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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
“To Autumn” should not be read merely as a static poem expressive of perfection and sadness. All kinds of mutation can be recognized in it: temporal changes (within the season, within the day), changes in space and angle of view, in the kind of biology and sociology alluded to, in syntax and rhyme patterns. These can be recorded as a series of curves, each of which differs from the others in direction or shape. Critical interpretations of the poem result from the combination of several of these curves. However, most interpretations ignore the background of the curves, the solid and encompassing, if inarticulate, “nature in process” on which the curves are superposed. Although still more interpretations, such as a sociopolitical one, could be devised by combining individual curves, none of them will be fully significant unless it takes into account the deep, vast, indifferent voice of nature itself slowly passing, which Keats managed to summon to a background presence.
1 Douglas Bush, Keats (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 176; also Charles Patterson, The Daemonic in the Poetry of John Keats (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1970).
2 Still, there is A. Davenport's witty and elegant essay “A Note on To Autumn,” in John Keats: A Reassessment, ed; Kenneth Muir (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press., 1969), pp. 96–102, which points out that the whole poem is based on semantic pairs in which the elements balance each other, from “mists” and “mellow fruitfulness” or “load” and “bless” to the gnats “born aloft” or “sinking.” He concludes, “... central to the poem is a sense that a new good is purchased only at the price of the loss of a former good.” See also Richard H. Fogle; The Imagery of Shelley and Keats (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1949), pp. 58; 99: “... the essential quality of Autumn is, as it were; fixed in a motionless, eternal moment,” and this is obtained by “an almost hypnotic repetition of a single-suggestion.”
3 John Keats, Poetical Works, ed. H. W. Garrod (1956; rpt. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 218–19.
4 Basil C. Southam, “The Ode ‘To Autumn,‘” in Keats-Shelley Journal, 9 (1960), 93–94; also Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961), pp. 421–25.
5 Patterson, pp. 226–40. The only quarrel one may find with his otherwise convincing analysis is his claim that the poem starts in the morning.
6 See particularly Bush, pp. 176–77.
7 The only scattered remarks on this point are to be found in Southam, p. 97, and Bernard Blackstone, The Consecrated Urn (London: Longmans, 1959), pp. 355–57. Clearly, however, one should not be content with dismissing the poem “as a conventional setting or personified abstraction” (terms that are not the same anyway) “depicted from time immemorial” (an overstatement if ever there was one), as does Stuart Sperry, Keats the Poet (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), p. 338.
8 Blackstone, p. 359, is obviously wrong in establishing an opposition between the first stanza and the second one in terms of natural;versus human labor.
9 There is an exceptional analysis of pictorial sources or equivalences in seventeenth and eighteenth-century paintings in Ian Jack's Keats and the Mirror of Art (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), pp. 234–42.
10 One has to agree here with. Michael Riffaterre, in “Describing Poetic Structures: Two Approaches to Baudelaire's Les Chats,” Structuralism, ed. J. Ehrmann (1966; Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor-Doubleday, 1970), p. 191: “... the poem may contain certain structures that play no part in its function and effect as a literary work of art.”
11 Beginning with “Season of mists and mellow /ruit/ulness” and continuing in st. 1, ll. 2 and 9, and elsewhere (not necessarily in a complete form).
12 It has a dominant position, either by beginning a key word of the line or by being part of some alliterative or other sound scheme, in st. 1, ll. 1–3, 5, 7–11; st. 2, ll. 10–5, 7–10; and st. 3, ll. 1, 3–7, 9, 11. The impressive apparatus of the knowledgeable David'Masson's, “The Keatsian Incantation: A Study of Phonetic Patterning,” in Muir, pp. 159–80, seems unfortunately to lead nowhere, probably because the analysis is unrelated to the semantic level. Fogle, p. 65, claims, that the “repetition and interlacing of r's, l's, b's and p's” evoke “sensations of the rounded, plumped-out fruits” in st. 1; the claim seems unfounded.
13 This rhyme pattern, incidentally, falls between the intricate luxuriant rhymes of “Ode to Psyche” and the “standard” rhyme pattern of the odes (“Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on Melancholy,” “Ode to a Grecian Urn”), which is ababcdecde. H. W. Garrod, Keats (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1926), pp. 87–90, and Walter Jackson Bate, The Stylistic Development of Keats (New York: MLA, 1945), believe that the typical ode stanza resulted from combining the first half of the octave of a Shakespearean sonnet with a Petrarchan sestet. V. S. Bushnell, “Notes on Professor Garrod's Keats,” in Modern Language Notes, 44 (1929), 287–96, emphasizes similarities with Akenside, Gray, and with eighteenth-century practice in general.
14 Garrod, p. 90, believes that the pattern of the first stanza is due to “mere inattention.” Even if this were true, it would still be relevant: the poem exposing its submerged reality from behind the poet's protective gestures.
