To Autumn

  • Plot: The poem serves as an ode to autumn and describes the season’s abundance, harvest, and transition as it prepares for the coming winter.
  • Structure & Language Techniques: The poem utilises three 11-line stanzas employing a variety of language techniques including imagery, alliteration, assonance, and personification to bring the season to life.
  • Themes & Linking Poems: The poem explores themes of nature, the cycle of life, and the acceptance of transience which can be linked to other Keats’ odes like “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn”.
  • Key Quotes: Key quotes emphasise the beauty of the season such as “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,” and the acceptance of life’s cycle in “Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too.”
  • Poet & Context: Keats, a renowned Romantic poet, penned the poem in 1819, during the last year of his life when he might have been contemplating his own mortality which is reflected in the reflective tone of the poem.