by M H Abrams
In the opening lines of his early poem Endymion, Keats says that he intended the work to be “A flowery band to bind us to the earth,” that is, to this material world. When copying out the poem, Keats inserted the famed passage that he described, in a letter to his publisher, as setting out “the gradations of Happiness even like a kind of Pleasure Thermometer”; the writing of these lines, he added, “will perhaps be of the greatest Service to me of any thing I ever did” (L1:218). In these crucial but obscure lines, the gradations of happiness that culminate in what Keats calls “A fellowship with essence” have often been interpreted as a Platonic ascent to a supraterrestrial realm. Despite some coincidence of terminology, however, Keats’ gradations are entirely opposed to the dematerializing process of philosophical meditation that Plato describes in the Symposium. In that dialogue, one climbs “as by a stair” from the beauty of a single material body up “to all fair forms,” and then to “the beauty of the mind,” in order to reach the goal of ultimate desire, the idea of “beauty, absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting.” Keats’ “Pleasure Thermometer,” on the other hand (as the word “thermometer” implies) measures what he calls the “intensity” (the degree of heat applied to a retort in a chemical experiment)11 in an imaginative ascent that is metaphorically equated with the stages of refinement in a process of evaporation and distillation. The ascent begins with the pleasurable sensations of physical things; these pleasures are successively refined and purified from all self-concern, until one achieves the selfless stage of “love and friendship.” At the application of a final (“chief”) degree of “intensity,” the grosser (the “more ponderous and bulky”) element of friendship is in turn separated out, leaving only, “full alchemiz’d,” the purified “essence” that is love. Thus, at the end of the psychochemical procedure,
at the tip-top,
There hangs by unseen film, an orbéd drop
Of light, and that is love.
As Donald Goellnicht acutely noted, this “orbéd drop” is “an exact description of a drop of pure distillate condensing on the lip of a retort to drip into a beaker.”12
The point is important, because to Platonize Keats—just as to intellectualize or to textualize him—is to disembody him and thereby eliminate what is most Keatsian in his poems. To read him rightly, we need to recognize that he is preeminently a poet of one world, however painful his awareness of the shortcomings of that world when measured against the reach of human desire. And Keats’ one world is the material world of this earth, this life, and this body—this sexual body with all its avidities and its full complement of the senses, internal as well as external, and what traditionally are called the “lower” no less than the “higher” senses. (Remember Keats’ relish of a nectarine and of “Joy’s grape.”) His term for the goal of profoundest desire is “happiness,” which he envisions as a plenitude of the physical and intellectual satisfactions in this earthly life, except that they have been purified from what he calls their “disagreeables.” And in a “favorite Speculation,” he imagines the possibility of enjoyments in a life “here after” as simply a repetition of “what we called happiness on Earth,” except (this time Keats resorts to a musical instead of a chemical analogue) that it is “repeated in a finer tone and so repeated” (L1:185).
III
Lest I give the impression that I share the nineteenth-century view that Keats is a poet of sensations rather than of thoughts, I want to comment on the way that, at his mature best, he deals with matters of profound human concern but assimilates the conceptual import of his poems with the material qualities of his spoken language and the material particulars his language represents.
I concur with the readers for whom Keats’ short ode “To Autumn” is his highest achievement. The poem is about a season of the year, but as in his other odes, the ostensible subject (a nightingale, a work of Grecian art, the goddess Melancholia) turns out to be the occasion for engaging with the multiple dilemmas of being human in the material world, in which nothing can stay. In “To Autumn,” however, more completely than in the other odes, Keats leaves the concepts implicit in the choice and rendering of the things, events, and actions that the verbal medium bodies forth. My onetime teacher Douglas Vincent Bush was an acute, as well as learned, reader of poetry, but I think he was mistaken when he described Keats’ “To Autumn” as “less a resolution of the perplexities of life and poetic ambition than an escape into the luxury of pure—though now sober—sensation.”13 On the contrary, Keats’ poem is a creative triumph because, instead of explicitly treating a perplexity of life, he identifies and resolves a perplexity by incorporating it in a work that presents itself as nothing more than a poem of pure sensation.
