Of all poems that speak to this moment in the year, Keats’ ‘To Autumn’ has to be, after 200 years, still the truest, the best loved, the most familiar and yet always fresh and new.

In a letter to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds from Winchester in the south of England, dated Sept. 22, 1819, Keats writes -

‘How beautiful the season is now — How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather — Dian skies — I never liked stubble fields so much as now — Aye, better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow, a stubble-field 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.’ Although he was to die at the tragically young age of 25, in February of 1821, he is, assuredly, as he felt he would be, ‘among the immortals’ — and this was to be the last poem published in his lifetime:

‘To Autumn’

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,—

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.

One of the riches that Keats left us, along with his miraculous poems, are his letters. I found them upstairs in the Library gallery in an 1899 edition, musty smelling, with pages that tear if not turned very gently, but words that remain as vibrant as the day they were written. Letters that are not only remarkable for their deep affection for his family and friends, for their spontaneity and lively curiosity, but as Elizabeth Bishop said about Gerard Manley Hopkins, quoting the essayist and scholar Morris W. Croll, you see ‘not a thought, but a mind thinking’. Letters that make excellent company for a Fall or Winter afternoon!

Keats, of course, was steeped in Shakespeare and there is in ‘To Autumn’, an echo of Sonnet 97, “The teeming autumn big with rich increase,/ Bearing the wanton burden of the prime.” But this is, in Shakespeare, the lover in summertime so bereft of his beloved that in his heart it is autumn or winter — “How like a winter hath my absence been/ From thee,…’. The lover’s poignant plaint is heightened by the tight constraints of the sonnet form. Yet, perhaps the greater difference between the Shakespeare sonnet and the Keats ode is that there is no self present in the latter, none. It is as though the poet is absorbed into the being that is Autumn. In his sonnet, ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be’, the closing lines are

‘ — then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think

Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink’.

Nearer our own time, the late Philip Levine (1928-2015), 2011 United States Poet Laureate and recipient of many awards, describes Keats in his book of essays “My Lost Poets,” as ‘a man who failed to find a distinction between himself and the creatures and beings of the world he inhabited; “if a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.’

Elizabeth Bishop has already been mentioned here, but Keats’ sparrow does remind me of her poetry, as far removed as she is from the young 19th century romantic poet as it is possible to imagine. Yet she wrote ‘what one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration’. A statement, I feel, that Keats would fully understand. Here are lines from her lyric ‘Sandpiper’ — that little shore bird being identified in the first stanza as ‘a student of Blake’ (seeing ‘the world in a grain of sand’).

His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied,

looking for something, something, something,

Poor bird, he is obsessed!

The millions of grains are black, white, tan and gray,

Mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.

Or from ‘The Moose’ where ‘the fog, shifting, salty, thin,/comes closing in.

Its cold, round crystals/ form and slide and settle/ in the white hens’ feathers,/in gray glazed cabbages/ on the cabbage roses/ and lupins like apostles;

And finally the moose appears — in stanza 26 of 28 six line stanzas — watched in wonder by the passengers through the windows of the bus.

‘Why, why do we feel/ (we all feel) this sweet/ sensation of joy?’

To return to Keats, in his 1819 letter to his brother George he talks about transforming the world from what others called a “Vale of Tears” to what he called a “Vale of Soul-Making.” This letter is a window, our window, on ‘a mind thinking’, on that ‘vale of soul-making’, that sees the sparrow and ‘takes part in its existence’.

To fill out this portrait, we have George Keats’ words describing his beloved younger brother — “He was not merely the favorite of all, like a pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage; but his high- mindedness, his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive, his placability, his generosity, wrought so general a feeling in his behalf that I never heard a word of disapproval from anyone, superior or equal, who had known him.”

And now let us give the last word to the young, dying, John Keats as he wrote what was to be his final letter, addressed to his close friend Charles Armitage Brown, dated Rome, November 30th 1820.

“I can scarcely bid you goodbye, even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow.

God bless you!”

— John Keats

Belinda de Kay is the emeritus director of Stonington Free Library.