Keats’s Autumn Music

A morning of precociously early snow did not spoil this year’s harvest of fall colors. The yellowwood tree outside my window, true to its name, has been shaking out the last of its golden plumage over the sidewalk. The pumpkins will shortly come down; the strings of lights, if they haven’t already, will go up.

We are departing what John Keats, in his great ode “To Autumn,” called the “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.” Keats composed his poem after a Sunday walk in the English countryside in September 1819. “How beautiful the season is now—How fine the air,” he wrote to a friend. “A temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather—Dian skies.” Walking on the outskirts of the town of Winchester, he admired especially the fields laid out by reaping: “I never lik’d stubble fields so much as now—Aye better than the chilly green of the Spring. Somehow a stubble plain looks warm—in the same way that some pictures look warm.”

The poem’s meditation upon the season is memorable for its delicate balance: Poised between celebration and mourning, its three stanzas give very little away. It is one of the finest examples in his own work of what Keats in a letter of 1817 famously called “Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching for fact & reason.” Keats names Shakespeare such a master.

“To Autumn” opens with the tribute above (“mists and mellow fruitfulness”). The beginning of the autumn is the climax of summer, which has brought to fruition a rich harvest: gourds and apples, hazelnuts and honey. Indeed, the bees have extended their hours to take advantage of long, warm days. The language of the first stanza insists on profusion: “bless,” “fill,” “swell,” “plump,” “more, and still more.” Early autumn is a season of abundance, which “fill[s] all fruit with ripeness to the core.”

The frenzy of the first stanza gives way, in the second, to a “drowsing” season. It is later in the year, the harvest has been stowed away, and a “winnowing wind” blows softly. Autumn sits “careless” in her granary, or sleeps among the furrows, which have been left “half-reap’d.” She is compared to a “gleaner,” picking scraps from among the harrowed stalks, heavy-laden. Or she is the maiden “by a cider-press,” watching as the drops are squeezed out, “hours by hours.” These are the dregs of the working season, patiently abided.

In the first two stanzas, autumn makes itself known by way of sight, smell, touch, and taste. The poem ends with the ear. “Where are the songs of Spring?” the last stanza wonders. But the year has not gone silent, for autumn has its own music. Under a rose-hued sky, across the “stubble-plains,” a chorus of gnats “mourn,” lambs on the hill “bleat,” crickets in the hedgerows “sing,” and a robin in the garden “whistles.” In the final line, “gathering swallows twitter in the skies.” Autumn is a cantata sung by Nature’s many voices.

Keats’s poem has long been read as a meditation on mortality, or on the exhaustion of the artist’s creative power. And, indeed, it is difficult not to read Keats’s fate into his poem. By February of the following year, tuberculosis had taken hold; a year later he would be dead. The poet in his premature autumn, composing his autumn poem.

Yet in the same letter in which he names Negative Capability, Keats suggests “that with a great Poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.” Might, then, the music of autumn in fact outperform the songs of spring, as the warm stubble plain outshines the chilly green spring field? Might the “soft-dying day” be the loveliest of all? A secret warmth blooms in the chill of the year.

The branches out the window may be shedding their covering, and another winter on its way. But along with the lamb and the robin and the swallow, who sing the golden season, Keats’s autumn music goes on.