Analysis of the poem
• First stanza: pre-harvest ripeness. The season of Autumn and the sun are conspiring/ plotting secretly to bring ripeness to all.
What is Ode?
• a long stately poem in the stanzas of varied length, meter and form. It is a song in honor of gods or heroes.
• Although an ode is a serious poem expressing the speaker’s passion, it may be passionate about almost everything.
• Ex:“Ode to the West Wind”, “Ode to a Nightingale”, “Ode to a Grecian Urn”
ቤተ መጻሕፍቲ ባይዱ
Analysis of the poem
• This poem is general recognized as the subtlest and most beautiful one of all Keats Odes.
Selected Readings of English and American poetry
Lecture 9 Ode (颂歌)
To Autumn John Keats
• Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,-While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; 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; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
• Keats's speaker opens his first stanza by addressing Autumn, describing its abundance and its intimacy with the sun, with whom Autumn ripens fruits and causes the late flowers to bloom. In the second stanza, the speaker describes the figure of Autumn as a female goddess, often seen sitting on the granary floor, her hair "softlifted" by the wind, and often seen sleeping in the fields or watching a cider-press squeezing the juice from apples. In the third stanza, the speaker tells Autumn not to wonder where the songs of spring have gone, but instead to listen to her own music. At twilight, the "small gnats" hum above the shallows of the river, lifted and dropped by the wind, and "full-grown lambs" bleat from the hills, crickets sing, robins whistle from the garden, and swallows, gathering for their coming migration, sing from the skies.
Analysis of the poem
• Themes
In both its form and descriptive surface, "To Autumn" is one of the simplest of Keats's odes. There is nothing confusing or complex in Keats's paean to the season of autumn, with its fruitfulness, its flowers, and the song of its swallows gathering for migration. The extraordinary achievement of this poem lies in its ability to suggest, explore, and develop a rich abundance of themes without ever ruffling its calm, gentle, and lovely description of autumn.
• Second stanza: late-harvest fulfillment. The speaker describe the figure of autumn as a female goddess. And like a goddess, she appears wherever she likes and enjoys the harvest she brings in.
• Third stanza: the post-harvest natural music. This is a song of the late autumn. The speaker praises the redbreasted robin and Winter's other singers and finds in the pre-departure twittering of the gathering swallows an emblem of natural completion.