English IV
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Theodore Gaillard Jr. - Keat's To Autumn
Critics have asserted that "To Autumn" comes close to being the best lyric poem in English and have offered perceptive analyses of flow and pattern in the poem's lush and intricate web of imagery. But absent from appraisals of "To Autumn" has been any close examination of the poem's two dramatic situations (one nesting within the other like a Shakespearean play-within-a-play),(n1) the roles of its three speakers, and the ironic enriching effects inherent in the differing tones of its levels of implied dialogue--all of which reveal "To Autumn" as containing parallel, but subtler, versions of the same dialectic tension seen in others of Keats's major poems.
Indeed, several critics deny the presence of such a tension in "To Autumn." Douglas Bush says the poem "has none of the tensions of the Nightingale and the Grecian Urn."(n2) Walter Jackson Bate observes that there is "no suggestion of the discursive language that we find in the other odes."(n3) Whereas biographer/critic Aileen Ward claims, "It is Keats's . . . most impersonal poem. The poet himself is completely lost in his images, and the images are presented as meaning simply themselves,"(n4) Virgil Nemoianu disagrees: "The question and answer in the third stanza should not be taken too easily at face value."(n5) And David Perkins, failing to distinguish between the separate voices of poet and fictional narrator in their respective dramatic situations, overlooks the second stanza's equally important question, "Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?" when he contends that "the last stanza begins with the one comment the poet offers in his own person (emphasis added): `Where are the Songs of Spring?'"(n6)
As we will see, the existence of more than one speaking "voice" endows a number of images with added depth and ambiguity on at least one of the speaking levels. Reuben Brower goes to the heart of the matter, stating that every poem is dramatic in that "someone is speaking to someone else. For a poem is a dramatic fiction no less than a play . . . and the voice we hear in a lyric, however piercingly real, is not Keats's or Shakespeare's," but is, rather, on one level that of a projected fictional speaker to a fictional listener.(n7) Furthermore, "as the tonal relations change--and they must in a living poem--they take their place in the sequence of relations we have called the dramatic movement" (30). Such focus is crucial in any consideration of "To Autumn."
Who are the speakers in "To Autumn"? Furthermore, what are the ramifications of multiple voices in the poem, of a fictional narrator-Autumndialogue? Let us posit a fictional dramatic situation derived from evidence in the poem. "To Autumn" seems essentially to be a monologue comprising the second half of an implied dialogue between Keats's fictional speaker/narrator and a personified Demeter-like divinity seen as the figure of Autumn. Given the nature of the first stanza's salutation to "Season" (line 1) in the vocative case, and of the questions that initiate stanzas 2 and 3 (addressed to this self-conscious and somewhat insecure divinity--"thou" and "thee"),(n8) we overhear an encouraging statement in which the speaker seems to be responding to possible questions: for stanza one, "Given the glories of Spring, what is my value and for what am I revered?" for stanza two, "Who has seen me or really notices me?" for stanza three, "What kinds of music can I offer--in contrast to the songs of Spring?"
And, of course, in the external dramatic situation, Keats projects to an imagined audience of readers his own wider, deeper, and richer impression ofAutumn overlaid on the fictional scenario envisioned above. The interaction between these two dramatic situations creates an ironic tension epitomizing the paradoxical nature of Autumn as both ripener and reaper of the harvest, controller and victim.
Let us first examine the dynamics of the drama involving Keats's fictive speaker and Autumn as anxious auditor. Here, the apostrophic first stanza (whose first line is almost introduced with an unspoken O,) stands as an incomplete sentence, a fulsome salutation to this "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" (1), who is then sumptuously defined in a series of appositives and modifying participial phrases. The speaker's tone reflects mild puzzlement that Autumn could be worried about her status, awe at the fertility and sensuous richness of the season, and emphatic encouragement.
In stanza 2, this speaker addresses specific questions that we can infer have been previously asked by Autumn (the implied third voice in this poem): With a tonal blend of disbelief, encouragement, and gentle irony, Keats's speaker asks, "Who has not seen thee oft amid thy store?" (12, emphasis added), rebutting Autumn's implied question, "Who has seen me or really notices me?" The speaker, still complimentary, then cites delightful places where "sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find thee" (13).
