Ode to Autumn

Here are the questions for this week. Remember that you need to use the critical ideas we discussed and looked at if you are to write this essay really well.

Choose ONE of these titles, and write a fluent and clear critical response to the question, using close evidence from the poem throughout to back up your ideas, and reinforcing your ideas with critical reference where appropriate:


1. It can be argued that 'To Autumn' is an intellectual response to the season rather than an emotional one. How far do you agree with this statement?

2. Does the use of metaphor allow the reader to share Keats’ intense enjoyment of the season in 'To Autumn' or does it obscure his celebration? Discuss how far you agree with each proposition and why.

3. Is 'To Autumn' a celebration of nature and autumn or is it an acknowledgement that the scene portrayed is an idealised vision of the past?

4. Knowles and Moon comment that ‘it is typical that metaphors use concrete images to convey something abstract, helping to communicate what is hard to explain’. To what extent do you think that the metaphors in 'To Autumn' are there to communicate abstract ideas, and how far are they used by Keats as simple aids to description?

5. ‘Knowles and Moon describe the functions of metaphor as ‘explaining, clarifying, describing, expressing, evaluating, entertaining’. How do you think Keats employs metaphor in ''To Autumn', and which of these functions does he prioritise?

Some useful critical terminology for your essay

Valediction: a farewell speech. To Autumn is in the valedictory mode.


Apostrophe: A feature of an ode. A figure of speech or rhetorical term in the form of an address in which someone is absent, dead or non-human and is addressed as if it were alive and present and able to reply. The speech can be addressed to a person, idea or thing.

Ode: (from the Greek – to sing) A lyric poem with a dignified theme phrased in a formal, elevated style. Its purpose is to praise and glorify. Odes describe nature intellectually rather than emotionally. An ode has a succession of stanzas in lines of varying length and metre. Its tone is formal, its style is elevated; it is lofty and has noble sentiments. It is characterised by its length, intricate stanza forms, grandeur of style and seriousness of purpose. The form was established by the Greek poet Pindar.

Caesura: a pause within a line of verse. In this example from To Autumn there are caesuras in both lines ‘Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,’
‘Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft’

End-stopped: The end of a line of verse coincides with an essential grammatical pause usually signalled by punctuation.
‘Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head...’

In this example from 'To Autumn', the first line is end-stopped, the second uses enjambment (see below)

Enjambment: The running over of the sense and grammatical structure from one verse line or couplet to the next without a punctuated pause.

Lyric: A poem, usually short, expressing in a personal manner the feelings and thoughts of an individual speaker (not necessarily those of the poet). Keats’ sonnets and odes are in the lyric form.

Synaesthesia: The description of a sense impression in terms more appropriate to a different sense; the mixing of sense impressions in order to create a particular kind of metaphor. As Keats likes to dwell on sense impressions, he uses synaesthesia.

In his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, he describes the taste of wine in terms of colour, action, song, sensation and feeling.

‘O, for a draught of vintage...
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!’