19 September 1819: Chaste Weather, On Guard Against Milton, To Autumn at Ease with Itself, & the Unegotistical Sublime
Winchester
Keats, aged twenty-three, has been staying in Winchester since the second week of August with his great friend Charles Brown, with whom he has been co-writing a play, Otho the Great. Their primary motivation, especially for Keats, is money, though for a moment or two Keats has inflated thoughts about shaking up contemporary drama. Keats and Brown will miss an opportunity to have the play produced, in part because of their impatience to get the play on the stage. Otho the Great remains unperformed during their lifetime—indeed, during their century. The warmer weather and favorable ambiance of Winchester seems to improve Keats’s health and spirits.
On 10 September, Keats goes to London to meet with the manager of his family’s complex estate, Richard Abbey, and he will have tea with Abbey on the 11th. Family money seems frozen with an uncertain (though unlikely) Chancery suit, though Abbey in some ways seems to keep the Keats siblings in the dark about their assets, which in fact are, unbeknownst to them, fairly considerable and held by the court. Keats sincerely hopes to help his brother—George—who has had a financial collapse in America; Keats feels George may have been fleeced and deceived in his business deals (letters, 21 Sept). George had invested all his money on a shipping boat that travels the main river routes, but the boat sunk. Keats, too, has lately suffered financially; Brown has supported him for the last few months. In early September, Keats receives loans from other friends, and he has just earlier attempted to call in loans that he himself has made. Keats returns to Winchester 15 September.
September sees Keats once more give up on the epic Hyperion story. The attempt (in the earlier guise of Hyperion and now what we know as The Fall of Hyperion) brings forth much strong poetry and represents clear progress in avoiding affected sentimentality for a more classical, tempered, sincere vision; but, as he attempts to explain to his friend and fellow poet John Hamilton Reynolds, with its uncertain engagement with John Milton’s accomplishment, story, and style, it seems to test his patience as well as aspects of his poetic judgment and his own poetical character.
As Keats critically cross-examines what he is achieving with The Fall
of Hyperion, the distinction between purposefully artful poetry and poetry that
originates from feeling and sensation seems to cause him to give up
on it (letters, 21
Sept). As a vague reworking of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the overly abstract and indeterminate allegory—now
with an added kind of dream-vision and a clear questioning of the role of the poet
in
addressing suffering—might have been another reason for Keats to abandon it. Keats
desires to
find a form and voice—and subject—that allows him explore what he calls the true voice of
feeling
rather than artful
Miltonic expression, which, at least in his own hand,
might end up as the false beauty proceeding from art
(21 Sept). Keats in a way suggests
to Reynolds that he cannot figure out when he
sounds too much like Milton and not enough like himself, and this, too, may have been
one
aspect of his giving-up on the poem. As Keats mentions in a letter to George and his wife,
he needs to be on guard against Milton
and Milton’s style of art and devote myself
to another sensation
(letters, 24 Sept). That Keats can muster such critical
self-understanding underlines how far his poetic sense has developed. And we have
to keep in
mind that—as we see in Keats’s marginalia in his copy of Paradise Lost—Keats is
nonetheless in awe of what he sees (in his own terms) as Milton’s immensity, grandeur,
and
magnitude, as well as in the blind poet’s unyielding pursuit of the imagination’s
capabilities; as Keats writes in his marginalia, Milton is godlike in the sublime
pathetic.
In early September, Keats completes Lamia, a poem with, he hopes, some popular appeal. Keats, however, has
recently expressed ambivalence about popularity: on one hand, he is confident he can
achieve
it; on the other, he worries over the poisonous suffrage of a public
(letters, 24 Aug).
Lamia is to be included in a new collection of poems he is anxious to publish, and Lamia becomes the lead title for the volume, eventually published by Taylor & Hessey in June 1820: Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems. Interestingly, the first two poems that title the otherwise exceptional volume are hardly Keats at his best; in fact, Keats did not want his Boccaccio-inspired Isabella published at all, since it was, in his opinion, simple, immature, and weak (22 Sept, to Woodhouse). And Hyperion, the fragment poem which ends the volume, he likewise did not want published, but his editors nonetheless included it; Keats was not happy. The poetry that actually caps Keats’s poetic progress are five odes that appear in the volume, along with The Eve of St. Agnes, which exhibits Keats’s gift for evoking a rich and sensual ambiance while, in narrative form, offering an allegory about the dangers of imagination (or superstition? love? temptation? dreaming?) in the face of cold, stark reality.
On 19 September, Keats composes his last great poem, To Autumn. Two days later, in a letter to his good friend and fellow writer, John Hamilton Reynolds , Keats describes the conditions and inspiration for the poem:
How beautiful the season is now—How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it.
Really,
without joking, chaste weather—Dian skies—I never like stubble fields so much as now—Aye
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.
Stubble-plainsand
the fume of poppiesaround Winchester (and in Keats’s poem), the South Downs Way (click to enlarge)
Integral to the poem’s composed temper is how this description of autumn merges with
a more
meaningful impression within the poem. The series of dashes suggests how much the
flowing,
interconnected senses struck
him. Somewhat paradoxically, what is remarkable is how he
is excited by the calmness—the beauty, the fineness, the purity, the texture, the
warmth. The
idea of chaste weather
takes us further into what Keats conveys in the poem, both in
what he describes and in how he describes it. This is affirmed by his idea of Dian
skies
—once more, a sense of the unsullied and pure, and without any necessary
embellishment. Keats emphasizes to Reynolds
that he is very serious about his sensations—Really, without joking . . .
