ODE TO AUTUMN

This is an ode that extolls the beauty and fullness of autumn. The first stanza describes how autumn, a "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" (1), conspires with the sun to fill up vines and trees with fruit and to help produce various crops. In the second stanza, Keats likens various people working at the end-of-autumn harvest to the season itself: a granary-worker, a reaper in the field asleep, a "gleaner" (one who gathers grain after it has been reaped), and a worker at a cider-press. In the third stanza, Keats rhetorically asks, "Where are the songs of Spring?" (23), but tells the reader not to think of these melodies. Autumn itself possesses the beautiful songs of "the soft-dying day" (25), the mourning song of the gnats, the bleating of lambs, the singing of crickets, and the songs of "the redbreast" and swallows.