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Ode to Autumn : Stimulus and Response

John Keats

An ode is a long lyric poem that is serious in subject and treatment, elevated in style, and
elaborate in its stanza structure. The Greek poet Pindar, whose odes were modelled on the songs
by the chorus in Greek drama, established the prototype. His complex stanzas were patterned in
sets of three: moving in a dance rhythm to the left, the chorus the strophe; moving to the right,
they sang the antistrophe; then still in the middle the epode. The regular or Pindaric ode in
English is a close imitation of Pindar’s form, with all the strophes and antistrophes written in one
stanza pattern, and all the epodes in another. This form was introduced in England by Ben Jonson
who wrote To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of That Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary
and Sir H. Morison (1629). The irregular ode was introduced in 1656 by Abraham Cowley
who imitated the Pindaric style and matter but disregarded the recurrent stanza pattern in each
strophic triad; instead, he allowed each stanza to establish its own pattern of variable line lengths,
number of lines, and rhyme scheme. Such irregular ode, because of its flexibility to match the
shifts in subject and mood took firm root on English soil; Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’
(1807) is the representative.

Pindar’s odes were encomiastic; that is, they were written to glorify to praise and glorify
someone ---in the instance of Pindar, the ode celebrated a victorious athlete in the Olympic
games. Such eulogizing odes were written Dryden, Collins,Gray, and Wordsworth who wrote
Ode to Duty. Romantic poets perfected the personal ode of description and passionate meditation,
which is stimulated by an aspect of outer scene and turns on the attempt to solve either a personal
emotional problem or a generally human one. To this genre belong Wordsworth’s Immortality
Ode, Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: An Ode’, Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’.

The Horatian Ode was originally modelled on the matter, tone and form of the odes of the
Roman Horace. In contrast to the passion, visionary boldness, and formal language of Pindar’s
odes, many Horatian odes are calm, meditative, and colloquial; they are usually homostrophic i.e.
written in a single repetitive stanza form, and are shorter than Pindaric odes. Bright examples
include Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’(1650) and Keats’
“To Autumn”. – M.H.Abrams

To Autumn is one of the six great odes of Keats – Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian
Urn, To Psyche, On Melancholy, Ode on Indolence and To Autumn – which were mostly
written in 1819. While To a Nightingale reflects the poet’s impassioned longing for escape from
the unintelligible world where ‘weariness, fever and fret’ reign, the last one, To Autumn, points
to the stability of the poet’s mind which portrays and delights in the calmness of fruition. Except
for Ode to Autumn, the odes show a concern with the poet’s desire for true beauty, and they
thus have a link with Endymion that begins with the famous line – ‘ A thing of Beauty is a Joy
forever’, Hyperion, Lamia and The Fall of Hyperion. Ode to Autumn, which has three
eleven line stanzas, is considered to be the most perfect poem Keats ever wrote.

To Autumn is acclaimed to be the best of Keats’ odes. Keats is now sedate, having overcome the
pangs of weariness, the fever and the fret of this unintelligible world and has found solace in the

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company of nature. The indrawn poet has now come out of his shell and has built up a link with
nature. That is why; he has selected autumn, which is remarkable for its fullness and mellow
fruitfulness.

Oliver Elton has praised the poem as ‘impeccable’. The tribute is a somewhat negative assertion
as it indicates freedom from faults rather than possession of positive merit. While it is true that
Keats is one of the greatest poets, he is occasionally guilty of lapses in thought and expression.
But the Autumn Ode and the Chapman’s Homer sonnet may be said to be flawless. It is not
because of the lack of faults that it is favourite among the readers; it has a rare combination of
disparate qualities, and it is on this account that it deserves to be classed with the finest nature
poems in English literature.

