An Autumn ranks among the finest poems of Keats. He recorded the mood in the form of this ode. this is a perfect Nature-Lyric

1. Prepered by
Laxmikant Kapgate

2. o About the poet
 John Keats, born October 31, 1795, London, England—
died February 23, 1821, Rome, Papal States [Italy]
 Romantic lyric poet with vivid imagery, great sensuous appeal
 an attempt to express a philosophy through classical legend.
 His first mature poem is the sonnet “On First Looking into
Chapman’s Homer” (1816), which was inspired by his excited
reading of George Chapman’s classic 17th-century translation of
the Iliad and the Odyssey.
 Arnold said of Keats, “ He is with Shakespeare.”
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3.  Written September 19, 1819; first published in 1820.
 Last major poem by John Keats, published in Lamia,
Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820)
 The poem treats autumn not as a time of decay but as a
season of complete ripeness and fertility
 Composed after an evening walk near Winchester
 Walter Evert called it ‘the only perfect poem that Keats ever wrote’.
o Quick Facts about An Autumn
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4. 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.
 The first stanza us the bounty of autumn.
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5. 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.
 The second addresses autumn in the style
of a female goddess, with a trace of the
homemaker about her
Stanza II
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6. 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.
 The third stanza goes back to the beauty of
autumn, advising her not to mourn the loss of
springtime, for there is ample life in autumn.
Stanza III
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7. • An ode—a poem that praises a person, an event, or an aspect
of nature
• Three 11-line stanzas (most of Keats's other odes from 1819
have 10-line stanzas).
• Each stanza starts with a quatrain (a group of four lines) with
a normal alternating rhyme scheme (ABAB), and ends with
seven lines with some relatively funky rhyming.
• Within these seven lines, Keats inserted rhyming couplets. So,
each stanza can be thought of as having three units: the
quatrain, the seven lines, and a rhyming couplet toward the
end of the seven lines.
o Form
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8. • Each of these stanzas follows the same rhyme scheme
• In each stanza, the third-to-last and second-to-last lines form a
rhyming couplet. In stanza 1, this couplet rhymes with the C
rhyme. But in stanzas 2 and 3, this couplet uses the D rhyme.
• So stanza 1's rhyme scheme looks like this: ABABCDEDCCE
• And the scheme in the other two stanzas looks like this:
ABABCDECDDE
o Rhyme scheme
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9. • Sensuousness : grapes, apples, the grounds, the hazels with their
sweet kernel- all appeals to our senses of taste and smell
• Vivid imagery: The reaper. The winnower, the gleaner, and the
cider-presser symbolize Autumn. The sun is ripening or
“maturing” the earth./ season of “mellow fruitfulness”
• Interest in Nature: minute observation of natural sights and sound/
sensitivity to natural phenomena
• Spirit of Greek poetry: Greek touch in the personification of
Autumn
• Felicity of diction: various phrases like ‘mellow fruitfullness’,
‘maturing sun’, ‘barred cloud’, ‘hair-soft lifted,’ ‘bloom the soft –
dying day’
o Highlights
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