To Autumn by John Keats

To Autumn:-

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

  Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

  With fruit the vines that round the    thatch - eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees,

   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; 

      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

and still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease, 

      For summer has o'er- brimm'd their clammy cells.

From the title it's clear that the speaker is talking about autumn. The speaker briefly describes the season and immediately jumps into personification, suggesting that autumn and the sun are old pals. "Mist"often accompany chilly weather because the moisture in the air condenses into a vapor when it's cold. "Mellow fruitfulness" sounds like something people would say at a wine tasting. The word "mellow" meaning low-key or subdued, is a good fit for autumn, with its neutral colors and cool, yet not cold, whether. And it's also the season when many fruits and other crops are harvested, making autumn fruit-fill. Autumn is a close friend of the sun, who is maturing as the year goes on. Maturing could be a polite way of saying "getting old". The sun is no longer in its prime.A bosom friend is like that friend you told all your secrets to in junior high school.

  The sun and autumn are "conspiring". We might have to separate the two of them.They are planning how to make fruit grow on the vines that curl around the roofs of thatched cottage. The image highlights the weight of the fruit as it "loads" down the vines. Thatched cottages suggest a pastoral setting, characterized by shepherds, sheep, maidens, and agriculture. The "pastoral" as a literary genre was thought to originate in Ancient Greece, and the ode is a Greek form, so it is appropriate for  this ode to include pastoral themes. Keats's other Great Odes, especially "Ode on a Grecian Urn", include similar imagery.

  Keats is going nuts with images of weight and ripeness. The richness here is like WIlly Wonka's Chocolate Factory set in an orchard. The apples "bend" down the branches of mossy trees with their weight. The trees belong not to some big farming cooperative ,but to the simple cottages of country folk. The ripeness penetrates deep to the very center of the fruit. They're not like those apples that look delicious until you take a bite and realize that the fruit is hard and sour. No, these babies are ready for chow-time right now.

  The ripeness converged on the center of the fruit. Now, the ripeness expands like a balloon to "fill up" nuts and gourds. The opposition of these motions helps us visualize the process. "Gourds" include things like squash, zuchhini, and, especially, pumpkins! What could be more appropriate for autumn than huge pumpkins ripening on the vine?  "hazel" is a plant that produces the nuts that add delicious flavor to coffee or gelato. The nut is the "sweet kernel" that we eat. It's almost as if the speaker is coordinating the growth of all these fruits and nuts. He's like, "more! More! More!

  The "budding" that the speaker describes is in the future. He has just been describing the "kernels" or seeds that drop to the ground when nuts fall from trees. These seeds will "later" turn into new plants and flowers when spring comes again. Autumn isn't just a time of things dying off, turning brown, and falling to the ground. It also sets the stage for the return of growth in the spring. From nature's perspective, fruit is the mechanism for planting new seeds. The speaker goes on a little imaginative trip into the next spring and summer, where the bees take advantage of the flowers that began as a small seed in autumn. Unlike humans, who can make sense of past, present, and future, the bees only know their task for the present. The bees think the summer will never end, and that flowers will always be in bloom. The bees are like monks or prisoners insides of the flowers in which they seek nectar. At this point, even the speaker must admit that all this growth has become too much, and summer is like a sweet liquid that threatens to spill over the brim of a glass. Besides, he is starting to get away from the point. Must be time for a new stanza.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?   Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may findThee sitting careless on a granary floor,  Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,   Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook     Spares the next  swath and all its twined flowers:And sometimes like a gleaner thou  dost keep   Steady thy laden head across a brook;Or by a cyder- press, with patient look,    Thou watchest the last oozing hours by hours.

Keats returns to the personification of spring. He asks a rhetorical question: who hasn't seen autumn hanging out by his or her "store" of fruits, nuts, and other ripe things? The word "store" suggests the abundance of crops, and you might think of a barn or a grain silo filled with the most recent harvest.

It's like trying to find the leprechaun from the lucky charms commercial. All anyone has to do is travel through the countryside hitting up every "granary" - buildings where large amounts of harvested grain are kept cool and dry - until you find autumn sitting on the floor of one of them. A silo is one kind of modern granary. Now that the grain has been harvested, autumn doesn't have a care in the world. The work for this season is done and in the books. We think "abroad" means "widely" or "through the countryside" or "across the land", rather han "in a foreign country".