The first striking quality of the Ode is its concreteness. Here concreteness means
commonplaceness, a profusion of objects of daily perception, objects we see and ignore. It is a
marvel of poetic imagination how these objects, ordinary fruits and flowers, birds and insects we
know and neglect, combine to produce an impression of exceptional beauty, born as it were, of a
conspiracy to fill fruits and vegetables with ripeness to the core. The word ‘conspiring ‘ is highly
significant in as much as it denotes the clandestine mating between the sun, the male, and nature,
the female. Here Keats subtly and succinctly hints at his inclination towards Hellenism referring
to Apollo, the sun god who is generically male, and Ceres (derivative in cereal) the goddess of the
Earth who is generically male. The distinction, we must keep in mind, is cosmological and
concerns the life process of the universe. Sexual designation here is metaphorical and the sexual
undertone is set in motion by the use of the phrase ‘ close bosom-friend’. The two agents, sun and
earth, together generate the rich bounty of harvest-time. Taken literally, ‘conspiring’ means a
breathing together (the Latin spiro means breathe). The word also conveys through general
signification the sense of concealed act, one that is done sub rosa. Spirituality and hidden
physical union between earth and sun heighten Keats’ celebration of autumn. The marriage is
beyond man’s control and influence, yet the products are tangible. Apples, gourds, hazel nuts, and
late flowers man can know; the cause and origin of this bounty he can only divine (guess,
presume, perceive, discern). The union is, however, sacred, and this sacredness of the union
between sun and earth is stressed in the reverential tone reflected in the poet’s description of the
lush prospect and in the infinitive ‘bless’. Actually, it is possible to read ‘To Autumn’ as
something of a Te Deum with nature as God because the ode praises with hymnal and ritualistic
joy the work of creation.

From addressing the season and noting her connection with the sun, the speaker moves on to
recite the various things in the natural world which season and sun have loaded and blessed with
‘mellow fruitfulness’. Common to each vessel of autumn’s blessing are weight, fullness and
profundity. The vines ‘that round the thatch-eves run’, have borne fruit. The ‘mossed cottage-
trees’ are so laden with apples that they ‘bend.’ And all the fruit are filled with ripeness to the
core.
The gourds are swollen, and the hazel-shells are plump with a sweet kernel. Keats does not stop
with a description of ripeness of the fruit to the core, but extends the theme further. The
conspiracy serves to ‘set budding more’ and promises new life through its seed. ‘And still more’:
offering the bees late flowers which are so plentiful that the bees ‘think that warm days will never
cease’. The fullness is also manifest in poet’s account that ‘Summer has o’er-brimmed their
clammy (damp, moist, dank) cells. The sticky cells of the honeycombs / beehives are already
overflowing with honey collected from the summer flowers, and yet Autumn provides more
flowers in case the bees may keep on sucking in further sweetness from the ‘later flowers’.

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The season not only fills fruits and vegetables with ripeness to the core, it also awakens in the
neglected birds and insects to make fine out of an exuberance of high spirits. It is in this way that
the lesser plants that cluster round thatch-eaves look beautiful, and bleating lambs, whining /
droning gnats in a wailful choir, twittering swallows, whistling red-breasts, and hedge-crickets
are suddenly endowed with a musical power. Basically, these plants, trees and flowers and
singing birds, insects and animals are not thought to have romantic beauty, but ‘as we catch the
infection of the poet’s enthusiasm’ (Prof. Sengupta), we wonder how these trivial objects of
nature are imbued with hitherto ‘unknown and unseen’ vitality which makes them uncommon.
The poet is not in a hurry; looking around in a leisurely manner he realizes and projects how
enchanting our commonplace surroundings /environs / milieu are, and using well-chosen
epithets he makes us feel that the poetry of earth is at our doorstep, if only we keep our eyes
and ears open.

