LUCID DREAM By Stephen Jin
LUCID DREAM
By Stephen Jin
John Keats is often recalled as a dreamer. With mesmerizing
diction and an infallible sensitivity to meter, he forms worlds held
deep within the etchings of urns, and paints nightmares of castles
nestled behind deceiving snow-covered boreal valleys. But “To
Autumn” is not one such dream. In this imagination, Keats reflects his
own reality by contemplating an earthly season filled with beauty and
despair alike. He does so, nonetheless, with the same evocative
language fit to muse upon fantastical dreams. In fact, this very
language is what makes “To Autumn” so perplexing: in the supposed
celebration of the red-orange season of harvests, which is told in the
most beautiful images befitting of the spell, Keats forebodes the
inevitable desolation of winter. Through this, through the natural
cycle of life and death, the poet moreover imparts his own mortal
insecurities which he accepts and then chooses to find his worth in the
waking world—not the dream—for Keats died at a tender age from an
illness that crept like night unto day.
While this poem is set in reality and not the dream, Keats does
not make it any less striking: “Seasons of mists and mellow
fruitfulness, / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;” (1-2). Here,
while the poem follows the general iambic pentameter as shown in the
second line, some lines, especially the lines at the top of the stanzas,
are begun with a stressed syllable. This makes each opening stanza
sound like a proper ode or celebration to autumn with their grand beginnings. These declarative lines are balanced with the subdued syllables of traditional iambic pentameter like in “Close bosom-
friend” (2). Furthermore, in the first line of the poem lies another contrast. How can a season be of mists and mellow fruitfulness at the same time? “Mists” has the connotation of the imminent winter, as if the biting cold is already materializing out of thin air. “Mellow
fruitfulness,” on the other hand, is a sweet image of mature fruit and
lazy days. Keats, through mellifluous modified iambic pentameter and
subtle contrast, lays down the scaffolding for this poem.
In the following lines of the poem, ignoring the obvious meter,
this trend of contrasting continues. Here, autumn is “Conspiring with him how to load and bless / With fruit the vines that round the thatch-
eves run;” (3-4). Through the personification of the season and the sun, it is strange how autumn is deemed to be “conspiring” with the
sun. “Conspiring” is synonymous to “scheming” or “conniving,”
which all mean to devise secret plans toward a harmful act. Perhaps
the harmful act is to nurture all this life during the harvest just to strip
it all away when winter comes. But through deft enjambment, the next
line reveals that the season and the sun are merely planning how to
grow as much fruit as possible, “To bend with apples the moss’d
cottage-trees, / And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core” (5-6).
Nevertheless, Keats’ use of “conspiring”indicates that, despite the
lovely image of trees stooping low because of their heavy apples, this
life is planned to become obsolete.
The next few lines continue to display these images of fertility
and life: “To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells” (7). The abundance of life is showcased through the sheer number of objects
that Keats lists—the apples, the gourds, the hazels, the kernels, and
the flowers. Even with this excessive listing, Keats says “to set
budding more, / And still more, later flowers for the bees” (8-9). This
celebration of abundance is then immediately subverted to remind us
that even with such life, death will always come. All the life around
cannot fool us to “think warm days will never cease” (10). Keats’s
ability to pervert positive and beautiful imagery into the gentle
reminder of mortality is noteworthy. The final line of this stanza
summarizes this point well, “For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their
clammy cells” with life to evoke this uncomfortable “clammy” feeling
(11). The bees that are unaware of the flow of time, unlike us humans,
work as if the summer will never end; in that way they are imprisoned
in their “clammy cells” of unknowing what makes life so special,
which is death, symbolized by winter. Keats is introducing a new
notion here—he is saying that an unending life is unnatural and
excessive—like wine threatening to spill from its glass.
The next stanza, which begins with the same stressed syllable
of the first, asks who has not seen the triumphs of autumn’s inventory.
In this stanza, autumn is shown “sitting careless on a granary floor,”
resting, after it has done its job of preparing the crops and collecting
this impressive inventory (14). “Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing
wind; / Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,” here, autumn is
shown in a peaceful, non-moving state (15-16). “Winnowing wind” is
the perfect way to describe the personified autumn, for to winnow
means to blow a current of air through grain in order to remove the chaff—it is work that people do, which is used by Keats to describe
the spiritual essence that is autumn. This beautiful, soothing imagery
is offset, however, when we discover that autumn seems to be
drugged or “Drows’d with the fume of poppies,” which is an allusion
to opium that stems from the poppy flower (17). This subversion
continues when it is also revealed that autumn’s “hook / Spares the
next swath and all its twined flowers,” as if autumn is Death sparing
the lives of crops not yet harvested (17-18). Therefore, these lines
raise the question of whether autumn is resting or dying as winter
creeps over the atmosphere.
As the stanza continues, this theme becomes more evident.
Autumn is compared to a “gleaner” or a scavenger looking for scraps
of grain left by the reaper after the harvest has been collected, and
they are seen with “laden head across a brook; Or by a cider-press,
with patient look,” dejected and decrepit, watching the “last oozings
hours by hours” (20-22). This autumn represents those who have not
accepted life as a balance among death, and so they are left with
“laden head,” depressed, and waiting for unavoidable death to come.
The peaceful imagery of the first half of the stanza and the ominous
lethargy in the second half create a contrast and introduces Keats’his
own outlook on life before the final stanza, which is transformed in
the final act of his ode to autumn.
