Autumn is in the air, a sign that is welcomed in my household, and one which triggers a swapping out of cushions and candles for ones befitting the season. Autumnal colours and aromas abound. My weekend walk was cooler and cloudier but the hedgerows were still full of late-fruiting blackberries, and the walk brought to mind that famous opening line of John Keats’ poem On Autumn, “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”. Let’s talk about Keats…
Along with Shelley and Byron, Keats is the classic exemplar of the archetypal Romantic poet, the fay, tortured genius. In Keats’ case, he was also consumptive and short-lived, dying at 25 and thus – a bit like the 27 club of the modern era – being conferred everlasting legendary status. He trained to be a doctor and worked at Guy’s Hospital in London, but he had long resolved to become a poet and so spent more and more time devoted to the study of literature and the penning of lines of poetry.
Although he wrote epics, sonnets and elegies, Keats’ most famous and well-regarded poems were his odes, written in quick succession during an extraordinary spell of creativity in 1819, at his friend Charles Armitage Brown’s house, Wentworth Place on Hampstead Heath. He wrote Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Indolence, Ode on Melancholy, Ode to a Nightingale, and Ode to Psyche during the spring, and finally, despite worsening health and looming financial woes, To Autumn in September. This was to be his last major work before tuberculosis brought the curtain down on his career.
After his stay with Brown, Keats moved to Italy, seeking a more salubrious climate to aid in his recovery, but it wasn’t to be. I have visited the small room in the house by the Spanish Steps in Rome, in which Keats spent his last days. He died on the 23rd February 1821, and is buried in the city’s Protestant cemetery (as is his good friend Shelley).
He was convinced that he had made no mark in his lifetime and in February 1820, when he knew that he was dying, he wrote: “I have left no immortal work behind me – nothing to make my friends proud of my memory – but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d”. Little did he know that he would indeed be remembered to posterity, more perhaps than he could ever have imagined – people like me, after all, are still writing about him over two hundred years later!
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.
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.
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.