Like the first stanza, the second immediately vivifies the presence of autumn through syntactical
device. While the first opens with an apostrophe, the second begins with a rhetorical question, a
query which does not ask for a reply but which calls attention to the conspicuousness of the point
being made: “ Who hath not seen thee amidst thy store?” The question has an inbuilt answer that
autumn not only fills to the core the vegetation, but also the granary. And this being a harvest
season, we have the image of a young girl ‘sitting careless on a granary floor’. ‘Careless’ here
does not mean lackadaisical/ slipshod / slapdash / casual / sloppy but happy-go-lucky or carefree.
This freedom from tension comes after exhaustive work that goes before the attainment of
composure. Great strain was required to bring the harvest into the granary; the furrow has been
half-reaped; the gleaner is on the way home; the patient look comes after many hours of attention.
Keats thus combines dynamism with serenity. This image actually adds force and individuality to
a routine affair. The tufts of golden grains or chaffs being winnowed by the wind create a further
image of autumn, the watching girl, as a blonde-haired / flaxen girl with her ‘hair soft-lifted’.
This is the second picture. This stanza contains qualities similar to the ones that were celebrated
in the first stanza – ripeness and plentitude. However, they are not like the static features that we
find in the first stanza – heavy apples and gourds, cottage-trees, the vines – but light dynamic
qualities. This shift from the stationary to the moving / stillness to motion points to the fusion
(assortment) of youthful qualities with those of maturity. For all her maternal, life-bearing power,
Autumn nevertheless retains a touch of girlishness and levity as suggested by her billowing,
blonde tresses.

The second tableau is of the field hand ‘sound asleep on a half-reaped furrow’. The drowsiness is
caused by the fume of the poppies and it is so relaxing / tension-busting that her hook / Spares the
next swath and all its twined flowers.’ Although sleep suggests inactivity, the intoxication that
sleep implies heightens the psychic process in the same way as Keats experiences in the
beginning of his Ode to a Nightingale – the drowsy numbness that is said to be caused by
hemlock or dull opiate. The nightingale’s song also produces in the poet ‘the dull brain’ . From
the reaper the ode moves to the gleaner. There is something elegant about the gleaner who keeps
steady her laden head while crossing a brook. There is another reason for the girl’s intoxication
because the air is also thick with the smell of the apple-juice oozing from the cider-press – a
process which (the last oozings) the cider-presser watches with patient look hours by hours. Thus
while the first stanza gives us a taste of the season’s sights, the second gives us the taste of its
smell – two of the three ingredients of Keats’s sensuousness. In a sense, the entire second
stanza measures the more of ‘still more’. After undergoing a long natural process of maturation,
the store of autumn can be used by man; and such usefulness increases its worth. The full granary
seems to stand alone as a picture of abundance; but the three other tableaux suggest a progression.
The reaper clears the crop; the gleaner picks up the stalks left in the field after the reaper has done

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his job; the cider-presser witnesses ‘the last oozings’ of the fruit being crushed in the cider hours
after hours.

Music, pleasing to the ears, the third ingredient of Keats’ sensuousness, is found in the third
stanza which opens with a question designed to comfort the season for its supposed inferiority to
Spring in respect of music – ‘Where are the songs of Spring?’. This question is followed by a
second question – ‘Ay, where are they?’. Although the poet is all for love of Spring and writes to
George and Georgiana from Hampstead on February 14, 1819 – ‘ I must wait for the spring to
rouse me up a little …’, this question is put to mean that one cannot expect Autumn to have the
songs that are heard in Spring. This suggestion of loss and diminution is countered by the
phenomenon of natural maturity, which is precisely what the ode honours. Still, the poet holds
that even if autumn has no songs, it has music. The {concerto / sonata/ symphony of the} music is
commensurate with the comparative attenuation which designates autumn, the younger season
and justifies its existence. Small gnats drone a ‘wailful choir’, full grown lambs bleat loudly from
hilly bourn (from the banks of a hilly stream); hedge-crickets sing; with treble soft the red breast
whistles from a garden-croft; gathering swallows twitter in the skies. ‘Treble soft’ suggests that
although the red breast sings at the loudest pitch, it is soft, hence very soothing and gentle. This is
how the poet discovers the compensation for the loss. Moreover, the autumnal chorus may not
have the charm of the vernal chorale of the cuckoo and the skylark but it has its own charm. This
is so because ‘all are manifestations of the same spirit that permeates nature in all seasons and is
equally present in all objects and in all beings, great or small’. Again, this stanza covers the
season’s presence as much on the earth as in the sky. Keats not only picturizes the vegetation
and human activities, but also brings into notice the abstract colour of the landscape. ‘The barred
clouds bloom on the soft-dying day / And the touch the stubble-plains with a rosy hue.’ The soft
hum of the gnats is borne aloft or sinks as the light wind lives or dies. While the lower sphere of
the air is abuzz with the musical concert / concerto/ sonata created by the mourning gnats, the
whistling red-breasts and the bleating lambs and the murmuring hedge-crickets, the skies,
obviously softly colourful with a rosy hue / shade, are filled with the twittering swallows. Even
when poet is excited about the beauty of Spring as is noticed in his poem Fancy, the poet refers
to the beauty of Autumn:

Acorns ripe down-pattering

While the Autumn breezes sing.

