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.

In My Day Being on the Spectrum...

 ...meant you were playing War of the Worlds or Sport of Kings.

(Though I never did. I just watched other people doing it. The Spectrum was a games console of the eighties.)

Is A.I. intelligent?

No.

This is the gist of every single blog post and article I've read about artificial intelligence.

I agree, but it's getting a bit tedious. Move on.

The Sentinels

When I was growing up, I lived opposite a fourteen-storey tower. At night a red light glowed on top of it, to ward off low-flying aircraft.

I used to fall asleep staring into that light. Back then I was a radical socialist. (This was almost inevitable, given my background.) I remember seeing the red light as a symbol of a future socialist world. One way or another, it comforted me. The tower no longer exists.

Then, in my twenties or thirties, I remember taking comfort from an orange streetlight that was just outside my front garden wall.

Currently, I live in a block of apartments. There's two globe-shaped lights on either side of the gate to its carpark. They give off a pleasant amber glow all through the hours of darkness. I like to look at them when I get up during the night.

I know lights can't be sentinels. They're just lights. But it's amazing how much they please and beguile me. They shine through the night, whether I'm looking at them or not, watching over my sleep.

More Interesting Words (And Terms)

Several people have contacted me and asked me to write a follow-up to the recent selection of words I shared from my "interesting words" notebook.

Actually, that's a bare-faced lie. Not a single person has contacted me. I can't think why not. But here is a follow-up list anyway. Suck it up!

Mulct: To punish someone by making them pay a fine.

Scutage: A payment made in lieu of military service. Literal meaning: shield money.

Passel: A large group of people or things. Apparently, this is a well-known slang term in America. I'd never heard it until recently, after which (as always seems to happen) I heard it again soon after.

Taffrail: The handrail on the stern of a ship. Has other related meanings, but that's one.

Fungo: A practice throw at a baseball batter, just so he can hit it. An American I know hadn't heard this term. (It can also be the batter throwing the ball himself and then hitting it.)

Malkin: A kitchen maid.

Colophon: The part of a book that tells you the publisher, printer, and other bibliographical information, and often includes the publisher's logo. I like this word very much, as I'm utterly fascinated by publisher's logos.

Vault light: Like a skylight, except it's in the pavement and looks down to a cellar. In Dublin (and elsewhere, I think) they have very picturesque glass panes, often discoloured by time.

Onomastic: Pertaining to names.

Allodial: The highest form of ownership of land, having no higher landlords or authority.

Gnomon: The rod or pin of a sundial.

Vigesimal: A counting system that's based on twenty, not ten. The Mayans had this. How did that come about?

Rake: The upward slope of the seats in a cinema or theatre.

Sprocket hole: The holes along the edge of a celluloid film reel.

Anamorphic desqueeze: The process of stretching horizontally compressed ("squeezed") video or photos back to their normal, wide widescreen aspect ratio. I don't really know what means, but I like the phrase very much.

Eisegesis: Reading your own bias or preoccupations into a text. The opposite of exegesis.

Fascicule: A separately printed instalment of a longer printed work. (Like Marshall Cavendish collections, which you might remember if you're as old as I am.)

A Thought About Memory

Here's a thought about memory which I've had for some time (years), but which I've never put into words.

In my experience, memory tends to be a sort of clip that lasts about one second, or half a second.

I'm going to take an example: the memory of "chip day" in my old school. The cafeteria served chips one day a week. I was too shy to use the cafeteria myself, but I saw the queues outside it, and the smell of chips being fried.

When I remember chip day in my old school, the memory is not simply a piece of information: Chip day was one day a week and there were queues to buy chips.

It's not just a visual memory. In fact, my visual memory is terrible and always blurry.

It's not even a visual memory plus an olfactory memory plus an auditory memory.

No; the best term I can come up with is "clip". It's like a clip plays in my mind for a very brief moment. It has visual, olfactory, and auditory elements.

But above all-- it's the atmosphere that comes back.

There's also an awareness that my consciousness is only part of a larger consciousness, or an aggregate of consciousness. This, to me, is the biggest part of memory. There's always an awareness of expectations, anxieties, hopes, and so forth which were swirling around me. This even marks solitary memories-- because that larger consciousness is notable by its distance (it's never absent).

I don't think my handle on what those other minds were thinking is always very accurate. In fact, I think it was often very inaccurate. But even someone as oblivious and frequently clueless as myself shares (I believe) the extraordinary human capacity to "tune in" to the atmosphere of a place or time.

So when I remember chip day in school-- I'm aware of all the teenage swagger, insecurity, exuberance, yearning, etc. etc. around me. I'm also aware of the consciousness of the teachers, their expectations for us, their disapproval or approval, their greater knowledge of life, and so forth. The whole project of the school is part of this atmosphere-- its push towards self-improvement and career prospects, its Christian ethos, its partaking of the Irish language revival as an Irish language school, and so forth.

All of these "streams" come together in a confluence, like the sounds of hundreds of voices in a shopping centre.

My awareness of this aggregated consciousness (the word seems more diffuse and impersonal than "mind") is like the climate of the memory.

And that's it. That's really all I have to say in this post. But it's worth saying because I rarely hear memory described in these terms, and I often wonder if other peoples' memory works in the same way.

The Death of the Workplace?

This is a depressing thought, from a blog post I found while internet browsing:

So much of The Office already looks antiquated to me, because all of my friends are either working in food service, freelancing, nannying, or communicating on Slack, as I do, with a network of coworkers they haven’t even met, let alone gotten to know well enough to develop nicknames for. It’s a lot more difficult for a 20-something to coast her way into a cushy full-time job like Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s Hitchcock and Scully apparently did. In fact, I don’t know any mediocre workers my age, because they never last long in any particular position. That bastion of workplace sitcoms, the bumbling employee no one trusts not to f--- it all up, is a dying breed.

Remote working has transformed my own workplace since Covid. I don't like it. I've chosen never to work from home, except for when I had no choice during the lockdown. As soon as I could come back into the workplace full-time, I did so.

I'm convinced remote working is a bad thing, although I'd probably struggle to make this argument when faced with its enthusiasts (which seems to be most people). For as long as I've remembered, I've feared an increasing privatization of society. I like the formality of work.

The comments on mediocrity touch upon another of my longstanding anxieties. I really and truly believe mediocrity is important, that a society has to find room for mediocrity. Excellence is the peak that rests atop a mountain of mediocrity. The historian Paul Johnson made the observation, which I think an excellent observation, that anyone who really loves a particular genre or art-form necessarily loves the second-rate and third-rate examples of it. I love the horror genre. The idea of only having classic horror movies like The Exorcist or The Wicker Man is a dreary one.

For the heart must pause to breathe

And love itself have rest.

Dare I mention poetry again? The idea that we can have only the tiny sliver of attention paid to poetry that we have today, and that poetry can flourish in those conditions, seems ludicrous to me. Lots of people still write poetry-- it's the readership of poetry that has disappeared. When poetry was seriously read, there was a huge class of indifferent or forgettable poets who achieved a certain amount of success, celebrity, or simply publication. But so what? How else could it be? Do you expect the local multiplex to have a constant stream of five-star films? Do you expect every soccer player to be a George Best?

But these are the sort of things I usually don't say because I fear people will assume I'm just being contrarian.