![]() ![]() It’s thought that Keats was referring to his Ode to Autumn. This struck me so much in my Sunday’s walk that I composed upon it.’ Somehow, a stubble-field looks warm–in the same way that some pictures look warm. 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. ‘How beautiful the season is now–How fine the air. Indeed, in a letter to Reynolds written in September of 1819, Keats writes: The writing of the “Ode to Autumn” may have given him a venue for an exquisite expression of poetic thought. His skill with language and imagery rivaled Shakespeare’s. If there was any poet in the history of poetry who could write beautifully for the sake of writing beautifully, that was Keats. And that’s that Keats may simply have been writing a beautiful poem. Perhaps, with this ode, he is metaphorically describing his own dissolution and the harvesting of his mind – his poetry.īut there’s another possibility – one that possibly sends tenured professors, lit majors and the Helen Vendlers of the world into fits of apoplexy. The symptoms of his tuberculosis were already underway. Bear in mind, as well, that Keats knew that he was likely to die when he wrote this poem. Autumn must achieve its fruition through its own dissolution. Keats knows that autumn will inevitably destroy all that he’s found beautiful within the ode, but knows as well that Autumn has its music too – its song, its “wailful choir”, a part of its own dissolution and impossible without it. ![]() Vendler’s chapter is worth reading and even if you don’t read Vendler, knowing this much might help you read the poem in a different light. She may or may not be right about Keats’ intentions, but in this case at least, Keats’ own letters show that he liked to think along these lines. Vendler’s entire chapter elaborates on this central premise. The ode To Autumn… contains Keats’ most reflective view of creativity and art… (p. A teeming brain becomes a ripe field the act of writing is the reaping of that field to have written all the poems one has been born to write is to have gleaned the full harvest from that teeming brain and to have compiled one’s poems in books is to have stored away riches. My main reason for mentioning Vendler, however, is her assertion that reaping serves Keats as a metaphor, throughout his poetry, for the act of writing:Īs the act of conceiving poems is paralleled to natural fruitfulness, his books are the garners into which his grain is gathered. ![]() The world’s natural state was a central metaphor for the Romantics with its the inevitable cycle of creation and loss. This was the beginning of the age that emphasized the pastoral over and above the urban – an intuitive grasp of the world began to supercede the classical emphasis on reason. ![]() Nevertheless, what the similarities between these two passages tells us is that the Romantic Era had begun. Whether or not Keats ever read or knew of Coleridge’s poem should remain conjecture. So… without clearcut documentation, take what Vendler writes with a grain of salt. Vendler then proceeds from the conjectural “must have” to “Keats borrowed” in the next paragraph. Shall hang them up in the silent icicles, Smokes in the sun-thaw whether the eave-drops fall Of mossy apple trees, while the nigh thatch With greenness, or the redbreast sit and singīetwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch Whether the summer clothe the general earth Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, Evidently she could find no correspondence suggesting this to be true but, who knows, maybe she’s right. Vendler writes, for example, that Keats “must have” remembered Coleridge’s Frost at Midnight. You may be no closer to knowing what Keats actually intended, but you can safely skip your MFA. Even if two thirds of her analysis is sheer conjecture, her ebullience and knowledge makes her every sentence worthwhile. Helen Vendler, a “close reader” who can turn limericks into three hundred page dissertations and the bar room drunks who wrote them into towering geniuses, wrote an exhaustive book on Keats’ odes. The Ode to Autumn was the last of the famous odes Keats wrote – and some would argue his greatest. May 10 2009: Bright Star by John Keats, His Sonnet.May 27 2009: Edited and expanded with reference to Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods”.JNew Post! On Imagery & Poetry: Ode to Autumn & The Five Senses. ![]()
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