Keats's Composure
Article by Joe Sutcliffe
Sometime, it is illuminating to adopt a biographical approach to criticism. Joe Sutcliffe examines 'To Autumn' in relation to Keats's anxieties about personal difficulties and about criticisms of the personal nature of his earlier poetry.
'To Autumn' is often interpreted as a peaceful evocation of the beauties of the English countryside, To me, it is more a subtle, troubled attempt by Keats to make some kind of sense out of dying young. It is hard to determine how much of this comes from a consciousness of his own impending death, and how much derives from more general thoughts about mortality. Nevertheless, it seems evident that the poem has a sense of conflict and ambiguity similar to the earlier, more obviously dramatic and questioning odes. The season of autumn is presented as a fertile and beautiful woman ('thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind') but, as with other beautiful female presences in Keats's poems (La Belle Dame Sans Merci, the personified Grecian Urn, Lamia), the charm co-exists with a potential cruelty and indifference.
Autumn: Kind and cruel
This ambivalence is apparent in the second stanza where we see Autumn as, if not exactly a Grim Reaper, at least a cool presider over the destruction she brings in her harvest. She sleeps insouciantly while the flowers await their fate at the hands of her 'hook' - a harsh, clinical sound which jars against the softer rhymes earlier in the poem and abruptly ends the preceding gentle, sleepy mood: 'Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook'..
On first reading, 'Spares the next swath', in the following line, implies clemency. In factm the image points to a delayed execution for the flowers. There is a similar effect here to that created by the final image of stanza 1, where the bees are offered unexpected and abundant pollen, but are soon to be disappointed in their belief that 'warm days will never cease'. The final image of stanza 2, Autumn watching the cider-press, also contains a hint of cruelty. Her patience is an aspect of her own immortal existence and contrasts with the slow crushing of the apples. The fact that she watches their 'last oozings hours by hours', emphasises the drawn-out nature of their destruction.
Each of these verbal pictures connects back to the opening of the poem and the perhaps surprising use of 'conspiring' in line 3. The sinister, calculating sense of the word fits the presentation of Autumn as a force which blesses with energy and beauty ('And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core') only for that life to be harvested in its prime. This is a knowledge of which Autumn's children are pathetically innocent: the 'full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn' but they do not know what is around the corner. Autumn sits 'careless' on her granary floor: the word means both free and relaxed, and also detached and aloof. The doubleness of 'careless' is similar to Keats's use of 'viewless' in 'Ode to a Nightingale' ('the viewless wings of poetry') where the sense of both incomparably sublime and without clear vision is relevant.
'To Autumn' is full of such 'about to' images, which create an anticipatory tension beneath a surface of calmness and gentleness. Gradually, as we move through the stanzas, this tension becomes more apparent. The first stanza describes plans of 'close bosom-friends', Autumn and the sun. It is curiously static grammatically: its chain of infinitives stems from 'Conspiring with him how to...' and constitutes one long sentence. Stanza 2 presents Autumn as midway through her work: lying on a 'half-reap'd' furrow; then as a gleaner half-way across a brook (F.R. Leavis saw the movement of the eyes from the end of one line to the next as evocation of the gleaner's transition across the brook); and finally watching the near completion of the crushing apples. Stanza 3 describes the passing of Autumn and the implicit expectation of winter. This is hinted at through daylight turning into evening ('soft dying day'), the presence of a robin, and the reference to swallows 'gathering' to migrate for warmer skies. It is also the reason for the elegiac 'music' of the final stanza, with its subtle but repeated allusions to death: 'the soft-dying day.. in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn.. as the light wind lives or dies'. The mention of 'sallows' (a Spenserism for 'willows'), a tree conventionally associated with sadness, adds to this mood, as does the poem's final image of the departing swallows. ('Swallows twitter' could, in fact, be an echo of the most well-known elegy of Keats's day, Gray's 'Elegy written in a Country Churchyard', with its 'swallow twitt' ring from the straw-built shed'.)
Thinking about dying?
When Keats wrote the poem in September 1819, he may have known that he himself would soon die of tuberculosis, though it is impossible to tell exactly what he knew. On the one hand, he had pressing concerns about his health. He had been suffering from a persistent sore throat since the previous summer (one of the recognised symptoms of tuberculosis) which worsened until February 1820, when he knew that he had the fatal illness. He had also lost his brother Tom, aged 19, to tuberculosis in December 1818. Having nursed Tom throughout his illness, and as a former medical student, he might have begun to fear the worst. His mother's death through tuberculosis (when Keats was five) might have strengthened a sense of familial connection. On the other hand, there is no direct evidence of Keats writing in his letter about his fear of developing the illness. In fact, in many of the letters he sounds upbeat and hopeful about the future (then again he might have wanted to protect his friends and family but not drawing attention to such worries).
Perhaps he was thinking about Tom when wrote 'To Autumn' (as he had done earlier in 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'). Perhaps he was thinking about premature death on a general level ('Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies!- Ode to a Nightingale'). Perhaps he was wondering whether he was to die young like Thomas Chatterton, a celebrated poet who committed suicide aged 17. Keats actually mentions Chatterton in a letter written to his friend Reynolds two days after he had written 'To Autumn'; 'I always somehow associate Chatterton with autumn'. Whatever the precise state of his feelings and knowledge about his health, he is occupied in the poem more deeply than merely 'gaping after weather', as he jokingly tells Reynolds.
Calmness is suffering
If Keats was thinking about dying at a young age, why should he choose to shape such a personal subject matter in the form of an ode; a traditionally public and formal genre? And why should he decide to write in the well-trodden territory of English pastoral writing; autumn being a distinctly conventional inspiration for poets? In 'To Autumn', I think Keats is trying to find a meaningful perspective for the painful consciousness that he might die young, like Tom and Chatterton. By placing his own worries in the context of the processes of nature, he perhaps finds a degree of calmness, and his feelings of frustration and potential self-pity perhaps struggle towards an understanding that his pain is not unique.
