An analysis of John Keats' poem "To Autumn"

Analysis of Keats's To Autumn Stanza by Stanza

Important for Students for slst wbcssc(slst) 

Reading this will help to prepare mcq questions. 

 Autumn is addressed by Keats' speaker in the first verse, who describes its abundance and intimacy with the sun, with whom Autumn ripens fruits and brings late flowers to bloom. The speaker characterizes Autumn as a feminine goddess who is commonly seen sitting on the granary floor, her hair “soft-lifted” by the breeze, sleeping in the fields, or watching a cider-press squeeze the juice from apples in the second stanza.

 Autumn is told not to wonder where the spring songs have gone in the third stanza, but to listen to her own music instead. At dusk, "tiny gnats" hum amid "the river sallows," or willow trees lifted and dropped by the wind, while "full-grown lambs" bleat from the hills, crickets sing, robins whistle from the garden, and swallows sing from the skies, assembling for their upcoming migration.

The poem begins with a celebration of the delicious and mellow Spring season, with food ripening and flowers blooming. Keats begins by stimulating the reader's senses by highlighting the fruit's robustness with adjectives like "ripeness to the core," "swell," and "plump" (lines 6-7).

 He's highlighting the fruit when it's at its most desirable and ripe, but also hinting that it's reached its peak and a change is on the way. “Summer has o'erbrimm'd their clammy cells,” Keats writes at the close of the first verse, implying that the end of the growing seasons has pushed the elements over their ripeness points (line 11).

The second stanza transports the reader to the following season, autumn, and the harvest. Here, Keats admires the wheat's "soft-lifted" hair during harvest (line 10). 

The wheat had already been rooted from the ground and was lying on granary earth. The transition from ripe and plentiful to cold and impoverished can be seen in nature at this period, as things are being taken out of the earth while still supplying food. 

This stanza, like the season it reflects, is a powerful representation of how things change.

When the third stanza begins, it expresses the common feelings of longing for warmer days and wondering where spring has gone. The speaker, on the other hand, quickly rejects this, realizing the beauty of the end of fall. 

To present a warmer side to Autumn while still indicating that it is disappearing, unusual qualities such as "stubble-plains" and a "rosy color" are assigned to colder weather.

The “full grown-lambs” is then described, and the final line, “And gathering swallows chirp in the skies,” refers to the birds gathering for migration.

This refers to the impending end of Autumn and the start of Winter. Though the poem is about an impending loss, Keats is on his way to accepting something even greater: that while death is inevitable, recognizing mortality is not weak, and it is prudent to embrace the passage of time and recognize the beauty of nature and life itself. Keats, like other romantic authors, learns to face death by immersing himself in beauty.

 Keats employs real imagination to beautifully describe the environment of nature. The lyrics have a lot of emotion to them, which reflects the romantic era's fanciful structure.