In “To Autumn”, one of the most beautiful poems ever written, the Romantic poet Keats describes the season as a time of apparently never-ending abundance. The vines are loaded with grapes, the apple trees are bending under the weight of the fruit, and everything is filled with “ripeness to the core” by the gentle “maturing sun”. There seems to be nothing but pleasure and delight. He describes how the flowers continue to bloom long after summer is over, using repetition to show the way that they seem to continue beyond what you could ever have expected: “more / And still more”. As a result the “bees” are deluded into thinking that winter will never arrive: “warm days will never cease.”
The warmth of autumn also creates a mood of rest and peace. Autumn is personified in the second stanza as someone who is “sitting careless”, or even “asleep” when the “furrow” is only “half-reap’d”. There seems to be all the time in the world, and no hurry to finish the labour of harvest before the cold weather sets in. There is even time to spend hours simply watching the apple juice oozing from a “cyder-press”.
But the warmth, rest and abundance cannot last forever. The final stanza brings in strong melancholy notes. The sunset is beautiful, but it is till the “dying” of the day. The “gnats” are mourning the end of the warm weather, which will mean their own death, while the “full-grown lambs” will soon be taken to the slaughterhouse. All material things must come to an end, and the departure of the swallows signals that warmth and life are departing from England, to be replaced by cold and darkness.
1.
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.
2.
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.
3.
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.