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*** Introduction of John Keats (1795-1821) Significance l. The most talented of the English romantic poets 2. He wrote best odes in English literature 3. The last of the great Romantics 4. The most attractive Romantic figure because of his personal life and his poetry 5. A poet of great beauty 6. A close friend of Shelley‟s Features of His poetry 1. fused with verbal beauty, musical beauty and melodious beauty 2. deal with minor subjects and his youth 3. worship beauty, sensuous beauty have physical response to life & this world stylistically, 4. he perfected the form …ode‟ 5. rhyme scheme is complicated, but used the couplet Type of Work

Type of poem: lyric poem Type of lyric poem: ode 1. "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a romantic ode, a dignified but highly lyrical (emotional) poem in which the author speaks to a person or thing absent or present. 2. In this famous ode, Keats addresses the urn and the images on it. The romantic ode was at the pinnacle of its popularity in the 19th Century. It was the re sult of an author‟s deep meditation on the person or object. Structure and Meter "Ode on a Grecian Urn" consists of five stanzas that present a scene, describe and comment on what it shows, and offer a general truth that the scene teaches a person analyzing the scene. Each stanza has ten lines written in iambic pentameter. The rime scheme is abab, cdecde Situation and Setting 1. In England, Keats examines a marble urn crafted in ancient Greece. (Whether such an urn was real or imagined is uncertain. However, many artifacts from ancient Greece, ones which could have inspired Keats, were on display in the British Museum at the time that Keats wrote the poem.) Pictured on the urn, a type of vase, are pastoral scenes in Greece.

2. In one scene, males are chasing females in some sort of revelry or celebration. There are musicians playing pipes (wind instruments such as flutes) and timbrels (ancient tambourines). Keats wonders whether the images represent both gods and humans. He also wonders what has occasioned their merrymaking. 3. A second scene depicts people leading a heifer to a sacrificial altar. Keats writes his ode about what he sees, addressing or commenting on the urn and its images as if they were real beings with whom he can speak. "Ode on a Grecian Ode" is based on a series of paradoxes and opposites: 1. the discrepancy between the urn with its frozen images and the dynamic life portrayed on the urn, 2. the human and changeable versus the immortal and permanent, 3. participation versus observation, 4. life versus art. Analysis of the poem Summary In the poem Keats shows the contrast between the permanence of art and the transience of human passion. The poet has

absorbed himself into the timeless beautiful scenery on the Grecian urn: the lovers, musicians and worshippers carved on the urn, and their everlasting joys. They are unaffected by time, stilled in expectation. This is the glory and the limitation of the world conjured up by and object of art. The urn celebrates but simplifies intu itions of joy by defying our pain and suffering. But at last, the urn presents his ambivalence about time and the nature of beauty. Stanza I. Keats calls the urn an “unravish‟d bride of quietness” because it has existed for centuries without undergoing a ny changes (it is “unravished”) as it sits quietly on a shelf or table. He also calls it a “foster-child of silence and time” because it is has been adopted by silence and time, parents who have conferred on the urn eternal stillness. In addition, Keats refers to the urn as a “sylvan historian” because it records a pastoral scene from long ago. (“Sylvan” refers to anything pertaining to woods or forests.) This scene tells a story (“legend”) in pictures framed with leaves (“leaf-fring‟d”)–a story that the urn tells more charmingly with its images than Keats does with his pen. Keats speculates that the scene is set either in Tempe or Arcady. Tempe is a valley in Thessaly, Greece–between Mount OlMount Olympus and Mount Ossa–that is favored by Apollo, the god of poetry and music. Arcady is Arcadia, a picturesque region in the

