Keats' to Autumn an Analysis of Keats' Thesis

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Keats' to Autumn

An Analysis of Keats' "To Autumn"

John Keats' "To Autumn" is a kind of "companion piece" to another English poem, "Ode to Evening," by William Collins -- a poem very much in the mind of Keats when he seat to work on "Autumn." Inspired by the English countryside, Keats, like Williams, evokes nature's reflection of the poet's own emergence from youthfulness to adulthood. Composed only two years before his death, there is already in this work a sense of the imminent end awaiting the young poet -- who is even still at his most fruitful. "To Autumn" carries with it the dichotomous theme of life in its fullness, haunted by "mists" and mellowness and a creeping kind of melancholy that portends the harvest. This paper will analyze Keats' "To Autumn" and show how the poet uses imagery, personification, and structure to illuminate and convey the fullness of summer's "ripeness to the core" (6), and autumn's lazy lounging in the wings.

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The imagery that Keats employs at the opening of the poem suggests an almost grave-like, sepulcher-like scene; following on the title, "To Autumn," the reader immediately brings to mind a season of death and dying -- a "season of mists" as Keats calls it, "and mellow fruitfulness" (1). Mellow fruitfulness is a reflection of nature's being subdued by itself -- by the eternally spinning wheel of time: the fruit is not bursting, blooming, or growing -- it has achieved its prime -- and has now mellowed with age: the image one might have is of pumpkins, "the gourd" (7), grown full and now waiting to be plucked from an October patch. Summer, as Keats expresses, has done its job, and "o'er brimm'd" (11) the world with flowers -- yet, there is an echo in the language here of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, which reminds us that "summer's lease hath all….....

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