Many of us will already know this poem TO AUTUMN by John Keats. It is a celebration of autumn when the mists descend and the land is swelling with over-ripe fruit, winding down to winter. He finds pleasure in almost everything he sees or hears. For me, it is a season I hate. I do not welcome the long, dark, cold evenings when I cannot get out into the garden and feel less like going out in the car in the dark to get to choir rehearsals. I don't enjoy seeing leafless trees or being battered by the strong winds. The clocks went back an hour yesterday. It will now be dark at 5 in the afternoon. and my body clock will be all over the place for days to come. "Roll on Spring" is all I can say. But John Keats will no doubt disagree.
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 cider-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.
2 comments:
I quite like autumn, but only those still, quiet, windless days where the sun shines weakly through the bare branches of the trees onto the carpets of golden leaves and cyclamen flowers bright here and there in the sleeping grass.
Does that make it any better?? :)
John Keats will not disagree because he died in 1821 at the tender age of 25. Percy Shelley died the following year at the ripe old age of 29. As for George Byron, he was 36 when he died in 1824.
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