately – (false friend) in the end

The Fifth Stanza

In the final stanza the values represented by the urn are seen from a new and less positive perspective.

The poet, now more detached, reflects - on his own reactions and- on the implications of eternity associated with the urn.

He addresses the urn as a ‘Cold Pastoral’ saying that it, like Eternity, ‘doth tease us out of thought’. - in other words the urn creates a rational impasse: a state of negative capability. We are

drawn out of our rational realm into a more intuitive one. - notice the wordplay: ‘tease’ can mean to mock70 in a playful way but ‘tease out’ means

disentangle71. So through its silence the urn is playfully liberating us from reason.

In the final stanza, the speaker presents the conclusions drawn from his three attempts to engage with the urn. He is overwhelmed by its existence outside of temporal change.

If human life is a succession of ‘hungry generations’, as the speaker suggests in Ode to a Nightingale, the urn is a separate and self-contained world.

There is an intriguing paradox for the human figures carved into the side of the urn: - they are free from time, but they are simultaneously frozen in time. They do not have to confront aging and death (their love is ‘for ever young’), - but neither can they have experience (the youth can never kiss the maiden; the figures in

the procession can never return to their homes).

It can be a ‘friend to man’, as the speaker says, but it cannot be mortal; - the kind of aesthetic connection the speaker experiences with the urn is ultimately72

insufficient to human life.

The beauty of the urn stands in sharp contrast to the life it transcends- but it sends Keats back to the intensity of life.

70 to mock – ridicule 71 to disentangle – extricate 72 ultimately – (false friend) in the final analysis

Keats’ Heuristic: Truth & Beauty

The final two lines, in which the speaker imagines the urn speaking its message to mankind – “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”, have proved among the most difficult to interpret in the Keats canon. After the urn utters the enigmatic phrase “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”, no one can say for sure who “speaks” the conclusion, “that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” It could be the speaker addressing the urn, it could be the urn addressing mankind, it could be the speaker addressing mankind.

If it is the speaker addressing the urn, then it would seem to indicate his awareness of its limitations: the urn may not need to know anything beyond the equation of beauty and truth, but the complications of human life make it impossible for such a simple and self-contained phrase to express sufficiently anything about necessary human knowledge.

If it is the urn addressing mankind, then the phrase has rather73 the weight of an important lesson, as though beyond all the complications of human life, all human beings need to know on earth is that beauty and truth are one and the same.

It is largely74 a matter of personal interpretation which reading to accept.

What is of true and lasting value can be found only in the actual world of mutability.

In the Symposium (3rd or 4th Century BCE), Plato describes physical love as the lowest rung of a ladder. According to the Platonic formulation, we are attracted first to a single beautiful person, then to beautiful people generally, then to beautiful minds, then to beautiful ideas, and, ultimately75, to beauty itself, the highest rung of the ladder. So, maybe the formula beauty = truth is just Platonic.

Keats has already defined beauty as transient perfection. Truth is the essence of reality. - If the essence of reality is transient perfection then nothing is knowable apart from

one’s momentarily perception of beauty. That’s how I see it, anyway!

73 rather – by contrast 74 largely – more or less, to a great extent75 ultimately – (false friend) finally

Ambiguity

Alternatively, Keats’ heuristic is simply a closed unknowable system that playfully mocks76 rational interpretation and thus leads to negative capability. - if so the 200 years of debate over what Keats’ meant is amusingly ironic!

Keats’s descriptions are richly ambivalent and ambiguity pervades the whole poem.- it is a poem notable not for the answers which it may or may not present, but for the

skill and intensity with which it asks the questions.

This suggestiveness is a frequent aspect of Romantic poetry and, of course, takes us back to negative capability.

Form

Each of the five stanzas in Ode on a Grecian Urn is 10-lines long, metered in a relatively precise iambic pentameter, and divided into a two part rhyme scheme, the last three lines of which are variable.

The first seven lines of each stanza follow an ABABCDE rhyme scheme, but the second occurrences of the CDE sounds do not follow the same order. In stanza one, lines seven through ten are rhymed DCE; in stanza two, CED; in stanzas three and four, CDE; and in stanza five, DCE, just as in stanza one.

