JOHN KEATS EKING IT OUT 53Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twinéd flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.Autumn the sun’s bosom-friend becomes a person, “Thy hair soft-lifted by the
winnowing wind.” And what a metaphor! Since “winnowing” derives from
“wind” that fans chaff from grain, the echo follows nature, just as this image
itself does, drawn from the harvesting that ’s going on.
Unlike the germinal bustle in stanza one, what ’s going on has reached a
poise, whatever stage the harvest ’s at. If in the granary with threshed grain,
Autumn sits easy, only her hair moving. If a reaper, then sleeping “Drowsed,”
his scythe stilled. If gleaning, then keeping steady over a brook. If pressing
cider, then patient, watching. Three times a run-on line shifts gear to hold this
poise by spanning, balancing two accented words across the break: “whoever
seeks abroad may find/Thee sitting careless”; “while thy hook/Sparesthe next
swath”; “thou dost keep/Steady thy laden head.” Steadfast Keats himself means
to hold out.
Moving and staying at the same time, Keats (or Autumn) does it again as the
stanza ends. At first he wrote, “Thou watchest the last oozing hours by hours.”
Two days later he made it “oozings,” squeezing out still more sweetness, much
as the flowers have not just “hours” to rhyme with but “hours by hours.”
Pressing out those last oozings, “To Autumn” brings the Nightingale ’s eight
and the Urn’s five stanzas down to three. Like the season’s turn, the hours verge
on evening.
Where are the songs of Spring? Aye, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge crickets sing; and now with treble soft