A Brighter Word Than Bright: Keats at Work

Autumn; or, Careless on a Granary Floor

130 Autumn; or, Careless on a Granary Floor Keats walks into knowledge in autumn. Though the spring of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” will always be spring, the season around him has shifted. He writes in late September to Reynolds of the change, a description that is the germ of the great poem: 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 [S]unday’s walk that I composed upon it.60 Keats walks within an atmosphere divine. He treads on the mortal world, evidence of hunger and appetite present in the stubble fields. But he breathes in the immortal world. He inspires the chaste sky. For a poet who now for many years has referred to his condition as being “in a Mist,” we find him suddenly in that astonishing moment when the vapors burn away.The divine air Keats walks through is also a lens of greatest clarity, and what in “To Autumn” he comes to see, he sees through an atmosphere that no longer veils his vision. He sees into what he knows. That knowledge feels drawn from the circling despairs darkly informing the desire of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” for “more happy love.” That shape, the circle, first encountered on the three figures of “Ode on Indolence” and then found again, more intimately, in Keats’s own hands, as he turns the Urn around to see theentiretyof its brede, offers to the poet the fundamental pattern that brings him to the bittersweet, sweet-­bitter, acceptance that infuses “To Autumn.” There is within “Ode on a Grecian Urn” a moment we know must 131 1819 exist but that we never witness. It is when the Urn has been turned one full circle, and we find ourselves again at thevery beginning, where gods and mortals engage in mad pursuit and wild ecstasy. That beginning is also an end, is indecipherable from an end. Keats witnesses in the nature of the Urn’s imagery, the circleof its scenes, that mythic pattern he has long inclined toward, where time ceases to be linearand is instead cyclical, returning always to the point of its own origin, finding itself, phoenix-­ like, always born again in the midst of its own demise. But the Urn troubles; it agonizes the very nature of the poem, the poema, that is, “the made thing.” What we see when we read “To Autumn,” when we look at the landscape through Keats’s Muse-­needing, Muse-­ haunted eyes, is the generous moment when Art reciprocates for its own possible heartlessness, when it includes within its life the lives that make it. Keats opens the poem in ripeness so ripe it exceeds itself, a condition we must remember is also a description of the goddess the poem is dedicated to: 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 run61 The close-­ knit, nearly granular clusters of syllables that lend to the opening two lines their marked density alter after “conspiring”—here best understood as a “breathing with” as much as the more immediate connotation. The words become suddenly monosyllabic, and by the fourth line of the poem, as the iambs become so regular as to move beyond mere music into the undergirding pattern that shapes the autumnal world of the poem—as if we have now heard the unsung pattern beneath the song, the world’s ur-­ grammar—whose comforting regularity also creates an as- 132 1819 tonishing anticipation felt matched within the reader’s own pulsing veins, body and poem forging their most intimate link, that as we reach the rhyme we cannot help but feel as if the fruit on the vine has burst with just the added warmth of our own attention. The poem includes us in its ripening, over-­ ripening concern. We know we are here witness to a scene that speaks also of our own nature, and the goddess to whom it is devoted: we find ourselves devotees. This is not a choice we make...