"To Autumn" by John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

      For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

   Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

   Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

   Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

      Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

   Steady thy laden head across a brook;

   Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

      Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?

   Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

   And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

   Among the river sallows, borne aloft

      Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

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.

~~~~~

I love this luscious poem. It is so thick and rich that one must read it slowly, carefully, attentively, like one would eat a very large, very ripe peach. 

Keats gives us a strange poem: iambic pentameter, but not a sonnet; 11 lines per stanza but not a roundel; close to a Spenserian stanza, but not quite.

Notice the poem's structure. First stanza: autumn's ripe bounty. Second stanza: autumn personified... what would he look like? Third stanza: the music of autumn.

I'm ready for autumn; are you? The greens are browning. Many leaves are down. I feel the plants are whispering, "May we rest now?" Nature has given over her rich bounty to us to keep, and soon she'll ask for sleep. 

I gauge the seasons by my fig tree. Today it is thin, each long branch topped by a tuft of green. The fruit is gone to my freezer and the birds.

On the ground you see what has died and fallen already, enriching its own soil.