Peloponnesus (a peninsula making up the southern part of Greece) where inhabitants live in carefree simplicity. Keats wonders whether the images he sees represent humans or gods. And, he asks, who are the reluctant (“loth”) maidens and what is the activity taking place? Stanza I begins slowly, asks questions arising from thought and raises abstract concepts such as time and art. The comparison of the urn to an "unravish'd bride" functions at a number of levels. It prepares for the impossisbility of fulfillment of stanza II and for the violence of lines 8-10 of this stanza. "Still" embodies two concepts--time and motion--which appear in a number of ways in the rest of the poem. They appear immediately in line 2 with the urn as a "foster" child. The urn exists in the real world, which is mutable or subject to time and change, yet it and the life it presents are unchanging; hence, the bride is "unravish'd" and as a "foster" child, the urn is touched by "slow time," not the time of the real world. The figures carved on the urn are not subject to time, though the urn may be changed or affected over slow time. The urn as "sylvan historian" speaks to the viewer, even if it doesn't answer the poet's questions (stanzas I and IV). Whether the urn communicates a message depends on how you interpet the final stanza. The urn is "sylvan"--first, because a border of leaves encircles the vase and second because the scene carved

on the urn is set in woods. The "flowery tale" told "sweetly" and "sylvan historian" do not prepare for the terror and wild sexuality unleashed in lines 8-10 (another opposition); the effect and the subject of the urn or art conflict. Is it paradoxical that the urn, which is silent, tells tales "more sweetly than our rime"? Twice (lines 6 and 8) the poet is unable to distinguish between mortal and immortal, men and gods, another opposition; is there a suggestion of coexistence and inseparableness in this blurring of differences between them? With lines 8-10, the poet is caught up in the excited, rapid activities depicted on the urn and moves from observer to participant in the life on the urn, in the sense that he is emotionally involved. Paradoxically, turbulant dynamic passion is convincingly portrayed on cold, motionless stone. Stanza II. Using paradox and oxymoron to open Stanza 2, Keats praises the silent music coming from the pipes and timbrels as far more pleasing than the audible music of real life, for the music from the urn is for the spirit. Keats then notes that the young man playing the pipe beneath trees must always remain an etched figure on the urn. He is fixed in time like the leaves on the tree. They will remain ever green and never die. Keats also says the bold young lover (who may be the piper or another person) can never embrace the maiden next to him even though he is so

close to her. However, Keats says, the young man should not grieve, for his lady love will remain beautiful forever, and their love–though unfulfilled–will continue through all eternity. The first four lines contrast the ideal (in art, love, and nature) and the real. The last six lines contrast the drawback of frozen time; note the negative phrasing: "canst not leave," "nor ever can," "never, never canst" in lines 5-8. Stanza III. Keats addresses the trees, calling them “happy, happy boughs” because they will never shed their leaves, and then addresses the young piper, calling him “happy melodist” because his songs will continue forever. In addition, the young man's love for the maiden will remain forever “warm and still to be enjoy‟d / For ever panting, and for ever young. . . .” In contrast, Keats says, the love between a man and a woman in the real world is imperfect, bringing pain and sorrow and desire that cannot be fully quenched. The lover comes away with a “burning forehead, and a parching tongue.” This stanza recapitulates ideas from the preceding two stanzas and re-introduces some figures, the trees which can't shed leaves, the musician, and the lover. Keats portrays the ideal life on the urn as one without disappointment and suffering. The urn-depicted passion may be human, but it is also "all breathing passion far above" because it is unchanging.

Stanza IV. Keats inquires about the images of people approaching an altar to sacrifice a "lowing" (mooing) cow, one that has never borne a calf, on a green altar. Do these simple folk come from a little town on a river, a seashore, or a mountain topped by a peaceful fortress. Wherever the town is, it will be forever empty, for all of its inhabitants are here participating in the festivities depicted on the urn. Like the other figures on the urn, townspeople are frozen in time; they cannot escape the urn and return to their homes. Stanza IV shows the ability of art to stir the imagination, so that the viewer sees more than is portrayed. The poet imagines the village from which the figures on the urn came. In this stanza, the poet begins to withdraw from his emotional participation in and identification with life on the urn. This stanza focuses on communal life (the previous stanzas described individuals). What paradox is implicit in the contrast between the event being a sacrifice and the altar being "green? between leading the heifer to the sacrifice and her "silken flanks with garlands drest"? In imagining an empty town, why does he give three possible locations for the town, rather than fix on one location? Why does he use the word "folk," rather than "people"? Think about

