Student Question
What feminine image does Keats use to describe autumn in "To Autumn"?
Quick answer:
In "To Autumn," Keats uses feminine imagery primarily in the second stanza. He describes autumn with images of a person with "soft-lifted" hair, a reaper asleep in a furrow, and a "gleaner" crossing a stream with a basket on her head. These images evoke female farm workers, reflecting the traditional roles of women in agricultural tasks.
Keats personifies autumn in all three stanzas of the poem "To Autumn," but he does so in different ways. In the first stanza, he calls autumn the "close bosom-friend" of the sun. This description does not imply a gender, nor does Keats follow it up with a pronoun to indicate gender. Typically, one thinks of a bosom-friend,—or nowadays, we might say "bosom buddy"—as a friend of the same gender, and since the sun is personified as male, we might lean toward a male personification of autumn in the first stanza.
In the second stanza, autumn takes on feminine personification. In lines 2–3, the picture is of a person sitting on a granary floor with the wind winnowing the person's "soft-lifted" hair. While the gender isn't specified, the image of long, streaming hair brings a woman to mind. More images of agricultural workers follow, and it is easy to...
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think of these characters as women who are working the harvest. The next image is of a reaper asleep in a furrow. The pleasant fragrance surrounding this person, "the fume of poppies," again suggests a woman rather than a man. The third worker described is a "gleaner" crossing a stream with a basket on her head.
Historically, gleaners—those who followed the teams of reapers to gather the remaining scraps—were women. An example that would have been well-known to Keats is the biblical character Ruth, who gleaned in Boaz's fields. Women were more likely to bear baskets on their heads than men were in traditional societies. The final image in the stanza is of someone sitting next to a cider press, watching the "oozings" come out hour after hour. This task would likely be performed by a young or old woman who was not strong enough for heavier field work. The four types of agricultural workers described in the stanza are most easily visualized as females.
The third stanza addresses autumn as a musician, but no gender is apparent. The actual sounds of autumn are listed without much male/female imagery except for the "stubble-plains," which evoke a masculine jaw in need of a shave. Although "treble-soft" brings to mind treble singers, who are defined as singers of either gender aged eight to sixteen, in the United Kingdom the word often refers to boy sopranos. If any gendered imagery exists in stanza 3, it would be male.
The strongest feminine imagery in the poem is in the second stanza, where Keats describes four different types of female farm workers.