The speaker's tone becomes more emphatically encouraging in the final stanza. In line 1, he repeats the question Autumn apparently asked earlier (but to which we, as Keats's rather than Autumn's audience, have not been party): "Where are the songs of Spring?" (23) he almost mocks--and then challenges: "Ay, where are they?" (23, emphasis added). What difference does it make? he implies, for "thou hast thy music too" (24). (Rather than the "sigh" that Helen Vendler hears in the Ay of this dramatic situation [178], Keats intends us to hear it as the speaker's emphatic assent, a hortatory challenge to Autumn concerning these intrusive "songs of Spring." As the OED states, Ay can indicate "assent to a previous statement, and preliminary to a further or more forcible one.")(n9) The rest of the stanza outlines several of the speaker's cheerful--but naive--examples of autumnal music. Thus is Autumn meant to be reassured--about the richness of the bounty she brings to appreciative communities, about where and how she has been seen and appreciated, and even about the music and (in contrast to those of Spring) variety of songs she offers the world.
But in his external and more encompassing dramatic situation, Keats as poet speaks in counterpoint across his personal vision of the season to the readers as his audience, constructing a non-fictive, apostrophic monologue that serves as a foil to his fictional speaker's assurances to Autumn, evoking a wistful sense of loss as we experience both the fruition and decline inherent in his poem's imagery.
As Keats in a fuguelike performance plays these two situations against each other, "sometimes" (13 and 19) emerges in a straightforward declarative tone from the fictional and encouraging speaker as in both lines he indicates a variety of places/roles inhabited by Autumn (sometimes here, sometimes there), but in contrast to line 19, "sometimes" in line 13 also assumes an ironic tone, as the overarching voice of the poet ambiguously implies that a pilgrim may not always find the Autumn he seeks. And as the speaker cheerfully lists places that Autumn may be found by eager seekers, Keats's carefully chosen imagery indicates that fruition and maturation have stopped and that even the harvest has run its course. No longer in control of growth or gathering in, Autumn can only observe "with patient look" (21), watching "the last oozings" (22).
Finally, in contrast to the fictional speaker's supportive listing of music associated with Autumn, the poet's choice of imagery foreshadows for us the seasonal transition from autumn to winter and death, introducing in the external dramatic situation a contemplative and sobering tonal shift that belies the naive optimism of the fictional speaker. Keats subtly brings us back to the "stubble plains" (26) of late-autumn reality, even as his speaker tries to maintain for his goddess a world of optimistic make-believe. "Thou hast thy music too" (24), the speaker enthuses--music, the poet, on the other hand, links with a "wailful choir" (27) of gnats that now "mourn" (27) against the backdrop of a "soft-dying day" (25) and a light wind that "dies" (29). Although Helen Vendler feels that the next passage "yields to pathos as sheep are represented as 'full-grown lambs' (the equivalent of calling human beings in some context `full-grown infants')" (254), the poet in fact has carefully chosen his diction to underscore the ironic point (overlooked by his Autumn-focused speaker) that those lambs have now reached their peak and are, like the fruits and vegetables seen earlier, ready for "harvesting"--for transformation into lamb chops and stew.
Nevertheless, Keats (here more in concert with his speaker's tone) mutes the irony with gentleness at the close. The day is "soft-dying" (25); the "stubble plains" have a "rosy hue" (26); the robin sings with a "treble soft" (31); "gathering swallows twitter in the skies" (33) instead of swooping swift and low over fields for now scare insects, soon to be "obeying the south summer's call."(n10) These receding images draw our attention away from late-summer "thatch-eaves" (4) of the cottage, from "granary floor" (14) and "half-reaped furrow" (16) and oozing cider-press--leading it first to the "hilly bourn" (30) of the ridgeline but ultimately to the universalizing skies that extend even beyond the horizon.
Keats and his fictional speaker both achieve the happiness that accompanies their "fellowship with essence"(n11) in the sensuous fertility and warm moistness of the poem's first stanza. But as he increasingly separates his own intent and tone from that of his speaker, Keats concludes "ToAutumn" by revealing the oxymoronic "sweet and bitter world" that pervades so much of his poetry.(n12) Characteristically, the positive experience transcends its loss.(n13) The poem's bitterness and sweetness embody the powerful dichotomy of the autumnal experience as the voice of the poet displays a wider understanding of process, thus providing an ironic foil to his speaker's fulsome praise of Autumn's short-lived beauties.
NOTES(n1.) Surprisingly, exploration of paired dramatic situations in "To Autumn" does not appear in Bernice Slote's Keats and the Dramatic Principle (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1958).