the different connotations of these words. The image of the silent, desolate town embodies both pain and joy. Stanza V. Keats begins by addressing the urn as an “attic shape.” Attic refers to Attica, a region of east-central ancient Greece in which Athens was the chief city. Shape, of course, refers to the urn. Thus, attic shape is an urn that was crafted in ancient Attica. The urn is a beautiful one, poet says, adorned with “brede” (braiding, embroidery) depicting marble men and women enacting a scene in the tangle of forest tree branches and weeds. As people look upon the scene, they ponder it–as they would ponder eternity–trying so hard to grasp its meaning that they exhaust themselves of thought. Keats calls the scene a “cold pastoral!”–in part because it is made of cold, unchanginmarble and in part, perhaps, because it frustrates him with its unfathomable mysteries, as does eternity. (At this time in his life, Keats was suffering from tuberculosis, a disease that had killed his brother, and was no doubt much occupied with thoughts of eternity. He was also passionately in love with a young woman, Fanny Brawne, but was unable to act decisively on his feelings–even though she reciprocated his love–because he believed his lower social status and his dubious financial situation stood in the way. Consequently, he was like the cold marble of the urn–fixed and immovable.) Keats says that when

death claims him and all those of his generation, the urn will remain. And it will say to the next generation what it has said to Keats: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” In other words, do not try to look beyond the beauty of the urn and its images, which are representations of the eternal, for no one can see into eternity. The beauty itself is enough for a human; that is the only truth that a human can fully grasp. The poem ends with an endorsement of these words, saying they make up the only axiom that any human being really needs to know. The poet observes the urn as a whole and remembers his vision. Is he emotionally involved in the life of the urn, or is he again the observer? What aspect of the urn is stressed in the phrases "marble men and maidens," "silent form," and "Cold Pastoral"? Yet the poet did experience the life experienced on the urn and comments, ambiguously perhaps, that the urn "dost tease us out of thought / As doth eternity." Is this another reference to the "dull brain" which "perplexes and retards" ("Nightingale")? Why does Keats use the word "tease"? By teasing him "out of thought," did the urn draw him from the real world into an ideal world, where, if there was neither imperfection nor change, there was also no real life or fulfillment? Or, possibly, was the poet so involved in the life of the urn he couldn't think? Was the urn an escape, however temporary, from the pains and

problems of life? One thing that all these suggestions mean is that this is a puzzling line. In the final couplet, is Keats saying that pain is beautiful? You must decide whether it is the poet (a persona), Keats (the actual poet), or the urn speaking. Are both lines spoken by the same person, or does some of the quotation express the view of one speaker and the rest of the couplet express the comment upon that view by another speaker? Who is being addressed--the poet, the urn, or the reader? Are the concluding lines a philosphical statement about life or do they make sense only in the context of the poem? Click here to read the three versions of the last two lines.

*** Ode on a Grecian Urn Summary In the first stanza, the speaker stands before an ancient Grecian urn and addresses it. He is preoccupied with its depiction of pictures frozen in time. It is the “still unravish’d bride of quietness,” the “foster-child of silence and slow time.” He also describes the urn as a “historian” that can tell a story. He

