Name: Thyagarajan R. Grade: 11 Date: 13.5.

13

To Autumn
Response
Autumn is known as the favorite season of romantic poets. John Keats being a romantic poet himself, wrote the poem To Autumn in which the season itself is personified in many ways. There are three stanzas in the poem and each has a unique characteristic of its own. The first stanza contains the images of fruits which possible suggest prosperity. The feeling of prosperity is also conveyed with the fact that the bees have filled their hives. This stanza signifies the early stage of autumn where much is still summer-like. The emotion conveyed by the rhyming scheme and the diction is that of fullness and a calm mood overall. In the second stanza there is a sudden shift where autumn is personified as a woman. However, at this stage I expected some action; the woman was calm and drowsy who worked to harvest grain. This shows much more calmness than the previous stanza and hence the speculation that it is further into the autumn. Continuing with the pattern, Keats writes in the 3rd stanza about late autumn where there is a search for the songs of spring. The message that autumn has its own music is also conveyed. Here the emotion of calmness becomes emptiness where the days are soft-dying and where the light wind lives or dies. All sense of pleasure seems to be taken away and an emotion near to sorrow has been expressed.