To Autumn
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To Autumn is a poem written by English Romantic poet John Keats in 1819 (published 1820).
Keats was inspired to write To Autumn after walking through the water meadows of Winchester, England, in an early autumn evening of 1819. There is a story that Keats could not concentrate on his work in his rented rooms because the landlady's daughter was practicing the violin. Driven to distraction, he went out behind Winchester College to walk and to think. He returned and wrote the poem straight away.
The poem has three stanzas of eleven lines describing the taste, sights and sounds of autumn. Much of the third stanza, however, is dedicated to diction, symbolism, and literary devices with decisively negative connotations, as it describes the end of the day and the end of autumn.
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[edit] Context
Keats died in 1821 of tuberculosis, only 17 months after this poem was written. These last few years of Keats' life were as productive as the autumn harvest he describes in this poem, writing some of his most important work including Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on Melancholy and The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream. The "wailful choir" of the gnats in the last stanza could be singing a requiem for Keats himself.
[edit] Political Overtones
Established poet Tom Paulin argues that the poem is a response to the Peterloo Massacre which occurred earlier that year[1]. The argument follows that the notoriously dark third stanza depicts a shift in the political climate of Keats' homeland towards a more sinister age when such public displays of brutality could happen.
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