The softness of the season is all pervasive. While the season is one of mellow fruitfulness, the
human activities too are slow. The hue is rosy, and the day is ‘soft-dying’. The wind is light and
even the voice of the red breast is ‘treble soft’. The melodies that are heard are sweet, sweet even
is the mourning of the gnats because ‘ our sweetest songs’ also include those ‘that tell of saddest
thoughts’. The poet draws the picture as much of the daytime as that of the twilight. All the
repose in the ambience indicates that the poet has reconciled himself with the world with its many
miseries as evident in the third stanza of the Nightingale Ode and has reached a state of calm
acceptance of life – ‘calm of mind all passions spent.’ The mood is no longer moist with lacrimae
rerum but is upbeat with joie de vivre. It may not reflect ‘wild ecstasy’ but the poet no longer has
‘ a burning forehead and a parching tongue’ and his heart that was ‘high-sorrowful’ is now
‘cloy’d’. The celebration of the season’s beauty is, for natural reason, not one of high hilarity but
sober and tranquil. It is marked by ‘unravish’d …quietness’ and is a foster child of silence
(softness) and slow time’.

There is often a critique that the poem despite being a ‘chorus hymeneal or triumphant chant’ –
Ode to a Skylark : Shelley it is a requiem. “ The images all describe a deliquescence and the
approach to the end. To the eye, the world is reddish from the sunset and is stubbed (hit, bumped)

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by the harvesters. To the ear the world is a diminuendo of sounds, not a diminuendo exactly but a
rising and falling of notes like the gnat flock lifted and dropped by the light river wind. All the
sounds are high-pitched however soft they may be – singing crickets, whistling birds, twittering
swallows, bleating lambs – and the piercing softness of the music aurally complements the
mellow vividness of the fruits. Shrillness also conveys the feeling of a dirge, a farewell to all life
which, like the migratory swallows, is about to end its stay.” Such appreciation of the Ode would
be doing injustice to both the composition and the composer, for such assertion is based on an
utterly contradictory to the tone of the poem, which is reconciliation and acceptance. Except for
the word ‘mourn’ followed by the word ‘wailful’ to strengthen the expression, which are used in
respect of the sounds created by the gnats there is not a single term to suggest what makes the
poem a dirge, but we must notice that the poet has used the word under a rhyming
compulsion which is further noticed in the use of the words ‘bourn’. Had the poet written in
blank verse or free verse, he could well have avoided the words and might have used the
words ‘droning or humming or the buzzing’ and in place of the suggestive word ‘bourn’
might have used words or phrases like from ‘the edge of the stream’ or from ‘the green
valleys’ and the like. The images are just situational and are introduced to make the
atmosphere comprehensive, ample and widespread. To call the poem a dirge is a blasphemy
or a clinical error as the poem is never a dirge but carries the air of a joyous celebration /
citation instead of lamentation. It is never a ‘plaintive anthem’. The joy, in spite of being
serene, is not subdued but luminous and effulgent, the effect being achieved as much by
well-chosen epithets but by the questions.

Professor S. C. Sengupta claims that ‘yet perfect as it is, this Ode has its limitations, and the
principal deficiency lies, strangely enough, primarily in its perfection, for in great poetry, as
Browning’s Andrea del Sarto would tell us, the poet’s reach should exceed his grasp. This
defect, implicit all through the poem, comes to the surface in the beautiful closing lines of the
first stanza:

To set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’erbrimm’d their clammy cells.