As in other odes (especially On Autumn), the two-part rhyme scheme - the first part made of AB rhymes, the second of CDE rhymes - creates the sense of a two-part thematic structure as well.

The first four lines of each stanza roughly define the subject of the stanza, and the last six roughly explicate or develop it. (As in other odes, this is only a general rule, true of some stanzas more than others; stanzas such as the fifth do not connect rhyme scheme and thematic structure closely at all.)

76 to mock – ridicule

Ode to Autumn

As close to perfect as any short poem in the English language.Harold Bloom77

The Title

Intriguingly, The Oxford English Dictionary records usage of a verb ‘to autumn’ in 1771, from the Latin autumnare, which mean ‘to ripen’, ‘to bring maturity’. - Perhaps Keats dropped the word ‘Ode’ from the title in order to hint that ‘To Autumn’

is a lyrical poem about the process of ageing and dying young - ‘Ode’ appears in all the other five titles of poems of this kind.

Stanza 1

Keats’s speaker opens by addressing Autumn, describing its abundance and its intimacy with the sun, with whom Autumn ripens fruits and causes the late flowers to bloom.

This is such a time of plenty78 that the bees think that this ‘Indian summer’79 will last80

forever. - By implication, humans know differently and may obsess about the coming of winter

rather than81 relishing82 this moment of abundance.

Stanza 2

The speaker describes the figure of Autumn as a female goddess adopting the ways of the country folk83 in high Autumn. She can relax now the harvest84 is in and is often seen sitting on the granary floor, her hair ‘soft-lifted’ by the wind, and often seen sleeping in the fields or watching a cider-press squeezing the juice from apples. - The atmosphere is soporific and the human activities are at one with85 nature, not

antagonistic to it.Notice how the fruit from the first stanza is processed in this stanza. These are not three separate poems but a progression through the day (from midday to dusk86), through the year (from late summer to the end of autumn) and through nature.

77 literary critic and professor, University of Yale78 plenty – abundance 79 Indian summer – period of hot weather in Autumn 80 to last – continue, endure 81 rather than – instead of, as opposed to 82 to relish – enjoy 83 country folk – rural people 84 harvest – collection of the cereal crop from the fields 85 to be at one with – be in harmony with 86 dusk – sundown

Stanza 3

The speaker tells Autumn not to wonder where the songs of spring have gone, but instead to listen to her own music.

In the third stanza, the focus shifts87 to the air and auditory stimuli88.

At twilight, - the ‘small gnats’ hum among the ‘the river shallows’, or willow trees, lifted and dropped by the wind, - ‘full-grown lambs’ bleat from the hills, - crickets sing, - robins whistle from the garden, and - swallows, gathering for their coming migration, sing from the skies.

Themes

This is a valedictory89 poem.

The poem is a reconciliation of stasis and progress, life and death.Death is present in Autumn – Keats knows he is dying – but he also has the consolation that life and the beauty of nature will continue after he has gone.

In some sense this is the reconciliation of red and green nature.

There is also an element of reconciling carpe diem with memento mori. The poet can convince himself that this moment filled with abundant life will last forever (as the bees do) or he can mourn the passing of life (with the gnats).

The poem transmits tranquility through simple metaphors.

In both its form and descriptive surface, To Autumn is one of the simplest of Keats’s odes. - There is nothing confusing or complex in Keats’s paean90 to the season of autumn, with

its fruitfulness, its flowers, and the song of its swallows gathering for migration.

The extraordinary achievement of this poem lies in its ability to suggest, explore, and develop a rich abundance of themes without ever ruffling its calm, gentle, and lovely description of autumn. - To Autumn is concerned with the quiet activity of daily observation and appreciation.

To Autumn, like the other odes by Keats, it shows his speaker paying homage to a particular goddess – in this case, the deified season of Autumn. 87 to shift – change 88 auditory stimulus – sth. one hears 89 valedictory (adj.) – farewell (valediction = farewell speech)90 paean – hymn of joy, invocation

The selection of this season implicitly takes up the other odes’ themes of temporality, mortality, 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 bees enjoy ‘later flowers’, 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 moving91 moments in all of poetry; - it can be read as a simple, uncomplaining summation of the entire human condition.

