A Sense of Doubt blog post #3560 - "To Autumn" By John Keats

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3560 - "To Autumn" By John Keats

I have been meaning to post this entry for a long time. Like many planned entries, it has been re-scheduled multiple times. I do this because the plan in my head for the entry is often too elaborate.

What I have been trying to teach myself is that I can do less and I should do less.

So my grand plans for a thorough explication and a collection of key links of the literary criticism of others has been scarpered.

Instead just a few remarks because the poem has additional meaning now that my Dad has died.

The idea in the first stanza that "warm days will never cease" provides the core concept of the summer-autumn progression in the poem. In the bloom of youth, there's great vigor, there's plenty, there's "ripeness to the core." There's more and more more, an abundance that seems so overflowing that it will never run out, never end.

Remember, when John Keats writes this poem he is dying of tuberculosis, (known then as "Consumption") which starts in June of 1818 when he catches a bad cold during a walking tour Scotland, Ireland, and the Lake District of England. John Keats' brother Tom dies of Consumption later that year (December 1st).

Keats writes "To Autumn" in September of 1819, about a year into his slow decline and eventual death in 1821. The Consumption has really taken hold when he pens this ode to autumn.

In the poem, Keats reflects not just on his own waning life since he knows he is dying like his brother Tom and so many in his family that Consumption was known as a "family disease" but on all our lives.

It can also be read as a waning of creative powers. Not that he's all that old, but he seems to comment on the powers of the season as an allegory for creativity waning in the "twilight" years, which for him have come too soon as he will die at the age of 25.

The poem opens with lush excess and abundance. It's fast, furious, and raucous. It's drunken.

In the second stanza, the abundance starts to "ooze." The harvest has begun and the vigor of youth fades. It's a sleepy time. Is this field of poppies that drowses us the origin of that famous scene in The Wizard of Oz?

The vigor is now careless; everything is slowing down.

The last stanza opens with a question about renewal, about rebirth? The "songs of spring." The songs of promise and that coming abundance.

But those songs are not hear and they should not even be thought of as they may be distant shore unreachable from here. Though Keats does look for the music of this time, the creativity that is oozing away: "Thou has't thy music, too."

Death is ever present now ("wailful choir" and "soft-dying day").  The sun is setting ("rosy hue"). There's mourning ("gnats mourn") and the light wind "lives or dies."

In the end, one of my favorite lines in all of poetry: "And gathering swallows twitter in the skies."

The ominous, circling birds. Not carrion eaters, though. Possibly the migrating birds, preparing to leave the chilly climes? But they are gathering. The time is nigh for the end.

The meaning I have always seen in this poem is newly connected to my Dad dying. I have always seem my Dad as unstoppable, like the abundant summer in the first stanza. As he started to age, even more dramatically in the years since my Mom died in 2015, I had a difficult time accepting that he couldn't do everything he used to do. I relied on my Dad because he was steady, dependable, energetic, full of optimism, hardy and hale.

I was seeing the signs of the imminent demise, but I did not want to see them much like Keats tried to deny his death, refused to name his affliction in letters, and yet tried to find the  joy of the end times as musical and rich with a different creative power.

I am angry with my Dad for dying. I am angry with the "dying of the light" as Dylan Thomas called it. I am raging against it because seeing my Dad go down is a harbinger of my own death, much like Keats sees his death in the season of mists: winter is coming.

Thanks for tuning in.

To Autumn  BY JOHN KEATS

   Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, 

   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; 

    Conspiring with him how to load and bless 

   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; 

   To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, 

   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; 

   To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells 

   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, 

    And still more, later flowers for the bees, 

    Until they think warm days will never cease, 

      For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. 

 

   Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? 

   Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find 

   Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, 

   Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; 

   Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, 

   Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook 

      Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: 

   And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep 

   Steady thy laden head across a brook; 

   Or by a cyder-press, with patient look, 

      Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. 

 

   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.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2411.16 - 10:10

- Days ago: MOM = 3424 days ago & DAD = 080 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.