To Autumn
 
by John Keats
   
1.
  
   
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-eaves 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’erbrimm’d their clammy cells.    
   
2.
  
   
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,  
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook  
Spares the next swath and all its twinèd flowers:    
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep  
Steady thy laden head across a brook; 20
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,  
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.  
   
3.
  
   
Where are the songs of Spring?  Ay, where are they?    
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—  
While barrèd 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 redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;    
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.  
   
 
To Autumn — This is the last of Keats’s odes, and the last poem of any kind he completed (though he continued to work on “The Fall of Hyperion,” his revision of his earlier effort “Hyperion”). He wrote it from the 19th to the 21st of September of 1819, in Winchester, in the southern part of England.
 
bosom-friend — Some critics suggest that the phrase suggests that Autumn is male, since at this time a female being would not conventionally be described as a bosom-friend of a male sun. Others perceive Autumn to be female. And still others argue that Keats intentionally makes the season’s gender ambiguous.
 
gourd — at this time, a word for what we call a melon
 
store — a supply of something kept secure for later use
 
poppies — various species of poppies are the sources of opiates such as codeine and morphine
 
gleaner — one who gleans, obviously, and to glean means to gather grain that has been left in the fields after the harvest
 
cyder-press — a wooden, hand-cranked machine that squeezes apples for cider
 
stubble-plains — Keats creates this image for fields after harvest
 
river-sallows — willow trees growing by river banks