The most famous of poems about the fall is probably still Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 73”—the poem with the line “Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” It appeared last week as The New York Sun’s Poem of the Day. But quick on Shakespeare’s heels comes “To Autumn,” the last of the astonishing run of odes John Keats (1795–1821) wrote in 1819. Keats has appeared twice this year in the Sun’s Poem of the Day feature, with “What the Thrush Said” in March and “On the Sonnet” in June. But here, deep in the fall, it seemed impossible to leave out the poem that begins “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.” Besides, today, October 31, is also Keats’s birthday.

The eleven-line pentameter stanzas are rhymed ababcdedcce in the first verse, and ababcdecdde in the second and third, but all with an opening quatrain and a couplet before the final line. Keats never names an emotion in the poem, but the effect of the scenes he describes — the apple trees bending beneath their weight, the last juice oozing from a cider press, the swallows in the sky — is devastatingly precise. Very little in literature conveys the season so exactly. “Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they? / Think not of them, thou hast thy music too.”

To Autumn
by John Keats

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.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.