To Autumn

Question 1

Form

Answer 1

• Pindaric ode
  (Follows strophe, antistrophe and epode structure)
  strope - young adult (active)
  antistrophe - mid adult (static)
  epode - old age (active and static)

Question 2

“Seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness”

Answer 2

• image replicating the softness of early autumn
• This time represented as easy and blissful

Alliteration of soft consonant sounds - emphasises the abundance of food and richness

Question 3

“Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun”

“Load and bless”

Answer 3

• Autumn being personified as a provider
• Reinforces loving, generous and spiritual ideas

Question 4

“Thatcg-eves run; To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees”

Answer 4

House represents humanity, creating an image where Autumn is taking care of humanity
- Image of tree being weighted with fruit - highlights the abundance

Question 5

“Fill all fruit with ripeness”

Answer 5

Image of harvest

Question 6

“Fill” “Bend” “Swell” “Plump”

Answer 6

Active verbs
- Reinforce idea of autumn as a time of activity

Question 7

“Plump the hazel shells”
“Still more, later flowers for the bees”
“Warm days will never cease”

Answer 7

Gustatory image of hazels
- Autumn as a time of pleasure and bliss
- Mimics the stages in human life (Early adulthood being a time of activity and pleasure)

Question 8

“For summer has o’er brimm’d their clammy cells”

Answer 8

Tactile imagery
- Highlights that the season needs to move on to the next stage as everything has reached their height

Question 9

“Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find”

Answer 9

Autumn is being represented as universally generous and everyone benefits

Question 10

“Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind”

Answer 10

Personification of autumn
- Represented as a time of peace after the harvest
- Mid autumn represented as sill and static

Question 11

“Half-reap’d furrow sound asleep”

Answer 11

• Autumn represented as both generous and still/ peaceful

Question 12

“Drows’d with the fume of poppies”

Answer 12

“Poppies” - symbolic of dreams + used as sleeping drug
- Symbolises Autumn as blissful and peaceful, a dream like state

Question 13

“Where are the songs of spring?”

Answer 13

• Rhetorical question
• Representation of youth, sorrowful tone
• Highlights transience

Moment of anxiety?

Question 14

“Think not of them, thou hast thy music too -
While barred clouds bloom the soft dying day”

Answer 14

Music as a metaphor for beauty
- Reassurance that autumn has its own type of beauty
“Clouds bloom” - idea of growth and life

Question 15

“Stubble- plains with rosy hue”

Answer 15

A once ugly image turned soft
- Highlights the warm yet delicate beauty to autumn

Question 16

“Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river swallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies”

Answer 16

Aural imagery

Image of things coming to an end - Sorrowful tone
- Season
- Life

highlights a beauty in things coming to an end
- Feelings of mourning and a feeling of accepting change
- Melancholy yet beautiful

Question 17

“Sing” “Whistles”

Answer 17

• Active imagery
• Aural

Question 18

“And gathering swallows twitter in the skies”

Answer 18

• Traditional image of death
• Migration - going to be winter soon, parallels to the idea of moving to the afterlife soon

Question 19

11 line stanzas

Answer 19

• Could be highlighting the vast abundance in autumn

Question 20

Context

Answer 20

• Acceptance of his brother’s early death
• Romantic - autumn representing melancholy and inevitable loss
• Food as more seasonal in Georgian period + lack of previous harvest (1818 as the year without a summer, written in 1819)