Keats’s poem “To Autumn” conveys something more than a serene acceptance of life. While its tone is less declamatory and enthusiastic than other Keats poems, its attitude is at least contented, and even celebratory.

The first stanza abounds in images of plenty. The season and the sun work together to “load and bless” the vines with fruit, trees bend beneath the weight of apples, and honey overflows from the beehives. When autumn is personified in the second stanza, the idea of abundance is transferred to her. She is “careless” because she can afford to be.

Keats was born and brought up in London, and his bucolic poems always have a strong atmosphere of the ideal about them. In his poem “To Autumn,” he barely admits that farmers have to do any work. Country people seem merely to wait calmly and contentedly while nature pours down her bounty upon them. The tone of the poem, therefore, is appropriate to this idyllic state of affairs.