TO AUTUMN. I. SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness, To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells 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. 2. Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, This poem seems to have been just composed when Keats wrote to Reynolds from Winchester his letter of the 22nd of September 1819. He says "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 nowaye, better than the chilly green of the Spring. Somehow, a stubble plain 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." 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. 3. Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies. (3) The term Hedge-crickets for grasshoppers in line 9 resumes very happily the whole sentiment of Keats's competition sonnet On the Grasshopper and Cricket. See Volume I, page 83. ODE ON MELANCHOLY. I. No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine; Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be A partner in your sorrow's mysteries; And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul. Lord Houghton gives the following stanza as the intended opening of the Ode, from the original manuscript: Though you should build a bark of dead men's bones, And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast, Stitch shrouds together for a sail, with groans To fill it out, blood-stained and aghast ; Although your rudder be a dragon's tail Long sever'd, yet still hard with agony, Your cordage large uprootings from the skull Of bald Medusa, certes you would fail To find the Melancholy-whether she Dreameth in any isle of Lethe dull. His Lordship adds-"But no sooner was this written, than the poet became conscious that the coarseness of the contrast would destroy the general effect of luxurious tenderness which it was the 2. But when the melancholy fit shall fall 3. She dwells with Beauty-Beauty that must die; Ay, in the very temple of Delight Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine, Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine; His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, object of the poem to produce, and he confined the gross notion of Melancholy to less violent images,..." |