Here’s an old favourite that I always love, and most especially at this time of year as late sunshine plays across the autumnal reds and golden browns of country landscapes: John Keats, of course, the cockney sparrow ;)
To Autumn
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 summer 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.
I love the way he builds a rich pattern of imagery in the first stanza, redolent of burgeoning fruit and a full harvest – then moves on via the extraordinary personification of the season in the second, through to the images of incipient death in the last. There is an elegiac build, both sweet and sad. The overall rhythm contributes an extraordinary and careful accumulation of sensuous effect, almost like leaves settling in gentle layers under the yielding trees.
In a letter dated Tuesday 21 September 1819, Keats wrote this to his friend John Reynolds, which seems to date the poem as written on Sunday 19th – I think he was staying in Winchester at this point in his life, just returned from the Isle of Wight:
“… How beautiful the season is now – How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather – Dian skies – I never lik’d stubble fields so much as now - Aye better than the chilly green of the spring. 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. I hope you are better employed than in gaping after weather. I have been at different times so happy as not to know what weather it was…”