wonders about the figures on the side of the urn and asks what legend they depict and from where they come. He looks at a picture that seems to depict a group of men pursuing a group of women and wonders what their story could be: “What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? / What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?” In the second stanza, the speaker looks at another picture on the urn, this time of a young man playing a pipe, lying with his lover beneath a glade of trees. The speaker says that the piper’s “unheard” melodies are sweeter than mortal melodies because they are unaffected by time. He tells the youth that, though he can never kiss his lover because he is frozen in time, he should not grieve, because her beauty will never fade. In the third stanza, he looks at the trees surrounding the lovers and feels happy that they will never shed their leaves. He is happy for the piper because his songs will be “for ever new,” and happy that the love of the boy and the girl will last forever, unlike mortal love, which lapses into “breathing human passion” and eventually vanishes, leaving behind only a “burning forehead, and a parching tongue.” In the fourth stanza, the speaker examines another picture on the urn, this one of a group of villagers leading a heifer to be sacrificed. He wonders where they are going (“To what green altar, O mysterious priest...”) and from where they have come.

He imagines their little town, empty of all its citizens, and tells it that its streets will “for evermore” be silent, for those who have left it, frozen on the urn, will never return. In the final stanza, the speaker again addresses the urn itself, saying that it, like Eternity, “doth tease us out of thought.” He thinks that when his generation is long dead, the urn will remain, telling future generations its enigmatic lesson: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” The speaker says that that is the only thing the urn knows and the only thing it needs to know. Form “Ode on a Grecian Urn” follows the same ode-stanza structure as the “Ode on Melancholy,” though it varies more the rhyme scheme of the last three lines of each stanza. Each of the five stanzas in “Grecian Urn” is ten lines long, metered in a relatively precise iambic pentameter, and divided into a two part rhyme scheme, the last three lines of which are variable. The first seven lines of each stanza follow an ABABCDE rhyme scheme, but the second occurrences of the CDE sounds do not follow the same order. In stanza one, lines seven through ten are rhymed DCE; in stanza two, CED; in stanzas thre e and four, CDE; and in stanza five, DCE, just as in stanza one. As in other odes (especially “Autumn” and “Melancholy”), the twopart rhyme scheme (the first part made of AB rhymes, the second of CDE rhymes) creates the sense of a two-part thematic

structure as well. The first four lines of each stanza roughly define the subject of the stanza, and the last six roughly explicate or develop it. (As in other odes, this is only a general rule, true of some stanzas more than others; stanzas such as the fifth do not connect rhyme scheme and thematic structure closely at all.)

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Ode on a Grecian Urn Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a poem written by the English Romantic poet John Keats in May 1819 and published anonymously in the January 1820, Number 15 issue of the magazine Annals of the Fine Arts (see 1820 in poetry). The poem is one of several "Great Odes of 1819", which include "Ode on Indolence", "Ode on Melancholy", "Ode to a Nightingale", and "Ode to Psyche". Keats found earlier forms of poetry unsatisfactory for his purpose, and the collection represented a new development of the ode form. He was inspired to write the poem after reading two articles by English artist and writer Benjamin Haydon. Keats was aware of other

works on classical Greek art, and had first-hand exposure to the Elgin Marbles, all of which reinforced his belief that classical Greek art was idealistic and captured Greek virtues, which forms the basis of the poem. Divided into five stanzas of ten lines each, the ode contains a narrator's discourse on a series of designs on a Grecian urn. The poem focuses on two scenes: one in which a lover eternally pursues a beloved without fulfilment, and another of villagers about to perform a sacrifice. The final lines of the poem declare that "'beauty is truth, truth beauty,' – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know", and literary critics have debated whether they increase or diminish the overall beauty of the poem. Critics have focused on other aspects of the poem, including the role of the narrator, the inspirational qualities of real-world objects, and the paradoxical relationship between the poem's world and reality. "Ode on a Grecian Urn" was not well received by contemporary critics. It was only by the mid-19th century that it began to be praised, although it is now considered to be one of the greatest odes in the English language.[1] A long debate over the poem's final statement divided 20th-century critics, but most agreed on the beauty of the work, despite various perceived inadequacies. Lines1-2 The poem begins with the narrator's silencing the urn by describing it as the "bride of quietness", which allows him to

