poem

To Autumn, Nov 2, 2026

John Keats

0 votes
◆

I
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.

II
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.

III
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.

◆

Comments

  1. Loading comments…
📖 About this poem

Keats wrote this ode in September 1819, and it reads like a long, contented exhale. Instead of a story, it offers three unhurried scenes: harvest ripening in the first stanza, the personified figure of Autumn resting among the work in the second, and the sounds of early evening in the third. The music is thick and slow, full stops softened by rolling vowels and long sentences that sprawl across the lines the way fruit sprawls on a vine. One image lingers especially: Autumn "sitting careless on a granary floor," hair lifted by the winnowing wind, unbothered by time. Another, quieter one closes the poem — swallows gathering and twittering in the sky, a small, ordinary sign that a season is ending. There's no anxiety about that ending, only attention. That's why it still lands: it asks us to notice abundance and change together, without rushing past either one.