A knowledgeable contemporary of Keats no doubt recognized what a modern reader is apt to miss, that “To Autumn” was composed in strict accord with an odd lyric model whose origins go back to classical times but which enjoyed a special vogue from the 1740s through Keats’ own lifetime. This is the short ode (sometimes it was labeled a hymn) on a general or abstract topic. The topic is named in the title and formally invoked in the opening lines, where it is personified, given a bodily form, and accorded the status of a quasi divinity, usually female. The poem proceeds to praise, describe, and expatiate on the chosen subject, but it does this, strangely, in the grammatical mode of a second-person address to the personified topic itself. In this genre the direct precursors of Keats’ “To Autumn” were the odes addressed to a time of year or a time of day, described by reference to scenes in nature; this subclass includes William Blake’s short poems on each of the four seasons, written in the 1770s, in which Blake gives the standard matter and manner of the ode a prominently biblical cast and compacts them into the compass of sixteen to nineteen lines. Within this latter type, it seems to me likely that Keats’ particular antecedent was William Collins’ “Ode to Evening,” published in 1746. But whether or not Keats remembered Collins while composing “To Autumn,” it is useful to note the similarities between the two poems—in their use of the linguistic medium, their subject matter, and their poetic procedures—in order better to isolate what is distinctively Keatsian in this most formulaic of Keats’ odes and to identify the innovations by which he brought what was by his time a stale convention to vibrant life.
Collins’ Ode to Evening is unrhymed; in place of the standard recurrences of terminal speech-sounds, his invocation exploits the enunciative changes in the procession of the speech-sounds inside the verse line:
If aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song,
May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear.
That is, Collins foregrounds the oral feel of producing the succession of vowels in the first line and of effecting the transition from the open back vowels (in “hope” and “soothe”) to the closed front vowel (in “Eve” and “ear”) in the second line.14 He makes us all but aware, in enunciating these lines, that we produce the different vowels, even though the vibration of the larynx remains constant, by altering the configuration of our mouth and lips and by moving our tongue forward or back. He also brings to the edge of our awareness that the stopped consonants that punctuate these lines are effected by interrupting, with our tongue or lips, the sounding of the vowels: “If aught of oaten stop. . . .”
Collins goes on, always in the mode of an address to the personified evening, to detail selected scenes and events in the declining day, including prominently (as in “To Autumn”) the sounds of insects. Later in the poem he holds constant the time of day and describes the change in a typical evening during each of the four seasons. By an inverse procedure, Keats holds the season constant and describes the changes during the course of a typical day, from the mists of the autumnal morning in the opening line to the setting of the sun in the closing stanza.
These and other parallels, however, only highlight the differences between the two poems. Collins’ linguistic medium is only subdued
ly physical, and his descriptions are exclusively visual, intangible, and expressly represented as generic items in a conventional eighteenth-century landscape modeled on the paintings of Claude Lorraine. He asks to be led, for example,
where some sheety lake
Cheers the lone heath, or some time-hallow’d pile,
Or up-land fallows grey
Reflect its last cool gleam.
Keats, on the other hand, makes us feel, in the act of enunciating his words, the very weight, pressure, and fullness that he ascribes, not just to the physical processes by which autumn conspires (an interesting word!) with her “close bosom-friend,” the virile sun, to “load,” “bend,” “fill,” “swell,” and “plump” the vines and trees, but also to their conspicuously edible products. Collins’ Eve is young and virginal; she is “chaste,” a “Maid compos’d,” a “calm Vot’ress” from whom the male sun is segregated “in yon western tent.” She is attended by an allegorical retinue of hours, elves, and “Pensive Pleasures sweet” but remains elusively diaphanous, emerging only to merge again into the visibilia of the landscape. “Be mine the hut” that
marks o’er all
Thy dewy fingers draw
The gradual dusky veil.
