50 PA RT O N E
Crying “happy” and chanting “ever,” six times over, masks a fear that our lives
can’t live up to art. Then Keats calls the urn “Cold Pastoral!” and stiff artifice
—a long way from what nature gave him, the falls “streaming silverly,” their
“thunder and the freshness.”
That autumn, in crisis, “Now I find I must buffet it—I must take my stand
upon some vantage ground and begin to fight—I must choose between de-
spair & Energy—I choose the latter.” Rooting his choice in the year’s natural
rhythms, Keats composes “To Autumn,” giving the season that “greeting of the
Spirit” he said certain things “require... to make them wholly exist.”
“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.” Merging weather with crops, the
ode calls to a human figure of fullness.
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;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruits with sweetness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a white kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’erbrimm’d their clammy cells.At first we could be witnessing some agricultural birth rite of female-male
fruitfulness. But who’s the speaker? Stanza one keeps summoning Autumn,
moving through limitless process, a present participle (“Conspiring... ”) plus
seven infinitives (“to load... bless... bend... fill... swell... plump... set
budding”). No main verb seals this process.
The earliest surviving manuscript, luckily preserved for two centuries through
many hands, shows no second thoughts here, and rapid writing—“furuits with
sweeness,” “wam days with never cease.” “To Autumn” brims with so much
life, you want to be everywhere at once. In a way, the poem needs no com-
mentary, only voicings and a glance back, with Keats, to Coleridge ’s “Frost at
Midnight” where “all seasons shall be sweet to thee,” and to his never-ceasing
autumn fountain on a heath.
Still this poem reveals more the more we dwell in it—in the weather behind
it, for instance. Because September 1819 found Keats beset by tuberculosis, he
hails “the Weather I adore fine Weather as the greatest blessing I can have.”
Jonathan Bate in The Song of the Earth notes that after three frigid European
autumns and poor harvests, 1819 saw the sunny days so vital to a consumptive.
“How beautiful the season is now—How fine the air. A temperate sharpness