(n2.) Douglas Bush, "Keats and His Ideas," English Romantic Poets, ed. M. H. Abrams (New York: Oxford UP, 1960) 337.
(n3.) Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1963) 581.
(n4.) Aileen Ward, John Keats: The Making of a Poet (New York: Viking Press, 1964) 322.
(n5.) Virgil Nemoianu, "The Dialectics of Movement in Keats's `To Autumn,'" Publications of the Modern Language Association 93 (1978): 209.
(n6.) David Perkins, "Affirmation of Process in Ode on Melancholy and To Autumn," Twentieth Century Interpretations of Keats's Odes (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1968) 92.
(n7.) Reuben Arthur Brower, The Fields of Light: An Experiment in Critical Reading (New York: Oxford UP, 1962) 19. All page references to Brower are from this text.
(n8.) Helen Vendler seems to feel that Keats somehow "determines to do without the personal pronoun" in this implied dialogue despite his obvious use of thee's and thou's. Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983) 274. All page references to Vendler are from this text.
(n9.) OED, "Aye, Ay" A. int. 2.a. One of the examples cited is, fittingly, from Keats.
(n10.) John Keats, "Endymion" 3.816.
(n11.) Keats 1.779.
(n12.) John Keats, "Lines Written in the Highlands After a Visit to Burns's Country," The Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H. W. Garrod (London: Oxford UP, 1956) 30.
(n13.) Jack Stillinger writes that in essentially the last third of the poem, "the focus and attitude show the speaker reconciled to the real world he lives in (emphasis added)." The Hoodwinking of Madeline and Other Essays on Keats's Poems (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1971) 110. Referring in fact (and accurately) to the poet as he speaks to us, Stillinger fails to consider the embedded dramatic situation in which the fictional speaker, largely oblivious to the negative connotations of his examples, is making his final attempt to reassure his listener, Autumn.
WORK CITEDKeats, John. "To Autumn." The Poetical Works of John Keats. Ed. H. W. Garrod. London: Oxford UP, 1956. 218-219.
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By THEODORE L. GAILLARD, JR., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
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Thomas Harrison - Keat's To Autumn
What John Keats's poem "To Autumn" is about has been much discussed. The reading that I usually give the poem in classes is that of a progression--the first stanza a depiction of the autumn harvest, the second an address to three personifications of autumn, and the third a confrontation with the end of the year, perhaps an acceptance of death. Hartman's ideological reading of the poem attempts to establish a place for it in poetic tradition. More recent readings have explored the interplay of speakers in the poem (Gaillard) and the influences of Shakespeare (Flesch) and Spenser (Scheill).
A more vexed issue, however, may be a more technical one involving the way Keats and other poets achieve their effects. Some critics dismiss the possibility of onomatopoeia, claiming that the "shape" of the sound is in the meaning of the word and has nothing to do with the sound at all (Barzun's position). This is a tempting position, because onomatopoetic words are supposed to make the sounds that they name: buzz, bop, bang, trickle, splash. But they obviously do not. The fly does not say "buzz" because he is not making speech sounds. The dog does not say "bow-wow," or even "woof" or "arf," for the same reason, and dogs are supposed to say quite different-sounding words in other languages.
Still, Walter Jackson Bate devotes considerable attention to the sounds Keats uses in his poetry, even stressing the dominance of "long" vowels in the first stanza of "To Autumn" (183). At least one other critic, Hugh Bredin, finds that onomatopoeia is indeed in the mind of the hearer and dependent on the context in which it occurs, but nonetheless real. Onomatopoeia "refers to a relation between the sound of a word and something else" (557). Bredin posits three kinds of onomatopoeia: "direct onomatopoeia," in which the word makes the sound it names (as in buzz), but in which the relation is at least partly determined by convention; "associative onomatopoeia" that occurs when the sound of the word resembles a sound associated with what the word denotes (as in cuckoo); and "exemplary onomatopoeia," which involves the amount of work expended in producing the sounds (so that nimble requires less effort to utter than slothful) and the sound echoes the sense, as Pope recommended.
The examples cited by Bredin are admittedly heavily influenced by the cultures and languages in which they occur. However, an example illustrating a broader principle, attributed to Otto Jespersen, is provocative. A professor drew the shapes in figures 1 and 2 on the board; he then named them (pronounced as in Italian or Spanish) umbulu and kikiriki. Which is which? he asked. Everyone agreed that the drawing with the round shapes was umbulu, and that the one with the points and angles kikiriki. Something about the sounds seems to suggest those shapes.(n1)
Specifically, high front spread vowels like those in beet and bait, combined with the voiceless plosives p, t, and k (however they are spelled) seem to suggest angular, pointed shapes. They are cacophonous, harsh-sounding.
