John Keats’s poem “To Autumn” was one of his final works before he died. It is composed of three stanzas of iambic pentameter. The ninth and tenth line in each stanza is a couplet. The ode itself addresses and personifies autumn in order to illustrate the season of autumn as a season of harvest which eventually matures into death.
By referencing spring in the first line of the third stanza, Keats subtly suggests that, though death (the coming winter) is inevitable in the midst of the beauty and bounty of autumn, it will be followed by spring, and a new birth of life. He focuses his attention on a single season, but he also focuses on that season’s place within a year, which will circle back again on life. He begins the poem at the start of autumn and ends it as winter is approaching. He also starts the poem at the beginning of the day (the “maturing sun” of morning – line 2) and ends it as day is closing (the soft-dying day” – line 25), suggesting, again, the cyclic renewal of life. The poem ends as the day is closing (“barred clouds … touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue” – lines 25-26), but a new day is certain to follow, as is another season, and another year, and another life.
One can sense an acceptance of death in the poem: perhaps a nod to Keats’s theory of The Vale of Soul-Making as well as Negative Capability. To truly appreciate all this dying life, one must appreciate the beauty that lives and fades within a single day, within an autumn, within a year, within a life.
We see morning die into afternoon as stanza one progresses to stanza two, while afternoon fades into evening in the third stanza. The day is dying. We see harvest and energy fade into satiation and sleep from the first stanza to the second. The apple cider, ready to be drunk, patiently awaits the close of day at the end of the second stanza. The third stanza with its full-grown lambs and gathering swallows conveys a restlessness to be done with this day and season. The life has been lived, the harvest is all wrung-out, the cider is gone, and it’s time to be away from this rose-skied moment to make room for the dying and the renewing.
The final stanza’s loaded diction (“wailful” and “mourn” – line 27) contributes to the sense that this death of life is both sad and glorious because it is part of eternity. To be alive, now, in this moment within that eternity, is I think, the point. Death is coming, but before that is the harvest, the energy, the glorious pink skied-symphony. Though the music of autumn “bleats” (line 30) in recognition of its coming death, it is a “soft-dying” (line 25) which recognizes spring as the inheritor of the moment and gracefully takes to the skies.
Keats uses a lot of the literary devices we’ve discussed in class to complement the poem’s depth. As already mentioned, loaded diction is present in the third stanza. Keats’s signature compound adjectives are sprinkled throughout: “thatch-eves,” and “soft-lifted,” and “soft-dying.” Rhetorical questions begin the second and third stanzas. These, contrasted with the apostrophe which begins the first stanza, contribute to the growing sense of certainty slipping away. The apostrophe is confident, while the rhetorical questions (which actually double from one question to two by the third stanza), add to the feeling that the speaker is addressing an eternity of life and death which will not answer back.
Keats plays with the tempo to contribute to the poem’s trajectory. The first two lines of the first stanza end in end stops, but the third line begins an enjambment over two lines which illustrates the bounty of harvest Keats is describing. It’s as if the harvest is so full it cannot be contained in a single line:
“Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;”
As if to contrast this heaping up of description through enjambment, Keats closes the second stanza with caesuras that stagger the read and slow it down — as if the poem itself is beginning to slow and die.
“Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.”
This is contrasted again in the third stanza with an enjambment that spills over three lines in a row (lines 27-29) –
“Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
– then slows to a sputtering end stop (and caesura), followed by a second enjambment of two lines (lines 30-32) –
“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;”
Followed by a final end stop (line 33).
“And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.”
The effect is the sensation of life going on a little too long, and slowly releasing as three lines of held breath shortens to two lines, then one line, then nothing.
The Studio Boat. Claude Monet, 1876.
British Romanticism at Georgia State University 
Your analysis of “To Autumn” was fantastic! I really enjoyed reading it.
To further your proof in regards to the cycle of birth and death in the ode, Keats seems to personify Autumn.
Autumn is introduced with human-like characteristics at the very beginning of the poem in lines 2-3. She is “conspiring” with the sun, making plans for the harvest with him.
The poem also mentions that Autumn can be found “sitting careless on a granary floor, / Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; / Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep” (14-16).
Keats gives Autumn human-like characteristics to put even more emphasis on the fact that everything, just like human life, has a beginning and an end– nothing is forever.
Thanks, r! 🙂 I appreciate you pointing out the places where Keats makes autumn into a life conspiring with the sun itself. I had noticed the personification but hadn’t considered how it contributes to the theme of the living before the death. You make some really good points. Thanks!