Analysis of Keats' To Autumn

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Analysis of Keats' To Autumn

John Keats' poem To Autumn is essentially an ode to Autumn and the change of seasons. He was apparently inspired by observing nature; his detailed description of natural occurrences has a pleasant appeal to the readers' senses. Keats also alludes to a certain unpleasantness connected to Autumn, and links it to a time of death. However, Keats' association between stages of Autumn and the process of dying does not take away from the "ode" effect of the poem.

The three-stanza poem seems to create three distinct stages of Autumn: growth, harvest, and death. The theme going in the first stanza is that Autumn is a season of fulfilling, yet the theme ending the final stanza is that Autumn is a season of dying. However, by using the stages of Autumn's as a metaphor for the process of death, Keats puts the concept of death in a different, more favorable light.

In the first stanza, the "growth" stanza, Keats appeals to our sense of visualization. The reader pictures a country setting, such as a cottage with a yard full of fruit trees and flowers. In his discussion of the effects of Autumn on nature, Keats brilliantly personifies Autumn. A personification is when an object or a concept is presented in such a way as to give life or human characteristics to the idea or concept. Not only does Keats speak of Autumn as if it had life, (e.g., in lines 2 and 3, where he creates a friendship between Autumn and the sun, in which they "conspire" to "load and bless" the trees with ripe, bountiful fruit), but he also gives personality to the life-form Autumn. He first defines Autumn as a "season of mist and mellow fruitfulness." The references to both "mist" and "mellow...

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...ch as funerals, or recessionals. It is appropriate that this change of imagery into musical imagery in the final stanza because it is not only the end of the poem, but it is the description of the end of Autumn as well ("While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day"). The use of the word "soft" in "soft-dying day" helps to take away the "Grim Reaper" sense of death and define it as a natural, inevitable occurrence that ends a cycle.

The final line "and gathering swallows twitter in the skies" gives the reader a definite sense of ending (the swallows are preparing to migrate for the winter season). At this point, the poem seems to comes to a rest, and this final line creates an effective sense of closure.

Bibliography:

"To Autumn". The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M.H. Abrams. New York:

W.W. norton, Inc., 2000.

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