The source of such comfort may derive partly from Keats's reading of Wordsworth. Keats was in broad sympathy with Wordsworth's philosophy of man's intimate and mysterious unity with nature. In a letter to Reynolds of 3 May 1818, Keats identifies Wordsworth's Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey as the best example of poetic under-standing of human suffering:
'We feel the 'burden of the Mystery', To this Point was Wordsworth come, as far as I can conceive, when he wrote 'Tintern Abbey' and it seems to me that his Genius is explorative of those dark Passages.'
Wordsworth's poem 'A slumber did my Spirit Seal' also seems comparable to 'To Autumn' in its mystic presentation of a dead young child at one with nature: 'Rolled round in earth's diurnal course /With rocks and stones and trees!'
In Hyperion, begun in late 1818 and abandoned at the time of writing 'To Autumn', Keats was already exploring the need to accept suffering with dignity and courage. The poem tells the story of the Titans (a group of mythical gods) and their dethronement by a new set: the Olympians of Ancient Greece. Oceanus, the Titan god of the sea, offers an explanation for the fall of his kind and suggests that they patiently give way to the accession of the Olympians. They have fallen, he says, 'by course of Nature's law' and it would be futile and self-destructive to fight the inevitable. The story of the fall of the Titans seems to be of similar value to Keats as the playful but melancholic contemplation of seasonal cycles (another aspect of 'Nature's law') in 'To Autumn'. The Titans' sudden and to them inexplicable fall from power parallels his own experience.
Keats was writing The Fall of Hyperion, his second attempt at the Titan-theme, at the same time as 'To Autumn'. In this poem, Keats allegorically and self-consciously shows the narrator becoming a true poet. By engaging in the tragic suffering of Moneta and the misery of the Titans, he places his own anxieties in the context of an abstract, eternal story, and together with the beauty of Moneta's presence, this gives his understanding and assurance:
'But for her eyes I should have fled away.
They held me back, with a benignant light...
... they saw me not,
But in blank splendour, beam'd like the mild moon,
Who comforts those she sees not, who knows not
What eyes are upward cast.
'Ode on Melancholy' (May 1819) is almost a blueprint for this psychological patterning. Its explicit message is that the poet should cultivate his sensibility by turning away from cliched Graveyard School images and self-pitying, self-generated depression ('Make not your rosary of yew berries') and instead turn towards contemplation of external beauty in Nature.
Response to criticism
There is perhaps a further explanation as to why Keats should choose to express his thoughts about dying in such an apparently oblique way. In The Fall of Hyperion, he condemns self-absorption through Moneta's attack on the narrator as a 'dreamer' who 'venoms all his days'. This might be a sensitive, self-correcting response to criticism of his poetry by figures such as Byron, and magazines such as The Edinburgh Review and Blackwood's. The usual charges against his work were of vulgar sentimentality, pretentious straining for effect, and a cloying prettification of nature. Byron, for instance, mocked Keats's limited knowledge of the natural world and of the Classics, found his eroticism embarrassing, and thought his self-conscious attention to the act of imagining and writing poetry puerile and tiresome: 'Johnny Keats piss a bed poetry ...always working himself up into a state ..frigging his imagination'. (I have not, though, been able to find any evidence of Keat's knowledge of Byron's criticisms.)
Keats does seem aware of the possible dangers of navel-gazing when writing poetry. In 'Ode on Indolence' (May 1819) he concludes his thoughts by rejecting poetry in a rather tongue-in-cheek manner, claiming it will only reveal him as 'a pet lamb in a sentimental farce'. The image is dismissive of cosy, predictable and naive expressions of emotion which lay themselves open, however heartfelt, to derision. It sounds slightly bitter. Keats was prepared to accommodate some of the criticism directed at him, particularly in regard to 'Endymion' (1817). Evidence of this is discernible in the more careful and detached narrative style of 'Lamia' (Summer 1819) and in the changed ending of 'The Eve of St Agnes' (January 1819) where the reappearance of the old and palsied Beadsman and Angela after the romantic happy ending is an attempt to make the poem seem, in his own words, 'less smokeable'. There is no direct evidence that Keats was deliberately looking for a more detached style in 'To Autumn', but this appears to be the direction that his writing was moving towards in late 1819, as, for example, in his desire to make The Fall of Hyperion, 'more naked and Grecian' and in his attempts at drama, Otho the Great and King Stephen: A Tragedy.
'To Autumn'
Intriguingly, The Oxford English Dictionary records usage of a verb 'to autumn' in 1771, originating from the Latin autumnare, which mean to ripen, to bring maturity. Perhaps Keats dropped the word 'Ode' from the title in order to hint that 'To Autumn' is a lyrical poem about the process of ageing and dying young - 'Ode' appears in all the other five titles of poems of this kind. Even if Keats was unaware of the existence of this no doubt obscure verb, it is perfectly possible that he invented such a meaning: his delight in the unusual vocabulary of Spenser, Milton and Chapman (archaisms by Keats's day) is evident across his poetry, and when he felt the need he was quite capable of adopting a word and changing it for his own purposes (see William T.Arnold's introduction to The Practical Works of John Keats, pp. 48-9). We could see the pleasure Keats derived from writing 'To Autumn' as part of the solace the poem's meditation brings. It seems appropriate that he chose a word to do with calmness and balance when telling Reynolds that he had just written a poem about the beauty and warmth of Autumn: 'this struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it'. Like the gleaner crossing her brook, it may have kept him, momentarily, 'steady'.