speak for it using his own impressions.[ The urn is a "foster-child of silence and slow time" because it was created from stone and made by the hand of an artist who did not communicate through words. As stone, time has little effect on it and ageing is such a slow process that it can be seen as an eternal piece of artwork. The urn is an external object capable of producing a story outside the time of its creation, and because of this ability the poet labels it a "sylvan historian" that tells its story through its beauty:[21] Lines 3–10 The questions presented in these lines are too ambiguous to allow the reader to understand what is taking place in the images on the urn, but elements of it are revealed: there is a pursuit with a strong sexual component.[22]The melody accompanying the pursuit is intensified in the second stanza:[23] Lines 11–14 There is a hint of a paradox in that indulgence causes someone to be filled with desire and that music without a sound is desired by the soul. There is a stasis that prohibits the characters on the urn from ever being fulfilled:[23 Lines 17–20 In the third stanza, the narrator begins by speaking to a tree, which will ever hold its leaves and will not "bid the Spring adieu". The paradox of life versus lifelessness extends beyond the lover and the fair lady and takes a more temporal shape as three of the ten lines begin with the

words "for ever". The unheard song never ages and the pipes are able to play forever, which leads the lovers, nature, and all involved to be. Lines 27–30 A new paradox arises in these lines because these immortal lovers are experiencing a living death.[24] To overcome this paradox of merged life and death, the poem shifts to a new scene with a new perspective.[24] The fourth stanza opens with the sacrifice of a virgin cow, an image that appeared in the Elgin Marbles, Claude Lorrain's Sacrifice toto Apollo, and Raphael's The Sacrifice at Lystra[25][A 1] Lines 31–40 All that exists in the scene is a procession of individuals, and the narrator conjectures on the rest. The altar and town exist as part of a world outside art, and the poem challenges the limitations of art through describing their possible existence. The questions are unanswered because there is no one who can ever know the true answers, as the locations are not real. The final stanza begins with a reminder that the urn is a piece of eternal artwork. Lines 41–45 The audience is limited in its ability to comprehend the eternal scene, but the silent urn is still able to speak to them. The story it tells is both cold and passionate, and it is able to help mankind. The poem concludes with the urn's message. Themes Like many of Keats's odes, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" discusses art and art's audience. He relied on depictions of

natural music in earlier poems, and works such as "Ode to a Nightingale" appeal to auditory sensations while ignoring the visual. Keats reverses this when describing an urn within "Ode on a Grecian Urn" to focus on representational art. He previously used the image of an urn in "Ode on Indolence", depicting one with three figures representing Love, Ambition and Poesy. Of these three, Love and Poesy are integrated into "Ode on a Grecian Urn" with an emphasis on how the urn, as a human artistic construct, is capable of relating to the idea of "Truth". The images of the urn described within the poem are intended as obvious depictions of common activities: an attempt at courtship, the making of music, and a religious rite. The figures are supposed to be beautiful, and the urn itself is supposed to be realistic.[28] Although the poem does not include the subjective involvement of the narrator, the description of the urn within the poem implies a human observer that draws out these images.[29]The narrator interacts with the urn in a manner similar to how a critic would respond to the poem, which creates ambiguity in the poem's final lines: "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." The lack of a definite voice of the urn causes the reader to question who is really speaking these words, to whom they are speaking, and what is meant by the words, which encourages the reader to interact with the poem in an interrogative manner like the narrator.