.
Season of mists . . .(click to enlarge)
From this, we can go to the poem. To Autumn, Keats perfects his ability—particularly through his easeful,
restrained tone—to find stillness and depth in holding time and sensation still, yet
also
intimating movement and life’s process as mirrored by nature’s movement. The senses
of
completeness and process and change are indistinguishable—complete incompleteness,
we might
call it. In this way, the poem is also an allegory of poetry’s own possible perfection—or
at
least the kind of verse Keats has worked to achieve: poetry that conveys naturalness
within
complementing form; poetry that balances intensity with unobtrusiveness; and poetry
that
represents ripeness while being itself perfectly, poetically ripe. Mutability is held
immutable though moving, and this is part of the complex impulse behind his other
odes of
1819, particularly those on the Grecian urn and the nightingale. Keats at one moment
in his
poetics describes how poetry must be content, that the imagery should evolve naturally
and be
set soberly
; it requires fine excess
(letters, 27 Feb 1818); and here, in
To Autumn, that
excess—in the senses and in sensation, in touching, seeing, hearing, in that swelling,
plumping, budding, and over-brimming—indeed finely pushes up against excess. It captures
a
moment of fullness, ripeness, and gathering, but all is tempered by steadiness and
patience
and harmony. It is, once more, the immutable within the mutable. That a sense of death’s
settled sadness ends the poem—in the soft-dying day,
in a wailful, mourning choir, in
the light wind [that] lives or dies
—gives us the larger thematics of loss and
acceptance that Keats has been working toward for a few years.
And stylistically: the syntax is natural, direct, and uncluttered; the form ingeniously massages the sonnet; and the word choice anything but eccentric. The poem is remarkably at ease with itself, and subtlety employs all the senses to connect with and reflect Autumn’s promise.
Thus To Autumn
approaches the depth of what Keats sees William
Wordsworth achieve in, arguably, his two greatest poems, Tintern Abbey and the Intimations Ode: acceptance
trumps striving; life is seen into; the eye looks with sober colouring
upon
the day’s end (Intimations Ode, 200); and recognition that the
external landscape is connected to something deeper and longer lasting than the ostensible
moment of being in and just looking at that landscape. It may be coincidence, but
Keats’s poem
also recalls the momentary sentiment of Keats’s closest contemporary young poet, Percy Shelley, who, in his Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (published early 1817 and republished in Shelley’s 1819
Rosalind and Helen collection) writes there is a harmony /
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky.
But Keats’s remarkable achievement—built upon his
poetic progress up until this point; upon his poetics; and upon his deliberate study
of Shakespeare, Milton (most obviously Il
Penseroso), Wordsworth, and now Coleridge (in particular, Frost at Midnight)—is that
To Autumn is not
channeled through or negotiated by a speaker’s subjectivity as a dominating or intruding
presence. Intensity is entirely controlled, despite, once more, those forms of excess
that
autumn offers or represents; surplus is held in restraint, and this holding is not
just of the
real-world oozing fruit, but for the expression of the capably imaginative poet. The
only very
slight leakage takes place in the speaker’s rhetorically repeated question, Where are the
songs of spring? Ah, where are they?
(23). Little, then, seems to depend upon a
speaker’s presence or experience, except the assurance of an extraordinarily subtle
empathy
with stillness, fulfillment, and death. It is the unegotistical sublime, and as a
modern lyric
ode, it is exemplary at very least, and at best perhaps matchless. When Keats writes
that he
has lost his earlier poetic ardour and fire
for a more thoughtful and quiet
power,
To Autumn represents
this change and progress (21 Sept, to the George Keatses).
Hyper-contextualization of Keats’s work sometimes functions to eagerly drag the poem too far into politics, economics, or subversive government practices; and then, in the other direction, there are readings that suggest that the poem in part enacts Keats’s apparent preoccupation with the maternal breast.* These top-down readings perhaps miss or misread the high achievement of lyrical practice and larger thematics that Keats gets right in the poem’s originality, despite pictures of autumnal repose being a fairly common trope in both poetry and painting. We should trust Keats when he enthusiastically tells Reynolds (above) that what strikes him to compose upon is the complex beauty of, and his immersion into, the tranquil profundity of the scene; the fine, temperate sharpness of the air; the warmth and the pureness that he perceives and feels; the restrained potency of what the season represents—all of which takes us to Keats’s final subjects: time, nature, and poetic self-possession in the face of accepted, human tensions. And it is very clear, as in Keats’s best poetry, that in-betweenness is his poetic state that Keats arrives at—in this case, the state that exists between maturation and decline, collecting and release, and, of course, life and death. Keats’s own words, then, are the real introduction to the poem. We might not assume that we know more about the poem than Keats.
Keats transcribes a copy of To Autumn in a letter to Woodhouse, 21 September, along with some lines from The Fall of Hyperion, including the powerful, assured opening of the poem, which teasingly articulates the role of poetry and the poet. Keats’s heavy revisions to the poem (and in particular, to the second stanza) point to its hard-earned elegance and covert simplicity.
To Autumn,Houghton Library, Harvard University (MS Keats 2.27). Click to expand.
*The idea that the poem expresses Keats’s retreat to the maternal breast comes from
Richard
Marggraf Turley’s ’Full-grown lambs’: Immaturity and To Autumn
(in
Romanticism on the Net, no. 28, November 2002).
