54 PA RT O N E
The redbreast whistles from a garden croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.First asking about loss, Keats then deflects his question—to “bloom the soft-
dying day”:
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...Having found Autumn “amid thy store,” now he opens up the full nature of
things, an ecosystem with humankind only hinted in stubble, lambs, garden.
Music fills the scene in Keats’s closing stanza, trying as when Tom died to
square poetry with “a World of Pains and troubles.” Gnats wail but crickets
sing, lambs bleat but redbreasts whistle, balancing mortal life. The gnats’ choir
is “borne aloft /Orsinking,” they mourn on wind that “lives ordies.” Lambs
bleating can’t sound wholly innocent, yet music, whatever its burden, lifts the
spirit. Keats savors the mixed weather itself—a “temperate sharpness,” he calls
it. “I never liked stubble fields so much as now—Aye better than the chilly green
of the spring. Somehow a stubble plain looks warm.” Somehow.
A stubble plain, the crop cut and gone, has its music too. Keats first wrote:
“While a gold cloud gilds the soft-dying day.” Then dropping the redundant
“gold... gilds,” he says: “While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day.”
Those firm stresses, “barred clouds bloom,” borrow a metaphor from the fertile
landscape itself, making “bloom” an active verb and lending warm color. As
it happens, the century’s great landscape artist, John Constable, had taken a
cottage that summer in Keats’s beloved Hampstead and was painting just such
glowing cloud-forms above the Heath. (plate 6)
A deft hand closes this poem. After “the small gnats mourn / Among the river
sallows” (willows), Keats anticipates a rhyme by having them “borne aloft / Or
sinking”—an extra, o’er-brimming echo of “mourn” well before the “lambs
loud bleat from hilly bourn” (border). And there he has Hamlet in mind, on
death “from whose bourn / No traveller returns.” Then still his wording over-
flows. As the wind “lives or dies,” “borne” and “bourn” sprout a bonus rhyme,
a poignant pun on “born.”
What ’s more, having changed “gathering” to “gather’d swallows,” Keats goes
right back to “gathering swallows,” maybe to keep them twittering—“now,”
he says—to hold the energy of their gathering before they migrate. The signs,
sounds, rhythms in this ode create a fullness of organisms at one and at home.
Like earth itself with the bees’ “warm days,” “The poetry of earth is never dead
... is never ceasing.”
A fullness of nature with no “I,” no ego, though Keats had anxiety enough,