We will tentatively guess that autumn is a woman. Not only because season were traditionally personified as female in European art, but also because this season has oh-so-soft hair. We could play gender police and point out that Keats never uses "she" or "her" in this poem, but it's simple if we use these pronouns while you just keep that fact in mind. Autumn is like a college student when exams are over: she has nothing to do but hang out. She sits on the granary, and her hair is lifted by a gentle wind. The word "winnowing " is perfect here because "to winnow" in farm speak means to separate the grain from the chaff. In centuries past, farmers winnowed their crops by having people beat the harvested plant with, say, large sticks. This action loosens the heavier grain, and then the chaff is light enough that it can be blown away, or "winnowed", in the wind. The place where the grain and the chaff are separated is called the "threshing floor"- this is where autumn is hanging out.

Keats says, she might also be on the furrow of a field that has only partially ben harvested. She's earned one. "Furrows" are the long, undulating hills that you see in fields, on top of which crops grow. The dips in the furrows are used for irrigation. The speaker claims that autumn is basically drunk on the smell of the poppy flowers that she was going to harvest. She lies on the furrow while the "hook", or sickel, that she uses to cut the flowers lies unused. She hasn't gotten to the next "swatch" of flowers, so they're saved. The reference to poppies is no accident. Poppies were used to make opium, a drug that was popular in England in the 19th century. The writer Thomas de Quincey wrote an article called "Confessions of an Opium-Eater" about his experience with the drug, which was published the year after "To Autumn". Of course, the smell of the flowers alone could not make someone intoxicated, except metaphysically.

The harvesting metaphors continue,as autumn is compared to a "gleaner",someone who picks out the last stalks of grain that were missed during the threshing process. Poor peasants would often be allowed to "glean" the field, the equivalent of picking up scarps after a feast. Autumn puts her head down to cross over a brook, just as a gleaner bows his or her head to look for grains. Her head to look for grains. Her head is "laden" or heavy- yet another image of weight. Apple cider is the most common form, but pear cider is also drunk in England. Cider is frequently alcoholic, so this could be another reference to an intoxicant. See "Calling Card" for more on this trend in Keats's poetry. Autumn is starting to sound like a real slacker. She has nothing to do, nowhere to be. She can "patiently" watch the thick juice or "ooze" of the apples drop from the press for hours on end. "Oozings" is definitely our favorite word in this poem. It captures the concentrated sweetness of the season.

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 strubble-plains with rosy hue;Then in a wailful choir the samll 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 softThe red- breast whistles from a garden-croft;   And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

The final stanza beings with another rhetorical questions, which we'll paraphrases as, "where are your songs at, Spring? Huh? Bring it, if you got it. I can't hear you ... yeah, that's what I thought". That's the super- aggressive version, at least. But the speaker is definitely needling the season opposite to autumn on the calendar. Spring might be great and all, but it doesn't sticks around, so who needs it. He reassures autumn, who might be feeling a tad inadequate compared to her more celebrated counterpart, that she has her own music.Keats alludes again to the pastoral tradition in poetry, in which shepherds typically "sign" in springtime,often while playing a lyre.

The speaker beings to describe the "song" of autumn. It's more of a metaphorical song, in that the scene beings with light and images. He describes the patchy clouds, between which patches of sky can be seen, as "barred". These clouds appear to be in "bloom" is a direct challenge, again, to springtime. The day is "dying" at sunset, but it's not a tragic or violent death. It's "soft" and gentle. The reddish colors of the sunlight "touch" the fields have been harvested, so all that is left is a flat "stubble" of crop.

The gnats by the riverside "mourn" the dying day like a choir at a funeral. They are "wailing" as if the daylight had been a favorite grandparent or something. In fact, they are just doing what gnats do: coming out at evening time. The choir sound is the collective buzzing of their tiny little wings. Some people would have a different word than "choir" to describe this sound: namely, "extremely annoying". Gnats especially like to hang out in wet areas, near trees, and here we find them near the willow or "sallow" trees down by the river. Their movement appears to be coordinated with the light. Light gets brighter, gnats go up; light gets dimmer, gnats go down. Keats is having all kinds of fun with movement and directions in this poem. The speaker continues to paint the sunset as a life-or-death struggle for the light. The sound of the gnats contributes to the song of autumn.

The poem concludes with more animal sounds, but those of a more convention variety than the buzzing of gnats. Lambs are bleating near the small stream, or , "bourn", that flows down a hill. Notice that the speaker calls them "full-grown lambs", which is like saying, "full-grown child." Wouldn't that just be a sheep? He seems to want to highlight the in between stage between the glorious ripeness of youth and plain old adulthood. crickets are "singing" by rubbing their wings together, otherwise known as "chirping". With a soft but high voice, the redbreast robin is whistling in an enclosed garden, or "garden croft". Last but not least, the swallows have taken to the sky at twilight, and they "twitter" joyfully as the sun goes down. Now, really, what kind of ending is that?We just have a bunch of images of different birds and beasts! If this were a movie, you would probably leave the theater scratching your head.