To Autumn

Read the poem and then working on your own, or in a group, decide which of the contextual points relating to Keats and his poem, To Autumn are most helpful to those wanting to reach a fuller appreciation of the poem. Drag the statements in the list below so that they are ranked from most to least important.

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-eaves 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’erbrimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee 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 oozings hours by hours.

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.


John Keats

Drag the statements

Drag the statements in the list below so that they are ranked from most to least important.

Very useful
Not useful at all
  • To Autumn was one of several odes written by John Keats. Odes are poems addressed to a specific subject, intended to create emotion in the reader through the use of natural imagery
  • John Keats was born in Moorgate, London, on October 31st 1795. He was the oldest of four children.
  • When he left school, he trained as a medical student at Guy's Hospital, but gave that up to devote himself to poetry.
  • John Keats is one of the Romantic poets, and, as with their works, his poems celebrated ordinary life, unlike poetry of the 17th and 18th century.
  • Tuberculosis (TB) a disease for which there was no cure before the 20th century, ran in Keats’ family, and he died of it on February 23rd 1821, when he was only 25.
  • Keats died in Rome - he had travelled there with friends, hoping the climate would help his health.
  • As well as his poems, he wrote a lot of letters. In one of these, to his friend, the poet, John Reynolds, he described a walk he had been on, which served as the inspiration for To Autumn, which he wrote on 19th September 1819, the same day as his walk.
  • Another person he wrote a lot of letters to was a neighbour, Fanny Brawne, with whom he had fallen in love. As none of her letters to him remain, there is no way of knowing if she felt the same way as he did.
  • In To Autumn Keats paints a series of word pictures of traditional rural and agricultural life at different stages of Autumn.
  • To Autumn is one of Keats’ last poems.

Questions

Now read these two introductory paragraphs in response to this question on how Keats presents the theme of change in his poem, To Autumn. Which do you think is the better, and why?

Example 1 of opening paragraphs

In Keats’ poem, To Autumn, he presents change as natural and inevitable, by focusing on the season of Autumn, which in itself symbolises change, as it is a time of transition between summer, associated with life and happiness, and winter, associated with death and decay. By the end of the poem, however, there are references to spring, hinting at acceptance of change and the part each season plays in the circle of life. Typically of Romantic poetry, Keats presents everyday life in his series of snapshots of rural life and farming traditions in the 19th century.

The poem starts with….

Example 2 of opening paragraphs

To Autumn by John Keats is a famous poem written by one of the most famous Romantic poets. John Keats wrote it in 1819, when he was 23. He died two years later, in Rome, from tuberculosis. This was a deadly disease in the 19th century, and people were sometimes a bit ashamed of having it. When Keats saw the bright red blood on his pillow he knew he was dying, and said it was his “death warrant.” Maybe he was aware of this when he wrote To Autumn. In the poem he describes different aspects of the season of Autumn.

In the first stanza….


If you chose Example 1, that is the right answer!

In the introduction to any response, aim to make clear reference to the question, and aim to slip in your knowledge of context, alongside references to what the poem is about and how it is written. Example 2 here, whilst not wrong, does not have much at all to do with the poem, and never specifically mentions “change”, which is the focus of the question.

Remember that you only have 20 minutes or so to write about each poem, if you are going to leave plenty of time to compare and contrast, so you need to write as economically as possible, whilst still including plenty of detail from the poems, how they are written, and show your knowledge of how contexts may impact on a reader’s appreciation of the poems. This means that it is really important that you only choose what is most relevant when it comes to discussing context. Filtering in this knowledge whilst you also discuss the poem’s content, themes and style will also save time.