But when Keats’ autumn makes a personal appearance in his second stanza, it is as a mature woman who, far from dissolving into the outer scene, remains a full-bodied person who supervises, and sometimes herself engages in, the physical labors of the seasonal harvest.
This leads me to the important observation that whereas the setting of Collins’ ode is the natural landscape, the setting of Keats’ ode is not nature but culture or, more precisely, the union of natural process and human labor that we call agriculture. Keats’ poem was in fact inspired by the sight of a cultivated field just after it had been reaped. “Somehow a stubble plain looks warm,” Keats wrote to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds. “This struck me so much in my sunday’s walk that I composed upon it” (L2:167). In fact, in “Ode to Autumn,” what Keats’ descriptions denote or suggest allows us to reconstruct the concrete particulars of a working farm. Before us there is a cottage with a thatched roof around which grapevines have been trained. In the vicinity are the other plantings that provide what Keats calls the “store” of farm products—a grove of apple trees, a garden producing gourds and other vegetables, hazelnut trees, and a partly reaped grainfield. There are also a granary with a threshing floor, beehives, and on a near hillside a flock of sheep with their full-grown lambs.15 In this Keatsian version of a georgic poem, two plants are mentioned that are not products of human cultivation, but both are explicity related to the activities of farming: the autumn flowers (9–11) that are harvested by the bees to fill the “clammy cells” of the farmer’s beehive and the poppies (17–18) that are cut by the reaper in mowing the stalks of grain they entwine. In the first stanza, even the natural process of ripening is converted, figuratively, into a product of the joint labors of autumn and the sun, and in the second stanza, the four functions attributed to the personified Autumn all have to do with the workings of a cottage farm during the harvest: Autumn sits on the granary floor where the grain is winnowed; watches the oozings from the cider press; sleeps on a furrow that, tired by her labor, she has left only half-reaped; and carries on her head the basket of grain that has been gleaned in the cornfield.
Most important, finally, is the difference in the overall purport of the two poems. Collins’ “Ode to Evening” is a fine period poem of the Age of Sensibility that is content to praise, with established odic ceremonial, the time and natural scenes favored by the lyric speaker, represented in the first person, who wanders through the poem as a typical penseroso figure and connoisseur of picturesque and sublime landscapes. He seeks out not only the “sheety lake” and “time-hallowed pile,” but also, in stormy weather, the hut
That from the mountain’s side,
Views wilds, and swelling floods,
And hamlets brown, and dim-discover’d spires.
In Keats’ “To Autumn,” the lyric speaker never intrudes as a first-person participant or even by specifying his responses to what he describes. The descriptions, however, are represented not simply for their sensuous selves, but in such a way as to communicate what is never expressly said. Keats, that is, concretizes the conceptual dimension of his poem, which declares itself only by the cumulative suggestions of the phenomena he describes, the constructions of his syntax, the qualities and interrelations of the speech-sounds in which he couches his descriptions, and the increasingly insistent implications of the metaphors he applies to these phenomena in the course of the autumn day.
It is notable, for example, that “To Autumn” ends not in a decisive closure, but on a triple suspension—in syntax, meaning, and meter:
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
The suspension is syntactic, in that the line (set off from what precedes it by a semicolon)16 concludes a sentence that lists the varied contributors to the music of autumn, in which the only connective is a noncommittal and; Keats enumerates the sounds made by gnats and lambs, hedge crickets and redbreast; and gathering swallows . . . with which the series simply breaks off. The suspension is also semantic, in that “gathering,” a present participle used adjectivally, signifies a continuing activity still to be completed.17 Lastly, the suspension is metrical. The line can be read, according to the metric pattern established in the ode, with five iambic stresses:
And gáthering swállows twítter ín the skíes.
