Poetry for All
Transcript for Episode 30: John Keats, "To Autumn"

Joanne: 

Hello, IÕm Joanne Diaz.

Abram:

And IÕm Abram Van Engen.

Joanne:

And this is Poetry for All.

Abram: 

In this podcast we read a poem, discuss it, learn from it, and then read it one more time. 

Joanne:
 
Today, we are very excited to have not one but two guests with us to discuss John KeatsÕ wonderful poem, ÒTo Autumn.Ó Michael Theune is the Robert Harrington Professor and Chair of the English Department at Illinois Wesleyan University, and Brian Rejack is Associate Professor and Associate Chair of English at Illinois State University. Together, they are the co-editors of a volume titled Keats' Negative Capability: New Origins and Afterlives, published by Oxford University Press, and they are also the curators of the Keats Letters Project, which you can find at keatslettersproject.com. Brian and Michael, Welcome.

Michael:

Thanks so much for having us!

Brian:

Thanks so much, happy to be here.

Abram:

So, as Joanne mentioned, weÕre going to be looking at John KeatsÕ ÒTo AutumnÓ and before we begin our discussion, would you be willing to read that poem for us, Mike?

Michael:

Sure, IÕd be happy to:

ÒTo AutumnÓ

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 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 cyder-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,Ñ
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.

Joanne:

Wow, that was so great! 

Abram:

Alright, so hereÕs my question for you: as someone who does not regularly read the Romanticists, and who is not perhaps immediately takenÉ

Michael:

[Laughs]

Abram:

É but who understands that Keats is great and very influential, talk to me: why is this a great poem, what should we be noticing in this poem, or whatÕs the context, or whatÕs this poem doing that changes poetry that we should understand?

Michael:

How about we just kind of start with some immediate context. We actually know about when Keats wrote this poem. He has this letter to his good friend, Reynolds, written on the 21st of September, 1819. And Keats is talking about the fact that two days earlier, on Sunday, so on September 19th, 1819, he was out for a walk and this is what Keats writes to Reynolds. He says, ÒHow beautiful the season is now, how fine the air. A temperate, sharp mist about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather, Dianne skies. I never liked stubbled fields so much as now. Aye, better than the chilly green of the spring, somehow stubble-playing looks warm in the same way that some pictures look warm. This struck me so much in my SundayÕs walk that I composed upon it.Ó

Joanne and Abram:

[Both chuckle]

Michael:

Yeah, so itÕs one of those poems thatÕs like, okay, we know exactly when he was making this poem and kind of what inspired it. And for Keats, itÕs a poem thatÕs kind of coming late in his life. So Keats died very young, he suffered his family disease, tuberculosis, which was called ÒconsumptionÓ at the time. Earlier that spring, Keats actually has a coughing fit, he coughs into his pillow, he sees that thereÕs blood, and Keats (who had studied as a physician) looks at that blood and he says, Òthat is arterial blood. It is my death-warrant, I must die.Ó

Joanne:

WowÉ

Michael:

Right, and Keats is highly aware of his own mortality and even a sense that itÕs much more imminent.

Brian:

ÒTo AutumnÓ is often read in terms of its high seriousness and the sort of quiet tragedy of its musings on mortality, especially the end of the poem. This gets at an issue with this poem that Mike and I talk about a lot with respect to Keats, the temptation to always associate everything with death and mortality because we know the conclusion of KeatsÕ life storyÉ

Michael and Joanne:

[Humming in agreement]

Brian: 

É right, I mean he dies in February 1821, so it is true that a year and a half after writing ÒTo Autumn,Ó Keats is no more. But, Mike and I always try to push back against that narrative a little bit because thereÕs so much vitality and playfulness and wit andÉ yeah, life in KeatsÕ writing. And in this poem too, there are all these images of the profusion of life and fruitfulness and ripeness. The apple treesÕ branches are bent with these apples, a fruit filled with ripeness to its core, youÕve got a gord thatÕs swelling, hazel shells that are plumped with a sweet kernel, then that final image of the bees with the budding Òmore and still more later flowers for the bees,Ó and theyÕve got their Òo'er-brimm'd...clammy cells.Ó In terms of the images and the form, right from the start of the first stanza itÕs all about the fullness of life and everything that the season of Autumn brings. 

Joanne: 

Could you say a bit about his closeness to nature and how he works on it and how it works on him?

Brian:

Yeah, he has that snail-horn perception of beauty. ThatÕs the hallmark of KeatsÕ poetry in a lot of ways, is this really fine-grained attunement to the natural world. But actually, he grows up the son of a stable worker in London, heÕs an urban poet. So his writing about these natural scenes is very much learned and what many of his critics during his lifetime made fun of him for is that basically heÕs a suburban poet: his nature is not the sublime of the lake district where Wordsworth is, itÕs the nice little fox gloves on Hampstead Heath. So to us, I think it reads in a slightly different way than it did to his contemporary critics. 

Michael:

I wanna take a moment to suggest that this is KeatsÕ most negatively-capable poem. In December of 1817, Keats writes a letter to his brothers George and Tom and Keats talks about how he had this kind of insight into the nature of literary genius. And he says, Òat once it struck me, what quality it went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously. I mean Ònegative capability:Ó that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. One of the things thatÕs happening in this poem is whatÕs not happening in this poem. So, one of the things thatÕs pretty amazing about ÒTo AutumnÓ is that itÕs one of those poems that actually isnÕt going to make a palpable design. So itÕs not saying, ÒhereÕs autumn and hereÕs its clear meaning for you.Ó Part of the value of this poem is being able to hear its kind of quietness and reticence and to understand that over and against the noise and the bombast of other kinds of poetry. 

Abram:

You know, when I was reading this poem, Mike, I kept waiting for the insight. And this poem just sort of sticks with sight, it never sort of brings itself around to a sort of central insight or a central takeaway or something like that. Instead, itÕs just sort of like, ÒhereÕs autumn as it gathers all the fruits and things together, then as it presses all the fruits and oozes them into cider, and so on, and all thatÕs left is the stubble in the fields.Ó But then the last set of lines is all just the sounds that heÕs hearingÉ

All:

[Voicing agreement]

Abram:

É right? Lambs and crickets and birds, and the last line is Ò and gathering swallows twitter in the skies.Ó And heÕs like, Òand?Ó And there is no Òand,Ó thatÕs the point! ItÕs sort of a very careful description of autumn as it comes and goes.

Michael: 

That is precisely the point of this poem is that there isnÕt that kind of point. Keats, very clearly in this poem, is fascinated by the issue of kind of concentration or even Òconcentrate,Ó right? Think of the juices and the plumping, but this is a poem that is synthesizing pleasure and pain and death and life. The poem, through its music and its sensual qualities, tries to embody that rather than to tell everybody that. 

Joanne: Yesterday, when we were talking about the Romantics, you mentioned some political and historical context for what was happening around the time that Keats wrote this poem, but that political context is, at least on a superficial reading, nowhere to be found in this poem. Could you say a bit about that?

Michael:

Certain critics read ÒTo AutumnÓ as political escapism, right, that this is an ideological poem in that it is trying to avoid politics. So it becomes problematic in that way. And a number of critics have tried to see how thereÕs a kind of encoded politics in the poem. So, words like Òconspiring,Ó there were arguments that the red poppies were either blood of victims or redcoats, right, so there have been efforts to try to make this a much more overtly political poem. ThereÕs a terrific book by a critic named Anahid Nersessian called Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse, and hereÕs what Nersessian says about ÒTo Autumn,Ó Òin this ode, perfection is not an achievement but a style. And it is essential to what Keats is trying to say. The problem with beauty is not that it is so fragile but that it is so durable. It is there and true even in an avalanche of shit and despair. To acknowledge that fully as this poem does is a profound act of self-mortification. Every impeccable turn of every line is bought by shame, which can never be allowed to leach through the language it has hounded into being Ôlest it accidentally impersonate an alibi or justification. That we can be here on this planet, in this time, confined by these exact habits of survival, and still find things to call beautiful, and to love, or to be unable to stop loving is indefensible. But we are here and we do. ÔTo AutumnÕ confesses it for us.Ó

Joanne:

Wow, that is so moving!

All:

[Laugh]

Michael:

ItÕs a pretty great new book.

Joanne:

I love how counterintuitive that is, Òthe problem with beauty is that it is durable.Ó With what Nersessian is saying, how can we read this poem in a moment of ecological crisis in 2021?

Brian: 

The greatness of this poem is that itÕs giving us this scene without us. You can think of this as a sort of post-apocalyptic poem in a way, that itÕs a scene of life and vitality and profusion, but for the most part not a human one. This is like a non-human landscape. I often think of this poem as kind of like a field recordingÉ

Abram:

Yeah.

