Reading Keats’s ‘Ode: to Autumn’ (1819)
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.
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.
— -
It used to be the case that critics acclaimed Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ as his — and perhaps the language’s — ‘most perfect’ poem whilst denying that there was anything very much that could be said about it. Sixty years ago B C Southam confidently declared that the poem ‘has figured only slightly in the criticism of Keats’s mature poetry, for in comparison with the other odes of 1818-1819 “To Autumn” does not seem to offer fertile ground for the purposes of discussion or exposition.’ This, he suggests, is a good thing:
To all levels of readers it is an immediately attractive poem within which we find an acute and vivid description of the season, its processes and phenomena rendered sensitively in the verbal texture and the movement of the lines. There are no critical or textual cruces, no historical or technical references needing explanation. Here we have, if anywhere, a great poem which may be received by the common reader without a heavy apparatus of footnotes or explication. Indeed, to comment upon its already eloquent qualities would be to do little more than exemplify Keats’s particular genius in the presentation of sensuous experience. The ode can fittingly be described as a perfect work of art, flawless in detail, and composed in mood. It is a satisfying whole which presents, unlike the ‘Nightingale’, not just a passage of experience, but an experience which is complete in it. [B. C. Southam, ‘The Ode “To Autumn”’, Keats-Shelley Journal 9:2 (1960), 91–98]
Things have changed: the scholarly journals throng with critical analysis of this poem, the attack (if a military metaphor be allowed) coming on two fronts: on the one hand is the analysis that treats the poem as a purely aesthetic experience and explores its richnesses, exemplified by Helen Vendler’s celebrated The Odes of Keats (1985), which devotes 55-pages to the 33-lines of the poem.
On the other hand are those critics, often of a historicising or Marxist bent, who do not agree that this poem is removed from the political and social circumstances out of which it was composed. 1819 was the year of Peterloo, after all, and several years into the post-Waterloo economic depression. The Corn Laws were biting, making bread excessively expensive for the ordinary working people, never mind those who had been demobbed into an economy not fitted to employ them, disabled or unemployed. A poem about harvest, like this one, can hardly not engage with that political situation — such, at any rate, is the reading of Jerome McGann and Nicholas Roe (and others). Since there is nothing explicit in the poem that name-checks any of this social or political specific circumstance, this type of reading of the poem tend to focus on details like the drugged harvester of the second stanza, with his/her ‘hook’ (which we might read as a revolutionary as well as an agrarian symbol)— or on the gleaner in the following line. ‘Gleaning’ was the practice by which, after the wheat had been harvested, poor people would be allowed into a farmer’s fields to pick up any stray kernels that had been missed. This was an act of traditional charity, but Andrew J Bennett argues that 1818–19 saw an abrupt change in attitudes towards it, criminalising what had once been a widely accepted practice. If the gleaner in line 19 is the recipient of beneficence, like Ruth in the Bible, then the poem is saying one thing; but if s/he is legally a thief, liable to prosecution yet striding purposefully out with a load of gleaned corn, it is saying something else.
I wonder if this ‘pure aesthetic perfection’ vs ‘historically-politically engagement’ dyad is something of a red herring. Pranging the poems on the horns of a false dilemma. What else, then?
So: I think this is a poem about time, experiential time and the larger temporal context in which that takes place. That perhaps sounds abstruse, desiccated, especially considering Keats’s extraordinary genius in sensuous evocation, the thrillingly alive reproduction of which he was capable, capturing in his verse the qualia of lived experience, his specificity. And it can’t be denied that ‘To Autumn’ is, before it is anything else, a list of the various attributes and figures and features of its season, all brought before us with precision and vividness: mist, ripe fruit, a thatched cottage with old (‘mossed’) apple trees in its garden, nuts, flowers, bees and their honey; a harvest in progress (poppies growing amongst the wheat), winnowing and gleaning and squeezing the juice from apples to make cider; reddened clouds in the sky at sunset, ‘stubble-plains’, gnats buzzing mournfully down by the river, the cloud of them rising and falling as the breeze wafts them, lambs (on the verge of becoming sheep), crickets, a robin, a flock of swallows.
In all her many pages of minute close-reading Vendler omits one, I think, crucial detail about this poem: the sentence that constitutes the opening stanza has no main verb (Barbara Everett noticed this, and politely rebuked Vendler for missing it). The subject of the sentence is Autumn, the titular season, but all the subsequent clauses include participles (maturing, conspiring, to fill, to swell), all of which qualify the subject (they are all quasi-adjectival) without ever getting what it is Autumn is actually doing. The whole stanza exists in a kind of verbless, which is to say actionless, timeless, state: an itinerary of autumnal elements like the frozen figures on the side of Keat’s Grecian Urn.
Not that the poem is itself static. On the contrary, there is an unmissable evolution from the ripeness and ready-to-harvest status of the first stanza, through the actual process of harvesting (though drowsily, in the case of the individual with the scythe) in the second, to a landscape after harvest (stubble-fields) — a transition also marked by the fact that, in contrast to stanza 1, stanza 3 is replete with main verbs: think, mount, bleat, sing, twitter. This is what I mean by saying the poem is about time: in this specific sense that time can seem, in the intensity of specific experience, not to pass, while yet passing. My experience of parenthood brought home to me the sharp truth in the old proverb: when you have babies, the days are long but the years are short. You are so immersed in the business (exhausting, full-on, stressful, wonderful) of caring for the baby that each day, each hour, stretches out — and yet you turn around and suddenly the tiny baby you used to dandle on your knee, whose nappies you changed, whom you fed and bathed and cuddled, is suddenly in her 20s and living in a different city. How did that happen? Seemingly overnight.