Rounded back vowels (so called because of the rounding of the lips) like those in pool, pole, and Paul, combined with nasals (m, n, and the final consonant in sing), liquids (l and r), semivowels y and w, and even voiced stops like b, suggest soft, rounded, even heavy, shapes. They are euphonous.
In "To Autumn" Keats presents three kinds of images in the three sections of the poem. First, there are images of fruit ready to be harvested: "To bend with apples [. . .]" (5), "To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells" (7). The second stanza presents four personifications of the harvest: the granary keeper, the reaper, the gleaner, and the cider press operator, each with his sound effects, like the alliteration in "winnowing wind" (15). Finally, there are images of harvest done, stubble-plains, sunset, full-grown lambs, hedge crickets. And there are the many oblique allusions to death: "soft-dying day," "wailful choir," "small gnats mourn," "the light wind lives or dies" (25, 27, 29). All these images come with their appropriate sounds.
But Keats's sound effects are most remarkable in the first section. Reading through it, "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" (1), we are almost overwhelmed with ls, rs, nasals, and rounded back vowels. "Close bosom friend of the maturing sun" (2), "fill all fruit with ripeness to the core" (6), "swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells / With a sweet kernel . . ." (7-8), all these lines are full of round, heavy images of the fruits of harvest so ripe they are ready to fall. And to back these images up, Keats gives us sounds that by themselves suggest the soft, round, and heavy.
In the progression of stanzas, the first stanza gets the reader ready for the interplay between the speaker of the poem and the insecure deity ofautumn (in Gaillard's reading) in the second stanza and the final, if gentle, confrontation of the last. "Where are the songs of spring?" (23). Perhaps, the implication is usually read, there will be no songs of spring, no spring. To start the progression, Keats does not warn us. He satisfies us with images and sounds that leave us full to bursting with the great abundance we already have. Before we reach the wailful choir mourning, as we turn from the feast to the sleepy, bemused images of the second stanza, we can feel so filled, so sated, metaphorically speaking, that we could almost belch.
Keats's phonetic knowledge was no doubt intuitive and untutored. He clearly knew how to create the effects he wanted in verse; however, our latter-day knowledge may help us better understand and appreciate his achievement.
NOTE(n1.) The association referred to here is close to the principle of Bredin's "exemplary onomatopoeia" but is more properly called "sound symbolism," which posits a general correspondence between sounds and, in this case, shapes, rather than the context-specific kinds of onomatopoeia discussed by Bredin. Sound symbolism per se is discussed in detail by Jespersen (396-411) and more recently by Jakobson and Waugh (177-88).
DIAGRAM: Figure 1.
DIAGRAM: Figure 2.
WORKS CITEDBarzun, Jacques. "Onoma-Onomato-Onomatwaddle." The Kenyon Review 12.4 (1990): 110-14.
Bate, Walter Jackson. The Stylistic Development of Keats. New York: Humanities Press, 1962.
Bredin, Hugh. "Onomatopoeia as a Figure and a Linguistic Principle." New Literary History 27.3 (Summer 1996): 555-69.
Flesch, William. "The Ambivalence of Generosity: Keats Reading Shakespeare." ELH 62.1 (Spring 1995): 149-69.
Gaillard, Theodore L., Jr. "Keats's 'To Autumn.'" The Explicator 56.4 (1998): 183-88.
Hartman, Geoffrey. "Poem and Ideology: A Study of 'To Autumn.'" Literary Theory and Structure: Essays in Honor of William K. Wimsatt. Ed. Frank Brady, John Palmer, and Martin Price. New Haven: Yale UP, 1973. 305-30. Rpt. in John Keats. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1985.
Jakobson, Roman, and Linda Waugh. The Sound Shape of Language. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979.
Jespersen, Otto. Language: It's Nature, Development and Origin. London: George Allen, 1922.
Scheil, Andrew P. "Keats's 'To Autumn.'" The Explicator 58.1 (1999): 15-19.
Stillinger, Jack, ed. The Poems of John Keats. Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1978.
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By Thomas C. Harrison, Macon State College