Brian:

É You set up the microphone and let autumn do its work. ItÕs really just an attempt to resist that human-centric impulse.

Joanne:

Oh my God, so IÕve had conversations with my neighbor many times and sheÕs someone whoÕs really attentive to the natural world and very concerned about ecological crises. And weÕve talked a lot of times, like one time in passing she said to me, Òyou know, the Earth will go on, it will just go on without us.Ó And so, the more you talk about this poem, the more I start to read it as a 21st century person. And that ooze at the end, yes, there is a lot of human labor in the cider and in the stubbled plains, but what if this is, by the end of the poem, a world without us? ThatÕs really kind of incredible. 

Michael:

In another poem, Keats begins a sonnet of his with the line, Òthe poetry of Earth is never dead.Ó

Joanne:

Oof.

Michael: 

Right, so I love BrianÕs idea of Òfield notes,Ó here.

Abram:

So, I wonder if we could just spend a few more minutes talking about the specific words being used to unify the different contents of the different stanzas. So, one thing that I noticed in the first stanza is that thereÕs a lot of active verbs: load, bless, run, bend, fill, swell, plump, setÉ things are hard at work in that first stanza. And as all things are hard at work making more and more, we get that repetition, Òto set budding more and still more.Ó And then in the second stanza, things become less and less as we get words like: sifting, winnowing, reaping, oozing. So itÕs a kind of labor there, but itÕs a labor that makes less of what was more. And finally we get to that last stanza, and as we talked about, thereÕs kind of this unified imagery of a kind of mortality, Òsoft-dying day, stubble-plains, wailful choir, the morning gnats, the sinking light, the wind that lives or dies,Ó and so there is a kind of unity to the movements to this poem. I wonder if you could say more about the specific words you notice in each stanza or how you see him unifying the different movements of this poem. 

Brian:

One of the things I think is hard for us as 21st century readers to pick up on is the inventiveness of KeatsÕ language. He has words like Òsoft-lifted,Ó Òsoft-dying,Ó these combinations of words to turn them into these new adjectives.

Joanne:

AhhhÉ

Brian:

TheyÕre words conspiring together. Like Òbosom- Òthatch-eves,Ó Òcottage-trees,Ó Òo'er-brimm'd,Ó Òsoft-lifted,Ó Òhalf-reap'd,Ó and there are others, but there are a lot of hyphenated words that either Keats is himself creating as these kinds of neologisms, or that are already existing words. I always connect that with the sense of profusion as well. 

Abram:

I kind of feel the tone of this poem to be not rejection, not protest, not celebration either, but in the best possible sense, what a field-recording gives us is this kind of one-ness with it.

Brian: 

The last three types of sounds we hear are singing, whittling, and twittering. Right, itÕs getting towards this celebratory mode. Twittering is sociable and gossipy and fun and playful, right, like these birds twittering in the skies, I donÕt think theyÕre really twittering because theyÕre concerned about mortality, theyÕre up there having a grand old time twittering away. 

Michael:

The final lines feel, I agree with Brian, they feel much more lively than not. 

Abram:

You know, IÕm so used to autumn being about death and the dying of the light and so on, and you get all that imagery in the first half of the stanza, and yet the end of the stanza (and I think this is why I was thrown by the poem at first) is not about death, it;s about things living and twittering and singing and whistling.

Brian:

I think it does play with your expectations where you expect this final stanza to inexorably lead to death and stillness and silence, but it really doesnÕt do that. It sort of flirts with that and instead ends with a very soft (right it is soft and small and quiet and intimate) sort of celebration and an ongoing vitality. 

Abram:

Oh man, well we can think about the different meanings it has as we read it one more time. Brian, would you be willing to read this poem for us?

Brian:

ÒTo AutumnÓ

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 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 cyder-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,Ñ
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.

Joanne:

Wow, thank you so much for reading, that was amazing. And thank you for joining us today, Mike and Brian, I have learned so much from this conversation that I would never have known, thank you for this. 

Michael:

What a treat, thank you for having us, yeah.

Brian: 

Thank you for having us.

Joanne:

So, for more information on John Keats, we hope you will visit our website at poetryforall.fireside.fmÉ 

Abram:

And you can subscribe to Poetry For All wherever you get your podcasts. Please be sure to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. 

Joanne:

Thank you for listening.

Abram:

Thank you.