This final stanza is the most complicated out of the three and
displays the most contrasts between life and death through the poem’s
most evocative images. When Keats asks the world, “Where are the
songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?” it is a rhetorical gesture to declare that autumn’s music is louder and more pleasant than spring’s
(23). The comparison between autumn and spring is the difference
between the end of life and the beginning of life, and so when Keats
says “thou hast thy music too,” he is saying that the end of life is as
necessary as the beginning to it (24). The next line, “While barred
clouds bloom the soft-dying day,” is a stunning representation of a
sunset (25). “Barred clouds” can suggest their vivid reflectivity—
meaning they are marked with bands of light, but it also conjures this
image of the prison cell once more. With “barred clouds bloom the
soft-dying day” Keats suggests that those trapped in the
aforementioned “clammy cells,” like the bees, despite their blissful
ignorance, must succumb to the “soft-dying” (25). After all, as night
rests her hand upon the day’s shoulder to bring the inevitable end to
the day, the clouds are made invisible—. The clouds “bloom,” too, to
again compare autumnto spring. In this way, Keats once more argues
for inevitable death, like inevitable life,. “Soft-dying day” also paints
the realistic shades of blue, pink, and orange of a sunset, while
implyingthat death need not be violent—it can be soft and calm.
Referring back to autumn conspiring with the sun, after their
plans are made, the sun slowly begins to leave to let the world be
overcome with darkness: the sunset touches “the stubble-plains with
rosy hue,” as it departs (26). “Stubble-plains,” here, depicts a field
already harvested—a desolate image merely waiting to be drenched in
frost. Keats contrasts this with the lovely image of the sunset: “rosy
hue.” But as the sun begins to leave, and the day comes to a close, we
hear “a wailful choir” as the “small gnats mourn,” as their lives are about to come to an end (27). Their song is carried “among the river
shallows, borne aloft / Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies” (28-
29). Once again, Keats evokes autumn’s winnowing wind, except
here it is sad, not peaceful—the songs of melancholy are carried by
the wind, and their resonance is determined by whether the wind lives
or dies. Wind dying is a colloquial saying, but wind living is unusual.
Therefore, through this balance, Keats states that life and death are
unexchangeable. Here, we are able to walk through John Keats’s
shoes as he takes a stroll underneath the red-orange trees: this is what
autumn’s song means for him now that he is aware of his closeness to
death.
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. (30-33)
These are all the sounds of autumn that make “music” for Keats—the
music that drowns out the songs of spring.
“Full-grown lambs” is an oxymoron, it is like saying “full-
grown child.” Here, again, Keats is emphasizing the unity of young
life and old death. The lambs “bleat from hilly bourn,” because as
crops are harvested, animals are sent in for slaughter (30). Within
these final four lines, one can clearly imagine it is Keats listening to
all of these sounds—the sounds he depicts are beautiful and vivid,
with each verb being different to denote each sound’s unique origin:
bleat, sing, whistles, twitter. It is as if he begins his gaze downwards
to the lambs and the crickets at first, then raises his head to meet the
whistle of the red-breasted robin upon a tree before taking his eyes to the skies where the swallows look like black pepper against the
atmosphere, gathering for their southbound migration. In this way,
with this remarkable imagery, Keats somehow manages to evoke
beauty out of the ending day. And it seems that he himself is quite
hopeful, looking up into the heavens at the end of his poem—at the
end of his life.
John Keats begins “To Autumn” with a focus on the season’s
fertility and life, and how it cannot continue to be like this, it “has
o’er-brimm’d,” like too much of a good thing (11). It is told through
these images of fullness and maturation—Keats equates maturation to
nearing death. The second stanza introduces the lethargy brought
upon by this age. It suggests a despondency and an indifference to the
passage of time—an absence of action as “Thou watchest the last
oozings hours by hours” (22). These aspects of this paragraph are told
through the symbol of the granary, with autumn laying down on its
floor, “Drows’d with the fume of poppies,” and not caring about the
remaining swath left in the field (17). Autumn’s hair is gently risen by
the winnowing wind. It is a deceptively quiet image, and so its
message is gleaned by the last three lines, which tells of an uncaring
autumn waiting with “laden head…with patient look” for winter to
come and spring to rejuvenate (20-21).
Although the first two stanzas iterate, with extraordinary
metaphors and images, Keats’s idea of an inevitable death, the final
stanza is where we are able to truly understand his perspective. Keats
died when he was only 25 years old, in 1821, from tuberculosis, and
he wrote “To Autumn” in September of 1819. In a letter to his friend, J.H. Reynolds, Keats wrote, “How beautiful the season is now—How
fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking,
chaste weather—Dian skies—I never lik’d stubble fields so much as
now—Aye better than the chilly green of spring. Somehow a stubble
plain looks warm—in the same way that some pictures look warm—
this struck me so much in my Sunday’s walk that I composed upon it.”
The most noteworthy line in this letter is how Keats says that he never
liked the stubble fields until now: “Somehow a stubble plain looks
warm.”
Nearing his death, John Keats takes the sights in front of him
to create a vivid poem about autumn; it thus allowed him to come to
terms with his fast-approaching end. This is evident through the
contrasting details that are written in the lines, such as the first,
“Seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness” (1). Moreover, it is not in
his dreams, not in the urn nor in the eve, where he accepts death, but
in real life—in the sights and sounds of nature. Keats’s language of
“winnowing wind” and “soft-dying day” are, in some ways,
dreamlike, but by grounding these absolutely beautiful imaginations
into reality, and by underlying his meaning with the time oozing
“hours by hours,” the young poet succeeds in creating a surreal
landscape for those that are living a real fate. In an inverse of what he
normally does, Keats takes life and explains death.
Works Cited
Keats, John. “To Autumn.” 1820. Academy of American Poets.
Stephen Jin is an English major with academic interests in
Romanticism and Modernism. Stephen emulates Fitzgerald’s writing,
likes to read books, and enjoys autumn.