As a poet, Keats was renowned for his sensuousness, and in “Ode to Autumn,” we see this feature of his work displayed to the full. In this “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” the poet's senses are working overtime, conjuring up remarkable images that make the features of the natural world come to life:

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;

The very words that Keats uses are as luscious and as ripe as the fruits of autumn he is describing with such meticulous, loving care.

In “Late August,” Margaret Atwood also uses remarkably sensuous language in rendering the last gasp of a fading summer, bounteous and plentiful to the last:

Late August—
This is the plum season, the nights
blue and distended, the moon
hazed, this is the season of peaches
with their lush lobed bulbs
that glow in the dusk, apples
that drop and rot
sweetly, their brown skins veined as glands...

The “lush lobed bulbs” correspond closely to the swelling gourds and plump hazel shells in Keats's poem. Nature in all its ripe fullness can be observed thanks to the sheer sensuousness of the language used. In both poems, it is possible for us to close our eyes and imagine what it is like to be there in the midst of such an extraordinary burst of natural beauty, nature in all its fecundity.

Each poem deals with a different season: autumn in the case of Keats, summer in the case of Atwood. Yet both seasons have their music, to paraphrase Keats, and their music is beautifully conveyed by the respective poets' use of language that is at once rich, ripe, and sensuous.