On a Sunday in September 1819, John Keats walked past the edge of Winchester, saw a field of cut stubble, and decided it looked warm.
He went home and wrote one of the quietest poems in English, and he died less than a year and a half later.
“To Autumn” has no “I” in it, no complaint, and no plea for the season to stay, which raises the question of why so little on the page holds readers so tightly.
The answer lies in how the poem is built, from a rhyme that quietly shifts between stanzas to a last stanza that trades sight for sound.
The full text is just below, and our poems about food pick up its harvest side, so here we stay with the poem itself.
To Autumn by John Keats: The Full Poem Text
The full text of “To Autumn” by John Keats is below, in three stanzas of eleven lines each. Keats wrote it on September 19, 1819, and the poem is in the public domain.
The spellings follow the 1820 printing, so “cyder-press” and “Drows’d” appear as his first readers saw them.
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,
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.
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.
Credit: “To Autumn” by John Keats, from Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1820). Public domain. The text follows Representative Poetry Online’s 1820 text, which keeps Keats’s original spellings.
How the Stanzas and Rhyme Work
Each stanza has eleven lines of mostly iambic pentameter, one more than Keats’s ten-line spring odes.
All three open with an ABAB quatrain, then the first stanza rhymes CDEDCCE while the second and third rhyme CDECDDE.
The last line of every stanza rhymes with line seven. A guide to what an ode poem is explains the form.
The Winchester Walk Behind the Poem
The exact date was September 19, 1819, and Poets.org’s note on the poem records it. The route is less certain.
Readers long pictured the water-meadows beside the River Itchen, south of the city, but a 2012 article in The Review of English Studies makes the case for a cornfield on St Giles’s Hill instead.
A few days later, Keats told his friend John Hamilton Reynolds that he had given up Hyperion, the unfinished epic he had returned to that summer.
“To Autumn” reached print in July 1820, in the volume named in the credit line above.
Old Words in To Autumn, Explained
A swath is a row of cut grain; a gleaner gathers what the reapers leave behind, and to winnow is to separate chaff from grain with moving air.
Sallows are willows, a croft is a small enclosed field, a bourn is a small stream, and “thatch-eves” are the eaves of a thatched roof. “O’er-brimm’d” means filled to overflowing.
Where Are the Songs of Spring? What the Third Stanza Means
In the third stanza, the speaker asks where the songs of spring have gone and answers at once that autumn has its own music.
The poem then lists sounds instead of arguing: Gnats, lambs, crickets, a redbreast, and swallows.
It never uses the word “I,” so the acceptance comes from the sounds and the fading light alone.
Why To Autumn Rewards a Second Reading
The main takeaway from To Autumn by John Keats is how much the poem trusts plain things: Stubble, gnats, a redbreast, the light going.
Read it twice, once for the pictures in the first two stanzas and once for the sounds in the third, and the last line lands the second time differently.
Before you close this page, read stanza three aloud and note which of its five sounds you hear first.
Then head to our poems about food, where the same harvest looks different from the kitchen, and pick your next poem to read tonight.
