Keats was inspired to write To Autumn after walking through the water meadows of Winchester, England, in an early autumn evening of 1819. There is a story that Keats could not concentrate on his work in his rented rooms because the landlady's daughter was practicing the violin. Driven to distraction, he went out behind Winchester College to walk and to think. He returned and wrote the poem straight away.
The poem has three stanzas of eleven lines describing the taste, sights and sounds of autumn. Much of the third stanza, however, is dedicated to diction, symbolism, and literary devices with decisively negative connotations, as it describes the end of the day and the end of autumn.
1Season 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.
2Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may findThee 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.
3Where 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.