To Autumn
Can a person define life? Can life be defined at all? In his last rebellious act against death, one author took on the challenge. John Keats' poem "To Autumn" is a beautiful masterpiece, which has withstood the test of time. Keats' theme in "To Autumn" portrays how life can be related to the slow progression of the fall season. Keats shows this with his slowing rhythm and use of syntax, the softening of his sounds and diction, and the detailed imagery he manipulates throughout the poem. Keats uses these same techniques in "The Eve of St. Agnes". The portrayal of ardent young love dealing with a hostile adult world and contrasted with aging and death has an inherent appeal on the reader. A closer reading reveals more than just a gorgeous surface; it reveals many of the same concerns about life that Keats explores in his odes--imagination, dreaming and vision, and life as a mixture of opposites In To Autumn, Keats cleverly introduces the theme through rhythm and syntax alterations. It is written in iambic pentameter, allowing the first stanza to move fluently without hesitation due to the consistence of the meter. The second stanza brings about a slower pace, as the rhythm is momentarily broken by a question asked by the
This represents mid-autumn because by this time, a lot of the animals have migrated or gone into hibernation, which results in the elimination of the sounds produced by these animals. " In this stanza, Keats starts to use more letters that make softer sounds such as w, n, and s. Sight is also one of a person's more immediate senses because most of the time people see before anything else. In the third stanza, Keats uses more of the softer letters but there are still some hard letters buried in places. Contrary to this pattern, Keats throws in some harder sounding words like "barred" and "crickets. When he thinks, he pictures things in his mind. All things have died or are dying, "Then is a wailful choir the small gnats mourn. In the first stanza, the reader reads phrases such as: "Until they think warm days will never cease," and, "For summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cells. Stanza two is similar to mid-autumn because as Keats moves away from the immediate senses, nature begins to die and some of the objects, which arouses ones senses, are not longer present outdoors. Lastly, the third way Keats proves his theme is with the vivid imagery that he uses. " The sentence shows the gnats are dying, an example of one death that is occurring. These letters are b, d, p, g, and t. The last stanza is comparable to late autumn because as the readers are using their more abstract senses, nature's glories have all but diminished. Keats took a regular season, which is around for a quarter of the year, and which no one really gives a second thought about, and he compared it to the progression of the most treasured possessions one can ever have. This can also be related to a middle-aged man.
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Acceptance Essays
