''To Autumn''

[Miss Madison]

I'm having a hard time having one set interpretation of this poem!
Every time I read it, I find some new, deeper meaning into the poem and it just confuses my thoughts.
So I was wondering what everyone else viewed this poem as.

[Nightshade]

I think madison that that is the beauty of keats theyre is seldom one interpritaion to his poems. now while Ode to Autum is far from my favourite (probably because it was the first one we studied and I was just a wee bit prejudiced at the time) I can look at it now and rather enjoy it.

One interpritation is that every thing he talks about is an aspect of Autum. For example the second stanza id to my mind all about hay. But thats just my personal opion.

[barbara0207]

What a beautiful melancholy poem. I think only someone in the autumn of his life can write something like that. On the one hand there are numerous examples of the beauty of that season and that time of life. It's the time when a person is mature and able to reap the fruit of his work. On the other hand it is clear that winter (old age/death) is not far away, although he'd rather not think about it, he prefers to remember the warmth of summer ("warm days will never cease"). The last line, however, makes it clear that the swallows are already gathering in order to fly away and spend the winter in warmer regions. This is an unmistakable sign that winter is coming soon. Words like "wailful", "mourn", "soft-dying" make the atmosphere quite melancholy in the last stanza.

[sumi123]

can anyone help me to interprete these lines..i mean i dont understand the 'wind' part
"Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;"

another qs..is the autumnal music all sad..i said to my freind its melancholic but she said there is both joy and sadness..what do u think?

[Dark Muse]

The part about the wind is refering to, the way in which the wind rises and falls. And how the clouds of gants are riding upon the winds. So when the winds rise (live) they will be lifted up, and when the winds die down again, the gnats will fall with the falling winds. It is a refernece to the changing breeze.

I think there is both joy and sadness within it. Though the passing of one season is being moruned, there is also a celebration for the coming of the new season, and what that season may bring.

[sumi123]

but if we think that the central messageof the poem is "ripeness is all"..KING LEAR..then dont u think the poem mourns the approach of winter...which is equated with death.

[Dark Muse]

Here is a little bit about the acutal writing of the Poem

Keats wrote "To Autumn" after enjoying a lovely autumn day; he described his experience in a letter to his friend Reynolds:

"How beautiful the season is now--How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather--Dian skies--I never lik'd stubble fields so much as now--Aye better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow a stubble plain looks warm--in the same way that some pictures look warm--this struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it."

This does not seem to indicate that he intended the poem to be mournful

[AuntShecky]

The other day I read an article in which the author praises a critic of poetry, but the poem which he uses to illustrate his points is
"To Autumn" by Keats. Here's the link:
http://www.slate.com/id/2199466/

[Dipen Guha]

The rhetoric question in the third stanza of the poem may make the reader feel that the speaker is lamenting the loss of the song of Spring. But, the poet admonishes the personified Autumn not be concerned about those songs, because Autamn too has its own music. Then he offers a catalogue of sounds ( including "Wailful choir the small gnats mourn") that fill the ripe season of Autamn. (Please, read "Grasshopper and the Cricket" that suggests music of the earth does never die). In the last stanza Keats sings praise of Winter's singers. Winter descends here as a man might hope to die with natural sweetness. Ode to Autamn lets warm love in and resolves contraries because there is no further need for progression.

[Dipen Guha]

"Ode to Autamn" is the best of great odes written by Keats. The poem is justly regarded as the distillation of Keats' life work as "The Tempest" is among Shakespeare's creative achievements . It is nearest to absolute perfection. It is "complete in its rounded perfection and the felicity of loveliness". Here we have the sensuous touch, the reflective note, the love of nature, and painting of words in words. This is a poem which makes the final stage of the poet's spiritual odessey, from the world of flux to that of stability In the poem subjective note is totally absent and the poet has made his "imaginative" surrender to the nature. As a critic has said, "the firsr stanza is a symphony of colour, second-symphony of movement and the third- symphony of music".

[Dipen Guha]

The poetic philosophy rests upon its calm affirmation of life, and its placing of man in the centre of the universe of nature . Keats embodies here the ideal of energy caught in repose.
There lies a Shakespearean concept :-
"Man must abide his going hence, even as his,
Coming hither- ripeness is all"

[Dipen Guha]

Keats was a true lover of beauty. He sought beauty in all things. Nature is the storehouse of beauty. His nerves used to be strained and stimulated at the humming of a bee, sight of a flower and the glitter of the sun. At a time, when Wordsworth and Shelley were concerned with the phenomenal social turmoils and political upheavels far and wide the globe, Keats was busy in unearthing the truth in beauty. The poet's sensuous love of Nature is manifest in his poem "Ode to Autumn". He draws one after another the lovely and colorful sights of Nature and captures its various sounds. To him Nature is a source of delightful sensations. His love of Nature is humane rather than spiritual like Wordsworth or idealistic like Shelley's. Shelley and Wordsworth are poles asunder in the perceptions and descriptions of Nature. Keats perceives and describes the beauty of both stasis and process in Nature. " To Autumn" is a fine example of the stillness as well as the movement in Nature---

"Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep
Drowsed with the fume of poppies while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers"

But in its very ripeness and fruitfulness, there is a suggestion of movement to writer. " Gathering swallows twitter in the skies" suggests the coming of winter.

The poem embodies the fruitfulness and fulfilment of Autumn. Autumn is personified as a full-grown entity lingering and dying. It is the season of dying as well as fulfilling. The ripeness of Autumn is the prelude to death. There is suggestion of fertility and ripeness on the edge of dissolution. These paradoxical qualities make up the personality of Autumn as indicated by Keats.
The first stanza is heavily weighted with natural richness. The second stanza with the picture of harvester, gleaner and cider presser complete in the images of lingering and passing. It provides the human embodiment of autumn in its last stage. Thought of death is present in the bare stubble and sunset of the last stanza. But, the sense of sadness is merged in the feeling of the continuous life of Nature which eternally renews itself in insect and animal and bird; and the close of the ode, though solemn, breathes a spirit of hope.