Something of that is in this poem I think: it hovers of the edge of something — winter, we intuit, is coming; the swallows are gathering to migrate, the gnats are mourning their own transience — without ever stepping into that altered time, those other moments and experiences. It’s a poem that records the passing of time whilst also remaining in the timeless moments of intense apperception of the beauties of the now.
This also reverts back upon the poem itself — all those verbs of singing in the final stanza, themselves actualising the title and form of the ode (from Ancient Greek ᾠδή, “song”). In this, again, it is like the Grecian Urn ode — at once about and embodying one of the distinctivenesses of art is its capacity to freeze a beautiful moment in a timelessness that implies the actual passing of time. The lovers leaning in to kiss one another on the urn will never consummate their love (though they’ll also never grow old and sick and die), but by describing them Keats implies the consummation that is not described. Something similar happens in this poem: it does not describe, but it nonetheless beautifully finesses, the passage of time, not by casting the imagination forward in time (what about the spring that we know will follow the winter that follows autumn? Think not of that — concentrate upon the music of the now) but purely by describing these various components of the now. It’s a brilliant, if elusive, expressive trick, like the Mona Lisa’s smile.
That list of things, or qualities — the poem’s itinerary of thisnesses — is what construes the whole, of course. And there are a couple of notable things about it. One is its scale: birds and insects but nothing very big — no cows, no horses, though both are features of the Hampshire landscape through which Keats wandered before writing the poem. Keats was, of course, of small stature himself, and there is perhaps an implied affinity between him and the sorts of things he notices in the natural world.
There’s something more, though. The itinerary that builds the poem is more than just a list of discrete autumnal creatures and attributes. It starts with mist — then the sun — then a cluster of fruit (the grapes on the vine), apples, nuts, a swarm of bees. These are all (the sun aside) aggregates, constellations of things. In the second stanza Keats personifies ‘Autumn’ as four discrete individuals — ungendered although the person in the granary is often assumed to be female (the softly-lifted hair I suppose) and gleaning was, as per Ruth, often undertaken by women; and whilst harvesting, and the scratting and pressing of cider, was more usually men’s work, the war had denuded the rural economy of male workers and both were often done by women in the eighteen-teens. So let’s say: four distinct women, all versions or avatars of Autumn herself. Then in the third stanza we get clouds — another form of mist, of course, higher up in the sky — and the stippling of innumerable stubs of cut stalks, and another cloud, this time a living one, a cloud of gnats hovering low over the river. This latter harks back to the mists with which the poem opened, just as the flock of birds in the final line is another constellation of individuals. I’d say it is in this, in what we might describe as a congeries of Hardt-and-Negri-esque multitudes, a bricolage of individuation that speaks both to the focus of attention of the poer’s singular apprehending sensibility and, as per Hardt-and-Negri, to politics as such. This is to read the poem as about class, and therefore as political, not via the rather clunking decodings of the reference to gleaners of hooks, but precisely in terms of its beautiful multitudinousness: ‘Multitude is a class concept,’ say Hardt and Negri, ‘and class is determined by class struggle.’
A multitude is irreducible multiplicity; the singular social differences that constitute the multitude must always be expressed and can never be flattened into sameness, unity, identity, or indifference. [Hardt and Negri, Multitude (Hamish Hamilton, 2005), 105]
In ‘To Autumn’ everything is interpenetrated: the fields of wheat have poppies intertwined about their stalks, the labour of the harvester is mixed-in with idleness, there are crickets and robins inside the hedgerows, the cottage thatch is intergrown with vines, the honeycomb is clammy with honey. It’s a trope both of ripeness but also of multitudinousness, which is why the clouds and crowds, the swarms and flocks are so prominently a feature of what Keats is describing in this poem. A swarm is life interpenetrating itself.
The motion of these clouds is important too: mists, we suppose, just lie there (until the sun burns them away), but the gnats rise and fall, and the swallows fold back upon themselves in that kneading, fluent manner we have all seen as flocks gather prior to migrating. And this is the poem itself: the apples being squeezed of their juice in stanza one fold back upon the apples mentioned, ripely, in stanza one; the stubble-fields of stanza three fold back upon the half-stubbled field of stanza 2, the clouds and mist of gnats of stanza three fold back upon the mist of the poem’s first line. And Keats’s deliciously melodic command of his language performs the same thing: I could spend a long time just on the way he keys and varies and rekeys the doubled ‘s’s and ‘m’s and ‘f’s of the words of the first line — season, mists-mellow, fruitfulness interrupting their alliteration with the chocky c- and b- plosives at the start of line 2 (‘close’ ‘bosom’) only to return, in reverse, to f, m, s (friend, maturing, sun). That casting out and drawing back rhythm, that fort-da sonic balance, runs through the whole, in patterns as complex and satisfying as a Bach fugue. A beautiful, complex poem about which there is much to say!
