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