An expressive reading, however, does not stress the inconsequential preposition “in,” but renders the line with only four strong stresses:
And gáthering swállows twítter in the skíes.
The result is that the poem closes with an empty fifth beat that we experience as portending something yet to come.
The multiple suspension, coming so unexpectedly at the conclusion to “Autumn,” is inherently suggestive, and also heightens our retrospective awareness of earlier features of the poem. For example, there is the repeated use of present participles that indicate an ongoing, unfinished process, from “conspiring” in the third line to “gathering” in the last. We become more sensitive to the illusoriness of the bees’ belief that “warm days will never cease” (10); to the emblematic associations, in stanza 2, with the scythe of a reaper only momentarily suspended; and to the portent in “the last oozings” of the cider press. The ending also sharpens our realization that in the last stanza the sunlit day of the preceding stanzas has lapsed into evening, and that although Autumn, as the lyric speaker reassures her, has her music, its mode, unlike that of “the songs of spring,” is elegiac, in a tonality established by the gnats (27) who “mourn” in a “wailful choir” (the suggestion is of a church choir singing a requiem) even as the swallows are gathering for their imminent flight south.
We thus come to realize that the poem is from beginning to end steeped in the sense of process and temporality. Critics have often noted the static quality of Keats’ descriptions, especially in the second stanza, but the seeming stasis, as the closing line both suggests and exemplifies, is in fact only a suspension on the reluctant verge of drastic change and loss. The precise moment of poise on the verge is denoted by the “now” in line 31. I must have read the poem a score of times before I realized the full poignancy of that word, coming at the end of a sequence of temporal adverbs beginning at line 25: “While,” “Then,” “and now” . . . the swallows are gathering. Sunt lacrimae rerum. What Keats expresses without saying, even as he celebrates the season of fruition, is awareness that in this world such fulfillment is only a phase in a process that goes on “hours by hours”; he expresses also his quiet acceptance of the necessity that this rich day must turn into night and this bountiful season into winter.
To return to the material base with which we began: Throughout the poem the interplay of
the enunciated speech-sounds helps to effect—in fact, greatly enlarges—this conceptual reach beyond assertion. The final word of the last line, “skies,” is itself experienced as a suspension, in that we need to go no less than four lines back for the word whose speech-sound, in the elaborate odic rhyme scheme, it replicates. That word is “dies”—
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies.
Collins applies the same metaphor to the wind in his opening invocation to evening,
Like thy own solemn springs,
Thy springs and dying gales,
but “dying gales” was a stock phrase in the poetic diction of Collins’ time, and its function in his poem is simply to comport with the pervasive mood of “the Pensive Pleasures sweet.” In Keats’ “To Autumn,” on the other hand, the wind that lives or dies resonates with a number of earlier elements in the poem; most markedly, it reiterates the metaphor in the phrase “the soft-dying day.” These two allusions, reserved for the stanza that ends with the premonitory flocking of the swallows, widens the reach of reference from the processes of the natural world to the human speaker of the poem, for whom living and dying are not, as for the wind, the day, and the season, merely metaphors. The initial allusion to death, however, is oblique and is mitigated by its embodiment in a sequence of speech-sounds that are a delight to utter: “While barred cloúds blóom the sóft-dýing day.” The procession is slowed for our closer apprehension by the two sets of successive strong stresses; as we enunciate the line, our awareness of the evolving changes in the seven long vowels (no vowel occurs twice) is enhanced by the slight impediments to be overcome in negotiating the junctures between adjacent consonants; while in the last two words the first syllable of “dying,” by a vowel shift forward and up, modulates into “day,” even as we realize that although the sunset can color (“bloom”), it cannot impede the death of the day.
Repetition cannot dull the sense of ever-renewing discovery in attending to the interrelations of material medium, metrical pace, syntax, tone of voice, and spoken and unspoken meanings in this marvelous stanza: