To Autumn
The poem is an ode in three stanzas of eleven lines each, addressed throughout to autumn itself, which it treats as a person.[1] The first stanza names the season the close friend of the sun and lists the fruit, gourds, hazel and late flowers it ripens. The second pictures autumn as a figure resting on a granary floor, asleep in a furrow, crossing a brook as a gleaner, or watching a cider-press. The third answers its own question about the songs of spring by cataloguing the sounds of an autumn evening, the gnats, the lambs, the crickets, the robin, and the gathering swallows.[1]
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.
John Keats was an English Romantic poet, born in London on 31 October 1795.[2] He trained as an apothecary and surgeon before turning to poetry, and he died of tuberculosis in Rome on 23 February 1821, at twenty-five.[2] He wrote “To Autumn” on 19 September 1819, the last of the odes he composed that year, and it was first published in 1820 in the volume Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems in London.[1]
- John Keats, “To Autumn” (1819), full text. The poem as reproduced here; the 1820 published text with its original spellings.
- Harvard Library, “1820: The Publication of Keats’s Lamia Volume.” Confirms the 1820 volume and the biographical facts in the maker panel.
Autumn—On the Hudson River
A wide panoramic landscape, painted in oil.[1] In the foreground three men with dogs and rifles rest among vine-covered fallen logs and mossy boulders beside a small waterfall and pool, with trees of crimson, orange, and golden foliage framing the scene at left and right. The middle ground opens onto a grassy meadow with a winding stream, a wooden bridge, and grazing sheep and cattle. In the distance a town with smoking chimneys sits along a river dotted with sailboats and steamboats, beneath a hazy sky lit by rays of light near a low sun.[1]
Jasper Francis Cropsey was an American landscape painter, born in Rossville, Staten Island, New York, on 18 February 1823.[2] He trained and worked first as an architect before turning to painting, and he became a leading second-generation member of the Hudson River School, a group of American landscape painters, known especially for his autumn scenes.[2] He painted this canvas in 1860 and died in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, on 22 June 1900.[1]
- National Gallery of Art, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Autumn—On the Hudson River (1860), accession 1963.9.1. The holding institution’s record; source of the date, medium, accession number, and open-access status.
- Wikimedia Commons, File:Autumn--On the Hudson River-1860-Jasper Francis Cropsey.jpg. The open-access image reproduced here, and the biographical dates for Cropsey.
American Homestead Autumn
A hand-colored lithograph of a rural American farmstead in autumn.[1] A wood-frame farmhouse with a porch stands among trees whose leaves are turning yellow and orange. Figures and farm activity fill the yard and an adjacent orchard and fields, with fences and outbuildings under an open sky. It is the autumn sheet of the firm’s four-part American Homestead series, one print each for spring, summer, autumn, and winter.[1]
Currier & Ives was a lithography firm in New York City that operated under that name from 1857 to 1907 and described itself as a publisher of cheap and popular prints.[2] Nathaniel Currier, born in 1813, founded the print business; James Merritt Ives, born in 1824, was a bookkeeper and artist who became a partner in 1857, when the firm took the joint name.[2] The firm produced thousands of hand-colored lithographs of nineteenth-century American life, including this seasonal series.[1]
- Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, American Homestead: Autumn, Currier & Ives, object 76.42.42.3. The holding institution’s record; source of the date, medium, object number, and the four-part series.
- Wikimedia Commons, File:American Homestead Autumn - Currier and Ives.png. The open-access image reproduced here, and the firm’s dates and description.
