To Autumn

• Structure


  • sensual, image-laden poems. It is a sumptuous description of the season of autumn in a three-stanza structure, each of eleven lines, and of an ABAB rhyme scheme.
  • The first stanza deals primarily with the atmosphere of autumn, while the second addresses autumn in the style of a female goddess, with a trace of the homemaker about her, and the third stanza goes back to the beauty of autumn, advising her not to mourn the loss of springtime, for there is ample life in autumn.
• Themes

  • Beauty
  • Death
  • Embracing the present
• "And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells"

  • The excesses of summer are captured in the lexical field of the words ‘fill’, ‘swell’ and ‘plump’, which allude to the point just beyond perfection.
  • introduces these ideas of excess in the first stanza; his musing starts at the point at which death begins — just beyond the prime. With hindsight, some commentators may read into this a hint that Keats was preparing for his premature death, as if he’d reached ripeness as a poet before his time.
• "And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease,"


  • 'more' excess
  • This is subtly sinister. In the previous line Keats paints a fairly standard picture of summer tranquillity (bees pollinating flowers). In this line however, he suggests that warm days WILL cease by stating that the bees ‘think’ they will never cease.
  • The dramatic irony here is deliberate. Through his illness, Keats was well aware of his own mortality and thus knows that the ‘warm days’ of his life’s summer are coming to an end.
• "Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,"


  • Images of lethargy jump out at you here, with Autumn described as sitting careless. This could be quite innocuous and peaceful, but the lack of vitality also signals something morbid.
  • To develop the ambiguity further, one meaning of ‘careless’ is without a worry, something positive, suggesting a youthful carefree attitude. The second meaning is negligent, suggesting thoughtlessness and wastefulness.
  • Of course, the latter prompts one to think immediately of the waste of a young life in Keats' premature death.
• "thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours"


  • This extra-line, known as a hypermetric line is tinged with something sinister. ‘Last oozings’ suggests the final ebb of life, the word ‘oozings’, with its stretched out ‘oo’ and sibilant ‘z’, is almost gothic in its connotation of slow, thick, repulsive substances. It contributes to the theme of excess and anticipation that the future will be less happy than the past.
  • The long vowels in the repetition of ‘hours’ also fits the slow pace of the preceding lines, maintaining the feeling of lethargy.
• "Where are the songs of spring? ay, where are they?"

  • previous stanza opened with one question; this has two. Keats is almost feverish with doubt here - emphasised by ‘Ay’. 
  • uses *ubi sunt motif, which is Latin for ‘Where are they?’ Ubi sunt -common in medieval poetry, used to reflect mortality and the transience of life, by questioning the fate of the beautiful (Spring).
  • interrogative mood, questioning where spring has gone or when will it return. Spring links to life and renewal - contrast to previous stanza
  • rhythmic ‘songs of Spring’, changing the mood after the lethargy that went before.
• "And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;"

  • Nature’s contradiction: the autumnal introduction of red at once seems to set the land on fire, to give it a vital “rosy hue” (the way a person’s cheeks might be flushed with life), but also to signal the beginning of descent into winter.
  • ambivalence - “negative capability,” in which the artist is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
  • Keats couldn’t know it, but his ideal of negative capability would later be embraced, and maybe perfected, by a new kind of poet.
• "Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;"

  •  'sallow’ - type of river shrub that grows in moist conditions, but it is life is not simply on a decline towards death. Keats is describing the moment of balance between life and death.
  • juxtaposition of two sets of opposites; ‘aloft’ and ‘sinking’, and ‘lives and dies’ - Autumn linking the opposites of summer and winter.
  • shows Keats as keen observer of nature, as the cloud of gnats rise and fall at the whim of the wind. They have no choice as to their fate – just like Keats.