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On September 19, 1819, John Keats was inspired by his walk along the Itchen River by how beautiful nature was in its autumnal glory. Two days later in a letter to a friend, he wrote: “How beautiful the season is now – How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it […] I never lik’d stubble fields so much as now […] Somehow a stubble plain looks warm – in the same way that some pictures look warm – this struck me so much in my sunday’s walk that I composed upon it.”

Keats was struggling to find inspiration, and he was finding it hard to continue being a poet. However, his experience dominated his consciousness, and he felt compelled to capture his experience of nature in all of its beautiful perfection.

He devoted his effort to composing To Autumn, and a version of the poem was sent to his publisher two days later.

Almost two hundred years later, the poem remains one of the most famous poems in the English language.

The language and structure of To Autumn (included in full at the bottom) reinforces the poem’s central theme that the season of autumn represents the perfection of life. The best aspects of spring and summer, those of birth and growth, are retained by autumn while those negative aspects of winter, the herald of death, are acknowledged by what is missing from the poem’s form. This gives autumn a special rank among the seasons.

To represent autumn’s perfect nature, the language and structure of To Autumn is very complex. On a basic level, the poem is an ode composed of three stanzas, which correspond to the traditional strophe, antistrophe, and epode. The rhyme scheme is similar to the traditional sonnet, and each line includes ten syllables formed into regular iambic pentameter except with minor variation.

The language is further organized through the use of alliteration, assonance, and rhyme, which reinforces the complicated structure of autumn as a season. Most of the linguistic analysis that follows is based on the work of Walter Jackson Bates in The Stylistic Development of Keats.

Alliteration: Beginning Unity

Alliteration is used throughout the poem to unify the beginning of words to represent autumn’s importance in the creating life, an aspect usually attributed to spring. In the first stanza, there is repetition of the beginning sounds in a simple manner, including: mists/mellow (1), him/how (3), fill/fruit (6), and they/think (10).

Then there is also the use of complex alliteration: the/that/the/thatch along with round/run (4). The repetition of the beginning sound creates a unity with words, but the alliterated words tend to be used in pairs except in line four, where the “t” words are separated into two groups by the “r” words: “With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run” (4).

The second stanza continues the simple alliteration, for example: thee/thy (12), Sometimes/seeks (12), and winnowing/wind (15). There is not an example of the complex alliteration as in stanza 2, unless one considers the “s,” “a,” and “t” sounds in line 18: “Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers.” Stanza 3 relies on simple alliteration in many lines, including: songs/spring (23), light/lives (29), and lambs/loud (30). There are two examples of complex alliteration: two pairs appear in line 25 (barred/bloom and dying/day) and the “t” sound, especially “th,” is heavily used in line 24 (“Think not of them, thou hast thy music too”).

The alliteration serves two purposes: to form cohesion within a line, and, in the third stanza, to represent the “songs” and “music” that is being described within the stanza.

Bilabial Sounds

This alliteration is further compounded with the heavy use of bilabial sounds (“m”s, “b”s and “p”s). These sounds appear within each line except for 4, 14, 23, 29, and 33, which is 84% of all lines. Of these, 17 lines contain bilabial sounds more than once, with line 11 including bilabial sounds four times: “For su mmer has o’er- br i mm ’d their cla mm y cells.”

The use of bilabials can be said to create a “popping” sound, which creates a cheerful tone. This denotes autumn as a happy time period that bustles with the creation of life. Other consonantal sounds that appear often within the poem are “s” sounds, “f” sounds, and “t” sounds, with a particular emphasis on “th” sounds. This repetition of sounds is wide enough to create some variation within the poem while creating a harmony within the word choice that extends beyond basic alliteration.

Assonance: Middle Unity

Assonance, the repetition of vowel sounds, also appears within the poem. Keats was known as one of the few poets who placed a heavy emphasis on assonance as a means to create internal harmony in his poetry. It would be impossible to truly know how vowels should sound according to Keats, as he was an 19 th century British citizen who grew up in a lower-middle class neighborhood in London.

However, it seems likely that words like that/thatch (4), moss’d/cottage (5), winnowing/wind (15), a/patient (21), and by/cyder (21) incorporate the same vowel sound. There are other sounds that, when read together, are similar because of their vowels, including mists/fruitfulness (1), but this relationship could stem from modern pronunciation.

The use of assonance creates a level of harmony between words and lines in a unique manner that serves by connecting the internal aspects of a word. This represents the development of life, which is usually an aspect attributed to summer.

Rhyme: Ending Unity

The final type of phonological cohesion is rhyme. The overall structure of the rhyme creates two sections within each stanza, the first four lines and the final seven lines, but none of the rhyme carries between the stanzas. This creates three separate sections (denoted by number) with a beginning and an end, which symbolizes the beginning and end of each stage of life (birth, development, perfection). The division within individual stanzas is reinforced by the placement of semi-colons following each of the four line sections.

In addition to traditional alliteration, assonance, and rhyme, Keats also repeats many words: in the first stanza, “fruit” is repeated three times (1, 4 and 6) and “more” is repeated twice (8 and 9); in the second stanza, “sometimes” is repeated twice (13 and 19) and “hours” is repeated within the same line (22); and the third stanza repeats the question “Where are” (23). Words do not repeat between stanzas except for conjunctions, which reinforces the use of rhyme to create three distinct but related sections of the poem.

The Linguistic Unities

Within each stanza, words are connected to each other through the use of similar sounds at their beginning, middle, and end, which creates a structural “perfection.” The individual stanzas are complete entities within themselves, but they can be joined together to form one greater entity. This establishes a greater unity within the whole poem that represents how all life forms are united within nature.

There is one aspect of “incompleteness” within the poem: the traditional three lines of a sonnet are missing from each stanza. Keats drops the final 3 lines of each stanza and only includes 3 stanzas, which represents the three stages of life. The missing final 25% (approximate) of each stanza and the lack of a fourth stanza represents winter within the poem, because death and loss are felt through the absence of life. This allows the poem to become a complete representation of life, even though it is theoretically incomplete.

Autumn is a complete and harmonious season just as To Autumn is a complete and harmonious poem. It is not the “Fall” of plants, animals, or mankind but a glorious conclusion to a life fully lived. It is a season of beauty and energy that is second to none.

To Autumn

I

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, ……………………… a

…Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; ………………….. b

Conspiring with him how to load and bless ………………….. a

…With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run; . b

To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, …………….. c 5

…And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; ………………….. d

……To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells ……….. e

…With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, ………………… d

And still more, later flowers for the bees, …………………….. c

Until they think warm days will never cease, ……………….. c 10

…For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells. ……… e

II

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? ………………. a

…Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find ……………. b

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, ……………………… a

…Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; …………….. b 15

Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep, ……………………. c

…Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook ….. d

……Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: …. e

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep ……………. c

…Steady thy laden head across a brook; …………………….. d 20

…Or by a cyder-press, with patient look, ……………………. d

……Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. …… e

III

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they? … a

…Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,– …………. b

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, ………… a 25

…And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; ………….. b

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn …………… c

…Among the river sallows, borne aloft ……………………… d

……Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; …………….. e

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; …… c 30

…Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft ………. d

…The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;………… d

……And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.……….. e 33