Bourne Comment

KEATS DOES NOT DESERVE TO BE SO ILL-USED

Autumn is with us and, as expected, we are hearing the familiar line from one of our most famous poets working overtime as it is used repeatedly in the media by writers and broadcast presenters with an impoverishment of imagination. Every year it is the same with the result that this beautiful and descriptive metaphor of the golden season has now become a cliché.

The words are the first line of the lyric poem To Autumn written by John Keats (1795-1821) and here it is in its correct context in the first stanza from this famous ode:

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-eaves 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.

Keats wrote the poem on 19th September 1819 after enjoying a lovely autumn day and he described his experience in a letter to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds: "How beautiful the season is now. How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather. Dian skies. I never lik'd stubble fields so much as now. Aye better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow a stubble plain looks warm in the same way that some pictures look warm. This struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it."

It is obvious that his perceptions were at their most acute and shortly afterwards he was taken dangerously ill and died a few months later at the age of 25. The beautiful and subtle verse has been described as close to perfect as any shorter poem in the English language and is acknowledged as the most anthologised, pored over by the purists and quoted interminably.

This accounts for the popularity of the opening line which has been used so many times over the years as the summer closes but in recent times has had such exposure as to devalue its real worth, trotted out by journalists, commentators, pundits and speakers with no thought for its actual context but merely to fill a few seconds of reference to the changing season.

My old editor always warned about using words that fall easily together and this has happened to this line from Keats that has become part of the lexicon of every lazy writer and broadcaster with no inclination to spend time in the library to find a new analogy. Popular is an acceptable description but hackneyed is hard to bear and so we must close our ears whenever we hear another reference coming on.

Poor Keats deserves better than this.

Note: This article was published by the Bourne web site on 14th November 2015