Autumn is considered a very poetic season; perhaps more poems have been written about autumn than any of the other seasons. Beauty and melancholy are enticing.
John Keats’ “Ode to Autumn” celebrates the special qualities of beauty and melancholy of the fall season. The poem consists of three stanzas, each with eleven rimed lines. The rime scheme of the first stanza is ABABCDEDCCE; the rime scheme of the second and third stanzas is ABABCDECDDE.
First Stanza: “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”
In the first stanza, the speaker dramatizes an overall description of autumn and what happens during that time of year: “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; / Conspiring with him how to load and bless / With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run.”
He has the season of autumn “conspiring” with the sun to produce the luscious grapes and other fruits that will soon be harvested. Autumn labors with the sun to cause the trees to “bend with apples,” and to “fill all fruit with ripeness to the core,” and “To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells.” It encourages the flowering of plants “for the bees,” and the bees “think warm days will never cease.”
Second Stanza: “Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?”
In the second the stanza, the speakers shifts his focus from a description to a direct address of the season, speaking to autumn as if it were a person: “Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find / Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, / Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind.” Autumn now appears as a woman whose “soft-hair” is blown by the wind.
This personified autumn may also be found in the fields drowsing “with the fume of poppies.” Other times this autumn person may be found “like a gleaner thou dost keep / Steady thy laden head across a brook.” Autumn is also found “by a cyder-press” watching the sweet cider being pressed by the apples that had bent the trees.
Third Stanza: “Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
In the third stanza, the speaker shifts his focus again; he continues to address autumn as a person, but now he makes a one-point comparison of autumn with spring. He asks the question, “Where are the songs of Spring?” And then he repeats the question, “Ay, where are they?”
The repetition makes the reader feel that the speaker is lamenting the loss of the song of spring, but then he admonishes the personified Autumn not to be concerned about those songs, because Autumn has its own music: “Think not of them, thou hast thy music too.”
Then he offers a catalogue of sounds that fill the ripe season of autumn. As a backdrop for the autumn sounds, the speaker paints this image, “While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day / And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue.” Then the reader hears the sounds of a “wailful choir” of small gnats “mourn[ing],” “river-swallows, borne aloft,” “the light wind lives or dies.” The reader also hears “full-grown lambs” bleating, “[h]edge crickets” singing, “with treble soft / The redbreast whistles,” and “gathering swallows twitter in the skies.”
Articles on summer poems:
- Dickinson’s Summer
- Frost’s ‘The Oven Bird’
- Whittier’s ‘The Barefoot Boy’
- Riley’s 'The Old Swimmin’-Hole'
- Amy Lowell’s ‘Penumbra’
- William Blake’s ‘The Schoolboy’