15 Additional rhyme connectives thicken the unifying paste: “bless” (a 2) is closely allied to “shells”–“cells” (e 1–e 2), being just a slightly jumbled form thereof. This is only one instance among others that might prove a decrease in “rhymedness” from the first to the last stanza. In a highly symbolic manner, the wealth of the first stanza spills over into the second: d 1–d 2 in st. 1 rhyme with a 1–a 2 in st. 2.
16 Counting “fruit” as an obvious plural, but not counting potentially plural-carrying metonymies such as “gourd.”
17 The implications of the future are virtually contained in the whole string of verbs linked to “conspiring” from “how to load and bless” to “bend,” “fill,” “swell,” and “set.” They become active in “until they think” and emerge fully in “will never cease.”
18 The relation of this to the “normal” present explains perhaps the use of archaic second-person forms.
19 The verb governing the long invocation from i, 2, to ii, 1, which serves as a semiautonomous apposition to “bosom-friend,” occurs only at the beginning of the second stanza: “Who hath not seen thee ... ?” In a purely analytical sense, st. 2, l. 1, can be read as being afunctional. It is (as the punctuation indicates) an independent interrogative sentence introducing the long sentence that follows, ll. 2–11; it also provides (logically) the missing syntactic framework to the sentence that centers on “season” and/or “bosom-friend.”
20 With perhaps Ihe solitary exception of “as the light wind ...,” where modal tinges crop up and tend to take over.
21 For the sake of comparison and without further comment, it may be noted that the syntax of the “Melancholy” and “Grecian Urn” odes would place them somewhere between sts. 2 and 3 of “Autumn,” whereas “Ode to Psyche” and “Ode to a Nightingale” would seem to oscillate between the syntactic structures delineated in sts. 1 and 2.
22 Patterson's remark, p. 237 and elsewhere, that each stanza incorporates in an almost hungry manner the meanings of previous stanzas seems to point in the same direction.
23 Walter Jackson Bate, Keats (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), p. 582.
24 This view is perhaps best articulated by Bush, pp. 176–77, who speaks about the “melancholy implications of exuberant ripeness” and says that the poem claims, “If autumn comes, winter cannot be far behind.”
25 Sister Thekla, J. Keats: The Disinterested Heart (Filgrave, BucksL.: Publications of the Greek Orthodox Monastery of the Assumption, 1973), pp. 188–89.
26 The Quest for Permanence: The Symbolism of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 282–94.
27 “How beautiful the season is now—How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather—Dian skies—I never lik'd stubble fields so much as now—Aye better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow a stubble plain looks warm—in the same way that some pictures look warm—this struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it.” Letter to Reynolds of 21 Sept. 1819, in The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), ii, 167.
28 Contraries are surpassed, as pointed out by Bloom, p. 425, but the idea that the poem could be summarized as “ripeness is all” has been dismissed since Leavis' rebuttal of Middleton Murry in Revaluation (1936; rpt. London: Chatto and Windus, 1953), p. 263. In fact, by now even the physical and sensuous ripeness to which Leavis subscribed seems an exaggeration: at least the third stanza represents a postripeness phase.
29 Albert Laffay, “Présence et absence du monde dans la poésie de Keats,” in Le Romantisme anglo-américain: Mélanges offerts à Louis Bonnerot (Paris: Didier, 1971), p. 171, emphasizes that in the third stanza “le paysage s'efface” and there is a “dilution des images,” in fact a general withdrawal, even the sounds that fill the space being weak, indistinct, tenuous.
30 James Lott, “Keats's ‘Autumn’: The Poetic Consciousness and the Awareness of Process,” in Studies in Romanticism, 9, No. 2 (1970), 71–81.
31 This idea should not seem farfetched or outrageous in an author speaking about a billiard ball's “sense of delight from its own roundness, smoothness and volubility and the rapidity of its motion.” See Woodhouse, Scrapbook; quoted in W. J. Bate, Negative Capability (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1939), pp. 70–71. Other examples of the same attitude include Keats's feelings toward “sea-shouldering whales” or toward Shakespeare's “cockled snails.”
32 This chemical term seems more appropriate than the much more frequently used “ambiguous,” not only because the latter has unpleasant psychological and moral connotations but chiefly because “polyvalent” somehow preserves the integrity of the two elements in encounter (poetry and criticism). That for the untutored in the classical languages (or in chemistry) the term may acquire a connotative tinge of something like “rich in value” is a cause of wonder and satisfaction.
33 “The fullness of life, the achievement of spring and summer is being removed from its birth-place, the land, to be turned to man's use,” says Southam (p. 96).
34 Geoffrey Hart man, “Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats's To Autumn” in Literary Theory and Structure: Essays in Honor of William K. Wimsatt, ed. Frank Brady, John Palmer, and Martin Price (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 305–31, alludes to the relevance of the Hyperion-Apollo polarity and offers a delicate aquatint of “sensory ideology” and philosophical temperateness.