Monday's Poetry: "To Autumn"

 

by Pa Rock

Poetry Appreciator

Summer will officially expire this Wednesday, the day after tomorrow, and already there is just a hint of approaching autumn in the air.  The spring this year was wet, very wet, and the summer was equally dry.  The past few days have begun cooling, in anticipation of autumn, and a few leaves have begun tearing themselves from their trees.  Before many more weeks have passed I will be raking and mulching and hunkering down by the furnace vents wishing that winter would get here and get gone so that the renewal of spring could be upon us.

One or two more mowings will see me through the remainder of the mowing season, and two more runs to Kansas City will complete my social calendar for the year.  It's all winding down.

Here are the thoughts of British romantic poet John Keats on the approach of autumn.  Keats, whose life was very brief - he died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five - was doing his very best writing exactly two hundred years ago.  Please enjoy the following "ode" by John Keats.

To Autumn

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,
  Drowsed 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 cider-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 redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
    And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.