Autumn Flashcards
‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun’ (5)
- personified / apostrophe
- sibilance and consonance of ‘m’ - dream-like
- double meaning of mist - mellow/concealing death
- ‘maturing’ ripens but also closer to death
- constant change reflected through changes in meter (these lines iambic)
‘Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;’
- ‘conspiring’ also hints towards decay
- ‘load’ and ‘bless’ - religious + bountiful imagery - stresses transformative process
- line 4 perfect iambic - reflects natural seasonal order of autumn
‘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;’
- purpose - depict abundance so great it hints one is close to death/decay
- dynamic imagery - sense of life to contrast with theme of death
- consonance of ‘l’ contributes to ideas of abundance
‘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.’
- further allusion to death coming ‘think’
- ^^ ambivalence of reader - to enjoy sun or think of approaching winter
- pathetic fallacy - speaker can empathise with bees but knows better - melancholic tone
- line 11 ends with full-stop - past lines have reflected non-stop growth
‘Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?’
- rhetorical question - emphasises autumn’s universality
- ^^ reminder poem is apostrophe
- Historically, the second-person pronouns thee, thy, and thou were used to address one’s friends and family…Although by Keats’s time thee, thy, and thou had fallen out of use, he still uses them in his poetry
- ^^ KING JAMES BIBLE ALSO USED TO TALK TO GOD - AUTUMN GOD-LIKE
- adjustment of iambic pentameter
‘Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;’
- ideas of Autumn being still - hinting to death
- alliteration of ‘winnowing wind’ is onomatopoeic
- ^^ calming or unnerving?
‘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:’
- stillness of Autumn further explored ‘sound asleep’
- ‘poppies’ linking to death via opium overconsumption
- conflicting image of ‘scythe’ and ‘spare’ - idea Autumn is trying to hold off winter killing everything
- again beauty hints to death ‘twined flowers’ will kill each other
‘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.’
- plosive sounds and colon before line 18 indicate shift from still, lazy nature
- reflects how Autumn ever-changing
‘Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—’
- ambiguity of Autumn emphasised through repetition of rhetorical questions
- pep-talk to Autumn - suggests further bond between reader and season
‘While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;’
- travel through day - stanza 1 ‘mists’, stanza 2 warm afternoon, now ‘soft-dying day’ evening - pathetic fallacy
- alliteration of soft but plosive ‘b’ - indicates dying but emphasises gentleness - mournful yet celebratory
- ‘rose’, symbol of life, touches mowed fields, symbol of death
- perfect iambic reflects this is natural and necessary
‘Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;’
- gnats annoying but glorified as ‘choir’, shows how Keats is overcome with beauty
- Keats elegises the gnats wailing ^^
- gnats accepting being directed by wind symbolic of how we should accept transience
- punctuation and extended vowel sounds elongate sentences - reflects ‘mourn’
‘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;’
- addresses ‘music’ asked about earlier
- ^^ idea that Autumn should be praised for its vitality as much as spring is
- ## ‘full-grown’ lambs alludes to death
‘And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.’
- one of the very few species that can escape winter by flying south
Form
- can be described as elegy or pastoral poem
- each stanza starts with quatrain, but then has 7 lines with varying rhyming to reflect how Autumn is transformative/ever-changing
- stanza 1 life, stanza 2 death, stanza 3 combination - very traditional as follows basic structure of original ode
