Poetic Maturation Of Keats
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Keats, unlike most men, had a deep understanding of his own individuality and mortality, and at a young age had years of wisdom. He described his life metaphorically in the last of his six odes, To Autumn, and delves into a personal history, using the nature and time as his guide, in order to understand and achieve the greatness he so desired. The letter he wrote to J.H. Reynolds on 21, 22 September 1819 surely supports this and shows his mood and the strong sense of calm and understanding that surrounded him and filled him. Keats uses this ode to not only describe his maturation process and to confront his identity, but to also force readers and critics to realize it as well and, for the first time, shows Keats addressing his own death.
The title of Keats ode, To Autumn, immediately symbolizes a specific state of maturity in his own life, past the spring of youth, and the middle years of summer, just before the cold death of winter. In fact, it seems, early on that Keats looks upon the works of his youth with disdain. In his letter to Reynolds he shows this when he writes, “Aye better than the chilly green of Spring” (Keats 271). This is a most interesting statement because green is often used to describe something new or fresh, and yet his use of the word “chilly” shows a feeling of loneliness, perhaps showing where much of the source for the work stemmed from. This contempt for his youth was most likely fueled by the criticism he constantly received, calling his poetry boyish, something he loathed. The contempt he held for his youth most likely lead to his own feelings of uncertainty, something that haunted him throughout his life.
The uncertainty that surrounded him through his years, and the art that it yielded is alluded to in the first line of the ode, “Season of mist and mellow fruitfulness” (Keats 274). The fruit of his labor he now looked upon, in hindsight, as uncaring of the weight of the world. His reference to the mist shows how lost he is as he specifically notes in his letter to Reynolds when he states, “To night I am all in a mist; I scarcely know what is what” (Keats 272). Here, it seems, he is acknowledging the clouds that veiled his understanding of his work throughout his years, evidence of his maturity. When Keats refers to the “seasons of mist” as a “close bosom-friend of the maturing sun” he seems to be referring back to himself, recognizing his own maturity, yet still seeming lost because he did not recognize his own greatness as a poet (Keats 274). It may be our own wisdom in being able to view his works that we realize that To Autumn is a masterpiece with a very Keatsean style.
Keats special way of describing images and his use of every sense to put forth an all encompassing scene is quite overwhelming:
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.
(Selected Letters, p.274)
The poem’s suggestion of the stage of his life shows a full, ripe, and almost grand finale before the death of winter, another hint that Keats may have begun to realize not only his end, but also his greatness as a poet. Here he is describing his own maturity and the beauty that has filled his life as well that which he will pass on to others, either through his own work, or through the inspiration it will bring to others in their work. He seems to have, at last, concluded that his writings may last through the ages and that they will become part of the fulfilling beauty of the world that he is describing with these words.
While the first stanza uses the natural beauty of the landscape of autumn to describe his maturation, the second stanza shows the full and complete stages of his life, as Keats addresses his own spirit and inspiration as a poet:
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.
(Selected Letters, p.274)
Here he is going through the phases of his life, using the various stages of the growth and use of grain as an hourglass, initially talking of when he sat without a care, perhaps referring back to a time of a boyhood filled with happiness and enthusiasm, when the weight of world was not on his shoulders and allowed for the “mellow fruitfulness” that he mentions in the first stanza. When he writes of the next stage and how he was “drows’d with the fume of poppies”, he may very well be referring to the time when his mind was intoxicated with thoughts and anxieties, a natural response to drugs and a common reason for their use. Yet Keats treasures the resulting idleness and thoughts which later lead to his spontaneity and creativity, and he recognizes that these were wonderful steps in the maturation process. When he comments about how he “dost keep steady”, Keats is talking about the days when everything is clear to him, when he knows what to write, and when he is steadily working on his poetry. Yet in his letter he realizes that he is more complex than that and not commonly so steady when he states “but you know my unsteady and vagarish disposition” referring to his mood shifts and impulsive behavior (Keats 272). This once again