Beyond the Lines: Keats' "Ode to Autumn"

By John H.B. Martin

Published in New Lyre - Summer 2022

With his “Ode On Indolence” Keats bid goodbye to a life of striving and effort and ambition. Effectively he gave up. He decided he didn't have what it takes to be the great poet he had always wanted to be. With the immediate effect that he wrote three of his four great odes in that same May month. And then four months later, in September, the last of his great odes, the ode 'To Autumn'.  

Though in a sense, of course, all four odes are odes to autumn: they are all poems of leave-taking, and of valediction.  

Keats by this time knew he was doomed. He had already recently buried his favourite brother Tom and knew that he would soon be joining him. As a pharmacist he knew where he was headed. Hence presumably the valedictory tone of all these odes.  

Sensual but not Sensationalist  

So it is perhaps no wonder, for such a sensual nature, that each of these odes should pay homage, not just to the senses as a whole, but, in each case, celebrate a particular sense. And also even a different one. So that for each particular ode one sense should predominate over all the others. In the “Ode To A Nightingale” for instance the sense of hearing is at a premium. In the “Ode On A Grecian Urn” the sense of sight. In the “Ode On Melancholy” the sense of taste. In the ode 'To Autumn' the sense of smell. The only sense not covered is the most immediate and most lively of all the senses, that sense by means of which we procreate, the sense of touch. These are distanced poems. There is no close physical contact permitted. They are written by a man who is out of touch and has lost contact. Yet is almost happy to be so situated. These are poems distanced by the looming threat of death. 

Still, the fact of the matter is that, though Keats was a sensualist, he was never a sensationalist. His work was always written with a philosophical and spiritual intent. So in an age of hedonism, such as ours, is it any wonder that Keats still exerts such a fascination? For he, above all other poets, had the ability, while celebrating his own sensuality, to transcend it, and point it in the direction of something more completely spiritual. For though his nature is sensual it is never gross. It is always the finest features of sensual existence that he pays homage to.  

Some Formal Considerations 

The “Ode To A Nightingale” is much the longest of the four at eighty lines. After that comes “The Ode On A Grecian Urn” with fifty lines. The shortest is the “Ode On Melancholy” with thirty. The ode “To Autumn” has almost the same form, but with one extra line per verse, bringing it to thirty-three lines. All the odes have ten lines per verse, except the ode “To Autumn.” All the odes are in iambic pentameter throughout, apart from the “Ode To A Nightingale” which has one short line per verse - a trimeter - as well as one irregular hexameter line at the end of the second verse. Each of the verses is very similar to a sonnet, except that one of the quatrains is missing. In the ode 'To Autumn' one of the lines of one of the tercets is doubled up so as to repeat a rhyme. But this rhyming couplet does not occur right at the end. So the verse does not end with a Shakespearian flourish. It dies away rather. The final flourish is subverted. This seems appropriate to the theme.  

Eight verses; five verses; three verses; three verses plus three lines. There is a pattern here. Of increasing condensation, perhaps. In the first he regrets the coming loss of his singing voice. In the second he celebrates permanence, and compares himself with perhaps its most obvious image, a Greek vase, and reaches out towards some sort of Platonic ideal. In the third regret is expressed and lamented. He comes to terms with a prevailing sense of loss. And grief. Or at least with his more negative emotions. In the last he is finally at peace. There is a sense of ultimate reconciliation. He celebrates a crowning fruition. All has finally been accomplished through a self-negating philosophy of nonachievement. Idolatry has finally been given up, and true worship can begin. Now at last he can begin to worship Truth. And Beauty. And Goodness. He has served his apprenticeship. The false gods of mere aspiration and ambition have been dismissed.  

In the 'Ode To Autumn' Autumn is addressed directly. This is the chief characteristic of any ode: that whatever it is about is addressed directly. 'O' is the predominant word in any ode. All of nature is potentially personified. So in the second verse of this tripartite ode Autumn too is - almost outrageously - personified. She puts in a personal appearance. In the first verse Summer is mentioned, in the third and final verse Spring. So three of the four seasons put in an appearance. The only one that isn't mentioned is the season of Winter. In poetry what gets left out is often the most important thing. Winter is the season of death. All four of the odes presage Keats's early death. They are all poems about death. They are Elegies. Self-Elegies. Precursors to Shelley's Adonais.