To autumn

Question 1

What letter can you use as context for this poem?

Answer 1

a letter written to Reynolds in 1819

Question 2

content of the letter to Reynolds

Answer 2

How beautiful the season is now – How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it….Dian skies - I never liked stubble fields so much as now – a stubble plain looks warm - in the same way that some pictures look warm – this struck me so much in Sunday’s walk that I composed upon it…’

Question 3

key sources and intertextual references

Answer 3

1) Milton: Il penseroso and Eve in Eden in paradise Lost
2) spenser: the mutabilty cantos
3) ST coleridge: ‘Frost at midnight’
4) Shakespeares sonnets such as ‘how like a winter’

Question 4

Form, structure, metre and rhyme scheme

Answer 4

• usually grouped with the odes but not labelled as such
• iambic pentamtre
• three stanzas each 11 lines long
• ABAB rhyme scheme in the quatrain, the a septet: DDCEED

Question 5

what to enjoy about this poem?

Answer 5

• hughly concrete language
• very phonetically rich
• sensual and somewhat synaesthetic imagery of great vebal precision
• poetic depictions of nature
• great philosophical depth and richness

Question 6

stanza 1 synopsis

Answer 6

begins with an apostrophe to autumn. the depicts hwo by conspiring with the sun nature has reached the bountiful perfection that it now has

Question 7

how does keats create a sense of timelessness

Answer 7

• highly polysyndetic ‘and fill… and plump… and still more’
• use of infinitives

Question 8

who is the thy in the second stanza

Answer 8

-demeter? goddess of grain/ harvest

Question 9

stanza 2 synposis

Answer 9

keats personifies Autumn as a woman whom he see amongst her grain, near a brook, in a semi conscious state, wacthing a cider press

Question 10

stanza 3 summary

Answer 10

keats apostrophesises autumn again- dont think of the songs of spring- appreciate your own beauty

Question 11

poem you can link it too in terms of underappreciation/ internal/ external beauty

Answer 11

• psyche
  similar: semantic fields associated with bounty and harvest
  different: beauty in autumn is the sheer physicality and concreteness of nature, beauty of psyche is the limitless realms of the imagination

Question 12

key semantic fields

Answer 12

• nature/ abundance/ fruitfulness
• agriculture/ harvest
• death/ mortality

Question 13

phonetic feautures

Answer 13

-very satisfying phonetically- lots of sibilance, assonance and consonance- contributes to theme of bounty- occupies the mind, the eyes and the ears