Discussion Topic
Imagery of Abundance and Ripeness in "To Autumn"
Summary:
In "To Autumn," Keats vividly depicts the season's abundance and ripeness through imagery that appeals to the senses. The first stanza highlights the collaboration between autumn and the sun to "load and bless" the vines and trees with fruit, using words like "bend," "swell," and "plump" to convey fullness and readiness for harvest. The imagery of "bending" apple trees, "plumped" hazel nuts, and "oozing" nature evokes the season's bounty, while sound imagery in the final stanza underscores the richness and slow melody of autumn.
Which expressions in the first stanza of "To Autumn" indicate the season's abundance and ripeness?
The speaker describes how the season of autumn conspires with its friend, the sun, "how to load and bless / With fruit" all the vines that grow across the roofs of the thatched cottages (lines 3–4). Season and sun seem to want to make the trees so heavy with fruit that the limbs will "bend with apples" (5). Words like load and bend help to convey connotations of abundance, certainly. The speaker goes on to describe the season as "fill[ing] all fruit with ripeness to the core," "swell[ing] the gourd," and "plump[ing] the hazel shells / With a sweet kernel" (7, 7–8). Here, words like ripeness and swell and plump convey the ready ripeness of the harvest. Finally, the speaker describes the season and sun as attempting to produce
more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'er-brimmed...
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their clammy cells. (8–12)
The repetition of the word more also furthers the connotation of abundance, as does the image of the bees' honeycomb so overwhelmed with honey due to the abundance of flowers.
What things come to fullness or ripeness in "To Autumn" and how does Keats evoke these qualities?
The items that come to fullness or to ripeness in the poem include the unspecified fruit growing on the vine that runs around the thatched eaves of the cottages, the apples that weigh down and bend the trees that surround the cottages, gourds, plump hazel nuts, late-blooming flowers, and grain.
Keats uses imagery, description employing any of the five senses of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell, to evoke the fullness of the harvest season. The vines on the cottages are "load[ed]" with fruit, a word that connotes heaviness and plenty. We can envision the vines sagging under the weight of all this fruit. Likewise, the apple trees "bend[ing]" under the vast number of ripe apples on their branches paint a visual picture of abundance.
The sense of ripeness is conveyed through words like "swell" and "plump" that help us visualize the fruits and nuts at their ripest, fullest points, more than ready to be harvested.
The sense of autumn's fullness is evoked in the second stanza with images of sleep, personifying nature as so full of its own bounty that it has become drowsy and needs a nap. Words that take a long time to say, like "drowsed" and "oozing," also convey the autumn world slowing down, weighted with its bounty.
In the last stanza, Keats moves to sound imagery to illustrate that though it is not spring, the world is still full of the slow but melodious sounds of autumn, such as the bleating of full grown lambs and the "wailful choir" of gnats. The world is slowing down, heavy with abundance.
Which lines in "To Autumn" depict images of blossoming and ripening?
Imagery is description that uses the five senses of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. Autumn is described with many images of blossoming and ripening in Keats's "To Autumn." For example, we can visualize
fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run
Although the order of the words is a little confusing at first, we can imagine the vines trained around the thatched cottage brimming with ripened fruit.
Autumn's bounty also happens to
bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees
We can picture the apple trees by the cottage, perhaps covered with moss near the bottom, with their limbs bending because of the weight of all the many apples they hold.
Autumn manages:
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
half-reap'd furrow