As a symbol, an urn cannot completely represent poetry, but it does serve as one component in describing the relationship between art and humanity.[31]The nightingale of "Ode to a Nightingale" is separated from humanity and does not have human concerns. The urn, as a piece of art, requires an audience and is in an incomplete state on its own. This allows the urn to interact with humanity, to put forth a narrative, and allows for the imagination to operate. The images on the urn provoke the narrator to ask questions, and the silence of the urn reinforces the imagination's ability to operate. This interaction and use of the imagination is part of a greater tradition called ut pictura poesis–the contemplation of art by a poet –which serves as a meditation upon art itself.[32] In this meditation, the narrator dwells on the aesthetic and mimetic features of art. The beginning of the poem posits that the role of art is to describe a specific story about those with whom the audience is unfamiliar, and the narrator wishes to know the identity of the figures in a manner similar to "Ode on Indolence" and "Ode to Psyche". The figures on the urn within "Ode on a Grecian Urn" lack identities, but the first section ends with the narrator believing that if he knew the story, he would know their names. The second section of the poem, describing the piper and the lovers, meditates on the possibility that the role of art is not to describe specifics but universal characters, which falls under the term "Truth". The three figures would

represent how Love, Beauty, and Art are unifiunified together in an idealised world where art represents the feelings of the audience. The audience is not supposed to question the events but instead to rejoice in the happy aspects of the scene in a manner that reverses the claims about art in "Ode to a Nightingale". Similarly, the response of the narrator to the sacrifice is not compatible with the response of the narrator to the lovers.[33] The two contradictory responses found in the first and second scenes of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" are inadequate for completely describing art, because Keats believed that art should not provide history or ideals. Instead, both are replaced with a philosophical tone that dominates the meditation on art. The sensual aspects are replaced with an emphasis on the spiritual aspects, and the last scene describes a world contained unto itself. The relationship between the audience with the world is for benefiting or educating, but merely to emphatically connect to the scene. In the scene, the narrator contemplates where the boundaries of art lie and how much an artist can represent on an urn. The questions the narrator asks reveal a yearning to understand the scene, but the urn is too limited to allow such answers. Furthermore, the narrator is able to visualise more than what actually exists on the urn. This conclusion on art is both satisfying, in that it allows the audience to actually connect with the art, and alienating, as it

does not provide the audience the benefit of instruction or narcissistic fulfilment.[34]Besides the contradictions between the various desires within the poem, there are other paradoxes that emerge as the narrator compares his world with that of the figures on the urn. In the opening line, he refers to the urn as a "bride of quietness", which serves to contrast the urn with the structure of the ode, a type of poem originally intended to be sung. Another paradox arises when the narrator describes immortals on the side of an urn meant to carry the ashes of the dead.[35] In terms of the actual figures upon the urn, the image of the lovers depicts the relationship of passion and beauty with art. In "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on Melancholy", Keats describes how beauty is temporary. However, the figures of the urn are able to always enjoy their beauty and passion because of their artistic permanence.[36]The urn's description as a bride invokes a possibility of consummation, which is symbolic of the urn's need for an audience. Charles Patterson, in a 1954 essay, explains that "It is erroneous to assume that here Keats is merely disparaging the bride of flesh wed to man and glorifying the bride of marble wed to quietness. He could have achieved that simple effect more deftly with some other image than the richly ambivalent unravished bride, which conveys ... a hint of disparagement: It is

natural for brides to be possessed physically ... it is unnatural for them not to be."[37]John Jones, in his 1969 analysis, emphasises this sexual dimension within the poem by comparing the relationship between "the Eve Adam dreamed of and who was there when he woke up" and the "bridal urn" of "Ode on a Grecian Urn".[38]Helen Vendler expands on the idea, in her 1983 analysis of Keats's odes, when she claimed "the complex mind writing the Urn connects stillness and quietness to ravishment and a bride".[39]In the second stanza, Keats "voices the generating motive of the poem – the necessary selfexhaustion and self-perpetuation of sexual appetite."[40] To Vendler, desire and longing could be the source of artistic creativity, but the urn contains two contradicting expressions of sexuality: a lover chasing after a beloved and a lover with his beloved. This contradiction reveals Keats's belief that such love in general was unattainable and that "The true opponent to the urn-experience of love is not satisfaction but extinction."[41] 济慈强调用想象比现实表达的景象更能带给人美的感受:音 乐你听到可能是好听的;但是你不曾听的音乐在你的想象下 可以更好听,只因有你的想象,你可以想成比你听过的更好听。 在《希腊古瓮颂》里,济慈用这一句话来描述希腊古瓮上一 位男

