"To Autumn": Keats' treatment of brightness and fulfilment

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Examine Keats’ treatment of brightness and fulfilment in To Autumn.


Ans. To Autumn records the poet’s meditations on maturity. It encapsulates his efforts to achieve it issuing into a disciplined poetic art. The complete maturity exemplifies Keatsian virtues of sensuousness and pictorial beauty, felicity of diction, perfectness of form and splendid vividness of imagery. This impersonal ode celebrated the season of autumn as a time of natural fulfilment and as a part of the living process of nature. The season of ripeness and abundance is a reminder of the mortality of things, a herald to the approaching desolation of winter. In Stanza I, we come to know autumn as a ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’. The sun matures the earth, ripening the grapes, the apples, the gourds and the hazelnuts etc. Stanza II describes the imagery of arrested motion. It echoes the upcoming winter. The reaper is the messenger of death so, ‘the last drop oozing’, ‘flowing out of the cider-press’ imply that the harvest is drawing to a close. The last stanza begins with a couple of questions – “Where are the songs of spring? / Aye, where are they?” But there is no conflict in the answer: “Think not of them, thou hast thy music too”. Stanza III proceeds with images of death and withdrawal. The image of the ‘soft-dying day’ is followed by that of the mournful song of the gnats – a funeral dirge for the dying year. Other autumnal musical images, which are the sounds typical of the autumnal twilight, follow – the bleating of the lambs, the song of the hedge-crickets, the whistling of the robin redbreasts and the twittering of the swallows. They together compose the orchestration of autumn, a music that touches us by reflective tenderness. Keats spoke about ‘negative capability’.

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