Poems I Like: To Autumn by John Keats

Well, this morning I noticed the fallen leaves crunching under my feet. Summer is definitely over and we're into Autumn. (I like to capitalize the seasons.)

John Keats wrote the definitive poem about Autumn, at least in the English language. I'm sure you know it already, but that's no reason not to revisit it.

I've put this in my "Poems I Like" rather than my "Favourite Poems" series, because it's never quite got into the latter category. The main reason for this is that I've never been a fan of nature poetry. I'm very much an indoors person.

The best thing about this poem (and I'm sure most people would agree) is the opening line. It's undoubtedly one of the greatest opening lines in all of English poetry. (Keats has two immortal opening lines: this one, and "A thing of beauty is a joy forever".)

What is there to say about "Seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness?". It's one of those miracles of language where the whole is infinitely more than the parts. The soul of autumn has been captured in six words.

(I often wonder if poets realize they've written a classic line when they've written it.)

I used to post on the Philip Larkin Society Forum many years ago, and there was one rather curmudgeonly contributor who insisted Larkin was the only poet worth bothering with. I plucked this line out of the whole body of non-Larkin poetry and asked him: "Surely you see merit in this?". He said he saw nothing special about it. This astounded me. (He wasn't a troll.)

Aside from the opening line, my other favourite line comes at the very end of the poem: "And gathering swallows twitter in the skies." It's such a gentle, dreamy end.

Re-reading this poem, it strikes me that, when it comes to Keats's odes, the "Nelson touch" (look it up; I refuse to say "secret sauce") is the shortened eight line in every stanza. It always serves as a pause and an intensification at once. It makes the movement of the verse more stately. For instance, in the third stanza of this poem:

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, 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
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

I also love this couple of lines, which hardly need any comment:

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core.

Out of Keats's four great odes, this is actually my least favourite. "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode to a Grecian Urn" are, in my opinion, among the very greatest of English poems. "Ode to Melancholy" has already featured in my favourte poems series.

But "To Autumn" is also sublime, and deservedly beloved by the common reader-- the true judge of poetry, given sufficient time. It's probably just my (lamentable) lack of interest in the natural world that stops me from ranking it higher.