To Autumn

To Autumn" is a poem by English Romantic poet John Keats (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821). The work was composed on 19 September 1819 and published in 1820 in a volume of Keats's poetry that included Lamia and The Eve of St. Agnes. "To Autumn" is the final work in a group of poems known as Keats's "1819 odes". Although personal problems left him little time to devote to poetry in 1819, he composed "To Autumn" after a walk near Winchester one autumnal evening. The work marks the end of his poetic career, as he needed to earn money and could no longer devote himself to the lifestyle of a poet. A little over a year following the publication of "To Autumn", Keats died in Rome. The poem has three eleven-line stanzas which describe a progression through the season, from the late maturation of the crops to the harvest and to the last days of autumn when winter is nearing. The imagery is richly achieved through the personification of Autumn, and the description of its bounty, its sights and sounds. It has parallels in the work of English landscape artists,[1] with Keats himself describing the fields of stubble that he saw on his walk as being like that in a painting. [2] The work has been interpreted as a meditation on death; as an allegory of artistic creation; as Keats's response to the Peterloo Massacre, which took place in the same year; and as an

expression of nationalist sentiment. One of the most anthologised English lyric poems, "To Autumn" has been regarded by critics as one of the most perfect short poems in the English language. Themes "To Autumn" describes, in its three stanzas, three different aspects of the season: its fruitfulness, its labour and its ultimate decline. Through the stanzas there is a progression from early autumn to mid autumn and then to the heralding of winter. Parallel to this, the poem depicts the day turning from morning to afternoon and into dusk. These progressions are joined with a shift from the tactile sense to that of sight and then of sound, creating a three-part symmetry which is not present in Keats's other odes.[10] As the poem progresses, Autumn is represented metaphorically as one who conspires, who ripens fruit, who harvests, who makes music. The first stanza of the poem represents Autumn as involved with the promotion of natural processes, growth and ultimate maturation, two forces in opposition in nature, but together creating the impression that the season will not end. [11] In this stanza the fruits are still ripening and the buds still opening in the warm weather. Stuart Sperry says that Keats emphasises the tactile sense here, suggested by the imagery of growth and gentle motion: swelling, bending and plumping.[10]

In the second stanza Autumn is personified as a harvester,[12]to be seen by the viewer in various guises performing labouring tasks essential to the provision of food for the coming year. There is a lack of definitive action, all motion being gentle. Autumn is not depicted as actually harvesting but as seated, resting or watching.[11] In lines 14–15 the personification of Autumn is as an exhausted labourer. Near the end of the stanza, the steadiness of the gleaner in lines 19–20 again emphasises a motionlessness within the poem.[13] The progression through the day is revealed in actions that are all suggestive of the drowsiness of afternoon: the harvested grain is being winnowed, the harvester is asleep or returning home, the last drops issue from the cider press.[10] The last stanza contrasts Autumn's sounds with those of Spring. The sounds that are presented are not only those of Autumn but essentially the gentle sounds of the evening. Gnats wail and lambs bleat in the dusk. As night approaches within the final moments of the song, death is slowly approaching alongside the end of the year. The full-grown lambs, like the grapes, gourds and hazel nuts will be harvested for the winter. The twittering swallows gather for departure, leaving the fields bare. The . The whistling red-breast and the chirping cricket are the common sounds of winter. The references to Spring, the growing lambs and the migrating swallows remind the reader

that the seasons are a cycle, widening the scope of this stanza from a single season to life in general.[14]

