"To Autumn" by John Keats

To Autumn. by John Keats.

                                   I
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,          5
    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,              10
        For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

                                  II
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;            15
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;                  20
    Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
        Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

                                 III
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,          25
    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;      30
    Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
    The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
        And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.


Written on September 19, 1819, and published the following year.

First published:
John Keats, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems. London: Talor and Hessey, 1820.

Source of the text - John Keats, Complete Poems of John Keats (Wordsworth Collection). Hertfordshire, U.K.: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1994, pp.232-233.

TJB: 3 sentences which address yet describe Autumn with 4 noun-rich crop images; 4 verb-rich drowsy-labor actions; and 5 abstract sunset songs.