Despite the coming chill of winter, the late warmth of autumn provides Keats’s speaker with ample beauty to celebrate:

the cottage and its surroundings in the first stanza, the agrarian haunts of the goddess in the second, and the locales of natural creatures in the third.

Keats’s speaker is able to experience these beauties in a sincere and meaningful way because of the lessons he has learned in the previous odes:

He is no longer attempting to escape the pain of the world through ecstatic rapture (as in Ode to a Nightingale), and no longer frustrated by the attempt to eternalize mortal beauty or subject eternal beauty to time (as in Ode on a Grecian Urn),

In an earlier poem Keats makes the activity of harvesting an explicit metaphor for artistic creation. In his sonnet “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” Keats makes this connection directly:

When I have fears that I may cease to beBefore my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,

Before high-piled books, in charactry,Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain...

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’.

91 moving – emotive

In To Autumn the metaphor is developed further; the sense of coming loss that permeates the poem confronts the sorrow underlying the season’s creativity. When Autumn’s harvest is over, the fields will be bare, the swaths with their “twined flowers” 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 birdsong will return. Abundance and loss, joy and sorrow, song and silence are as intimately connected as the twined flowers in the fields.

What makes To Autumn beautiful is that it brings an engagement with that connection out of the realm of mythology and fantasy and into the everyday world.

He has learned that an acceptance of mortality is not destructive to an appreciation of beauty and has gleaned wisdom by accepting the passage of time.

Keats no longer focuses on ‘I feel’ but rather92 tells us “this is how it is” with calm detachment.

92 but rather – by contrast he

A Return to Normality?

In 1815 Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted; it was one of the greatest volcanic eruptions in human history. 1816 was known in Europe as ‘the year with no summer’ due to93 the catastrophic effects of volcanic detritus in the atmosphere. There were food shortages94 in many countries. The climate continued to be disrupted in 1817 and 1818. The year in which Keats wrote To Autumn was the first in several years in which meteorological ‘normality’ was restored. Could this have influenced his celebration of the seasonal cycle?

Nicholas Roe sees To Autumn as political.It was written at the time when the courts had just acquitted Henry Hunt of sedition after the Peterloo massacre. - Social justice was perhaps returning after a period of repression. There is hope in the

world.

According to Jeremy Hawthorn, “no poem insists more effectively upon the fundamental and unstoppable fact of change than does To Autumn.”

93 due to – because of 94 shortages – scarcity

Form

The Formalists in the mid-20th Century considered To Autumn to be Keats’ most ‘perfect’ poem.

‘To Autumn’ is written in a three-stanza structure with a variable rhyme scheme.

The form is basically that of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ but with an extra line to convey the leisure of the season.Moreover, the extra line after a couplet (= closure) suggests overflowing abundance.

Notice that the couplet belies95 its name:the material in it is bound grammatically to what precedes and follows it.

There is an absence of short lines, which tend to stress the changes of mood in the earlier poem.

Each stanza is 11 lines long (and each is metered in a relatively precise iambic pentameter. In terms of both thematic organization and rhyme scheme, each stanza is divided roughly into two parts. In each stanza, the first part is made up of the first four lines of the stanza, and the second part is made up of the last seven lines. The first part of each stanza follows an ABAB rhyme scheme. The second part of each stanza is longer and varies in rhyme scheme: - the first stanza is arranged CDEDCCE, and - the second and third stanzas are arranged CDECDDE.

(Thematically, the first part of each stanza serves to define the subject of the stanza, and the second part offers room for musing, development, and speculation on that subject; however, this thematic division is only very general.)

The poem is loaded with long vowels and consonant clusters which force the reader to read slowly.Moreover, there are more monosyllablic, simple English words than in any of Keats’ other poems; especially monosyllabic verbs suggesting activity.

The poem is particularly admired for its symmetry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwn6Xaz_uLM - well-read, but with annoying music.

95 to belie – contradict