To Autumn Essay -- To Autumn John Keats English Literature Essays

To Autumn I find this to be a deeply enjoyable poem. I take delight in it, even though I recognize in it some inadequacy. But, frankly, I like it best of all of Keats's work and know it by memory. It all comes together nicely and has an exceptionally fine ending.I do not discern any particular interpretative problems with this work. The poem is a lyrical evocation of autumn with a complex tonal blend which both celebrates autumn's fullness and wistfully regrets its sense of loss and ending. There is nothing in the poem which induces me to seek out a deeper level of meaning, since I believe that poem operates, for the most part, at a very literal level.I respond well to the mimetic depiction of autumn in the work (even though it is a different kind of autumn than the one I am familiar with) and I am generally inclined to enjoy seasonal verse and its various potentialities for lyrical expression. I don't find anything in the poem that gets to me in a moral or philosophical sense. I am not in any sense, "moved" by the poem as some kind of--as many scholars claim it is--meditation on death. I simply don't see that here. It would seem that my pleasure is taken primarily in the aesthetic qualities of the work. However, there is something wrong with the work on this score; the three different stanzas don't match and fit one another as well as they might; there is some clumsiness in the work, especially as one moves from one stanza to the next. These faults, however, are not so serious as to mar the excellence of the work.The general plan of "To Autumn" is relatively simple. As a whole, the poem is a lyrical description of autumn in terms of certain objects, processes, and events associated with that season, or... ...a beautiful poem. There are, of course, flaws in the work--loose ends, slips in structural coherence--and these have been noted and, we hope, accounted for. But the remainder of the evidence points to that kind of extraordinary interrelatedness of elements which is above all the hallmark of a beautiful thing. To be sure, "To Autumn" is not a very great poem; even without the flaws, it is a relatively modest achievement: the very subtle complexity and sophistication of a Shakespearean sonnet, the dynamically brilliant beauty of Miltonic verse, the dazzling precision of Pope are certainly not in evidence here. Even within the scope of Keats's entire work, if "To Autumn" lacks some of the more problematic discontinuities and lapses to be found in his very best writings, it also lacks some of the felicities of aesthetic form to be found in these same works.