Keats' to Autumn
An Analysis of Keats' "To Autumn"
John Keats' "To Autumn" is a kind of "companion piece" to another English poem, "Ode to Evening," by William Collins -- a poem very much in the mind of Keats when he seat to work on "Autumn." Inspired by the English countryside, Keats, like Williams, evokes nature's reflection of the poet's own emergence from youthfulness to adulthood. Composed only two years before his death, there is already in this work a sense of the imminent end awaiting the young poet -- who is even still at his most fruitful. "To Autumn" carries with it the dichotomous theme of life in its fullness, haunted by "mists" and mellowness and a creeping kind of melancholy that portends the harvest. This paper will analyze Keats' "To Autumn" and show how the poet uses imagery, personification, and structure to illuminate and convey the fullness of summer's "ripeness to the core"...
Autumn John Keats, Ode to Autumn 1819 (222) To Autumn has sparingly figured in criticisms of Keats's poetry, because when compared with other odes of 1819, Ode to Autumn appears not to provide a strong basis for exposition or discussion purposes. Ode to Autumn's three stanzas mark out the seasons' progress. In stanza one, Autumn's role as the harbinger of the fruits for the season is distinguished. In stanza two, Autumn
Most individuals fail to appreciate life to the fullest because they concentrate on being remembered as some of the greatest humans who ever lives. This makes it difficult for them to enjoy the simple pleasures in life, considering that they waste most of their time trying to put across ideas that are appealing to the masses. While many did not manage to produce ideas that survived more than them, others
Finally, the sestet ends with a question about whether any moral lessons can be learned from this little scene in nature: "[w]hat but design of darkness to appall/if design govern in a thing so small." In other words, the speaker is asking whether he should even try to draw any conclusions from the spider's destruction of the beautiful moth. The final lines of the poem not only call into question
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