*** Background It was during the months of spring 1819 that he wrote many of his major odes. Following the month of May 1819, he began to tackle other forms of poetry, including a play, some longer pieces, and a return to his unfinished epic, Hyperion. His brother's financial woes continued to loom over him, and, as a result, Keats had little energy or inclination for composition, but, on 19 September 1819, he managed to squeeze out To Autumn, his last major work and the one that rang the curtain down on his career as a poet Themes As the poem progresses, Autumn is represented metaphorically as one who conspires, who ripens fruit, who harvests, who makes music. In stanza 1, Keats describes autumn with a series of specific, concrete, and vivid images. The stanza begins with autumn at the peak of fulfillment and continues with an Initially autumn and the sun “load and bless” by ripening the fruit. But the

apples become so numerous that their weight bends the trees; the gourds “swell”, and the hazel nuts “plump”. Keats presents us a wonderful picture of the maturation of autumn. In the second stanza Autumn is personified as a harvester,[13] to be seen by the viewer in various guises performing labouring tasks essential to the provision of food for the coming year. There is a lack of definitive action, all motion being gentle. Autumn is not depicted as actually harvesting but as seated, resting or watching.[12] In lines 14–15 the personification of Autumn is as an exhausted labourer. Near the end of the stanza, the steadiness of the gleaner in lines 19–20 again emphasises a motionlessness within the poem.[14] The progression through the day is revealed in actions that are all suggestive of the drowsiness of afternoon: the harvested grain is being winnowed, the harvester is asleep or returning home, the last drops issue from the cider press.[11] The last stanza contrasts Autumn's sounds with those of Spring. The sounds that are presented are not only those of Autumn but essentially the gentle sounds of the evening. Gnats wail and lambs bleat in the dusk. As night approaches within the final moments of the song, death is slowly approaching alongside of the end of the year. The full-grown lambs, like the grapes, gourds and hazel nuts will be harvested for the winter. The twittering swallows gather for departure, leaving the fields

bare. The whistling red-breast and the chirping cricket are the common sounds of winter. The references to Spring, the growing lambs and the migrating swallows remind the reader that the seasons are a cycle, widening the scope of this stanza from a single season to life in general

*** The Beauty of Autumn 学号:05070411 班级:07(4) To Autumn of John Keats is quite different from the traditional poems about autumn home and abroad. Autumn is full of pessimism and gloomy in many peop le’s eyes, but under Keats’s pen, it’s hopeful, content and relaxed. Autumn is intangible; however, it becomes tangible and perceived here. T he autumn under Keats’s pen is divided into three stages--early autumn, mid-autumn, and late autumn. It develops firmly in keeping with the development of the day and that of the season. In the first stanza, Keats describes the mellow fruitfulness of autumn, such as the grapes, apples, gourd, hazel shells, indicating that it’s a season full of hopes. Sensuous feelings are

widely used here, such as “seeing” green vines, red apples and brown hazels, “smelling” the mellow fruitfulness, “hearing” the bees, “tasting” the sweet honey and “touching” its clamminess. The poet doesn’t describe the colors directly, but we may imagine that whether the color of grapes is light green, light purple or milky white, providing us ample room for imagination. Maybe this is the charm of the poem in one way. What’s more, personification is used here, such as the autumn conspires with the maturing sun to ripen the fruits and mellows like a tricky child. The second stanza presents us with the harvest activities in the British countryside. Autumn is also personified here as a farmer who takes joy from harvesting. He sits on a granary floor, drowses, gleans or sits by a cider-press, waiting for apple wine. All these acts bring us the atmosphere of harvesting. We can find a lot of onomatopoeia in the third stanza, like the wailing of gnats, the singing of crickets, and the bleating of lambs, the whistling of robins and the twittering of swallows. All these sounds form a pastoral symphony of the late autumn. Just as Keats once said that beauty and melancholy are twin sisters, the most beautiful autumn has its end one day. We may also find the hidden sadness behind the joyful scenery. For example, the bees think warm days will never cease but actually will do, the swallows twitter in the sky, predicting that the

winter is coming in the near future. We can never change the natural laws of seasons, and we just accept it no matter how unwillingly we are. Maybe that’s also what the poet wants to convey to us besides the joy of autumn itself.