52 PA RT O N E
about it,” Keats writes a friend. And to his brother George that same day: “Now
the time is beautiful. I take a walk every day for an hour before dinner.” It ’s
the autumn equinox, summer verging on fall, when a newly cropped grain field
“struck me so much in my sunday’s walk that I composed upon it.”
That greeting of the spirit, “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,” in-
volves no human footprint or anxious self as in the nightingale ode, no “Words-
worthian or egotistical sublime” (Keats’s phrase), or Coleridge ’s “in our life
alone does Nature live.” Nothing like Shelley’s autumn 1819 West Wind ode: “I
fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!” Free of any “I,” Keats’s stanza does what
autumn does: bend, fill, swell the season’s process in “o’er-brimming” language.
After “my sunday’s walk” he revised “sweetness” in line six: “And fill all fruit
withripenessto the core.” Now Shakespeare ’s King Lear can be heard, “Men
must endure / Their going hence, even as their coming hither: / Ripeness is
all,” balancing Keats’s mortal fears while day still equals night.
Choosing energy over despair, loading his verse with ripeness, Keats lets a
line break act out abundance: “to set budding more, / And still more.. .” And
still it grows,
to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees.And now he actually brims the stanza with one line more than in the Nightingale
and Urn odes. Those ten-line stanzas had a sonnetlike quatrain (rhymed a-b-
a-b) and sestet (c-d-e c-d-e). Now the added line tucks in a fresh rhyme—on
“never cease”!—just before the end:
to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.This extra verse, this increase, prolongs late summer with still more richness.
Think of Rainer Maria Rilke ’s marvelous “Herbsttag” (Autumn Day), written
at the 1902 equinox:
Command the last fruits to be full in time;
grant them even two more southerly days,
press them toward fulfillment soon and chase
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.At least in his ode, consumptive Keats could “think warm days will never cease.”
“To Autumn” now speaks straight to the season, intimate in nearly every line:
“thee... thy... Thee... Thy... thy... thou... thy... Thou.”