Mapping Keats’s Progress: A Critical Chronology

Mapping Keats’s Progress
A Critical Chronology

To Autumn

1

  • 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.

2

  • 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.

3

  • 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.

× Cite this page:

MLA Style: Works Cited

Keats, John. “To Autumn.” Mapping Keats’s Progress: A Critical Chronology, by G. Kim Blank. Edition 3.26 , University of Victoria, 12 July 2023. https://johnkeats.uvic.ca/poem_to_autumn.html.

Chicago Style: Note

John Keats, “To Autumn,” Mapping Keats’s Progress: A Critical Chronology, Edition 3.26 , last modified 12th July 2023. https://johnkeats.uvic.ca/poem_to_autumn.html.

Chicago Style: Bibliography

Keats, John. “To Autumn.” Mapping Keats’s Progress: A Critical Chronology, Edition 3.26 , last modified 12th July 2023. https://johnkeats.uvic.ca/poem_to_autumn.html.