But Summer days do cease, and although the poet mentions Summer and Spring and the poem is
all about Autumn, he carefully omits any mention of winter with its ‘pale misfeature’. This is
an ‘abstraction’(concept, thought, idea, generalization), and this also helps keep out human nature
which Keats says elsewhere is finer than scenery, fine as the latter may be. To Autumn is one of
the best poems in English Literature, but it is a lesser poem than the Ode to a Nightingale or the
Ode on a Grecian Urn.’ Displaying discordance with the accolades heaped upon the poem by
Oliver Elton who calls it ‘impeccable’ and M. R. Ridley who says that ‘the transparency of its
rich beauty is unflecked ,’ Prof Sengupta insists that it is not a great poem as, in his opinion,
‘what is impeccable and transparent and unflecked is not necessarily great.’ Prof Sengupta may
have good reason for his opinion, but we had better not argue with him as to whether it is a great
poem or not. We should remain satisfied with the thought that To Autumn is one of the best
poems in English literature as it like all best poems gives us ample pleasure. And if a work of art
gives pleasure, it is, according to Aristotle, is a good work of art. T. S. Eliot went as far as to say
that Shakespeare’s Hamlet is ‘an artistic failure’ although by one and all the play is considered an
artistic marvel. It will be inartistic to specify To Autumn as an artistic failure by saying that it is
not a great work of art and to find faults with such a brilliant poem. The exploration of flaw in a
widely acclaimed flawless ode is some kind of a public thought about which Keats remarks: “ I
never wrote one single Line of Poetry with the least Shadow of public thought.”- Letter to J

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Reynolds dated Teignmouth, April,1818. We may attribute to Keats what he says about the
nightingale : “(Thou) Singest of summer in full-throated ease”. Keats also sings of Autumn with
full-throated ease and that is all. The poet may not like to lose all interest in human affairs though
he has solitary indifference to applause, even from the finest spirits as he believes even if it
comes it will not blunt any acuteness of vision he may have. He is all for writing from the
yearning and fondness he has for the beautiful, even if his night’s labours should be burnt
every morning, and no eye ever shines upon them. This attitude of the poet upon being
taken into account melts into air all frustrations that emanate from the critics’ personal
expectations.

The poem came out of an inspiration and the inspiration came to the poet as leaves come to a tree.
In his letter of 27 February 1818 he writes to John Taylor:

If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to

a tree it had better not come at all.

The poem was occasioned by Keats’s experience of the beauty of Autumn in course of his
Sunday walks through the stubble fields of Winchester. In a letter dated September 22, 1819 to
Sir Joshua Reynolds, the celebrated painter, the poet wrote from Winchester : “ How beautiful the
Season is now – How fine the air – a temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste
weather – Dian skies— I never liked stubble- field so much as now – Aye better than the chilly
green of the Spring. Somehow a stubble-field looks warm, in the same way that some pictures
look warm. This struck me so much in my Sunday’s walk that I composed upon it.’

The feel of Autumn as we find in the Ode, despite the presence of winnower, the gleaner and the
cider- presser, and the music is one of solitude. The birds and the animals and the insects and the
human beings are, heard or unheard, seen or unseen, are like those abstract entities that are
painted on the Grecian urn, and do not give personal company to the poet. And here we get the
poet in his solemn mood – the poet who says in his letter of October 14 or 15, 1818 written to
George and Georgiana Keats :

Notwithstanding your Happiness and your recommendation I

hope I shall never marry. Though the most beautiful Creature
were waiting for me at the end of a Journey or a Walk; though
the Carpet were of Silk, the Curtains of the morning Clouds; the
chairs and Sofa stuffed with Cygnet’s down; the food manna, the
Wine beyond Claret, the Window opening on Winander mere, I
should not feel – or rather my Happiness would not be so fine, as
my Solitude is Sublime.

If we allow for this assertion of the poet, the Autumn Ode attains to sublimity on account of the
solitude that is felt in the ambience of the season picturized by Keats. This sublimity is not like
the essence anointing / perfuming Tintern Abbey, a philosophical poem by Wordsworth but it is
just like itself and has its own aroma.

The poet, however, does not aspire to be ‘the Wordsworthian or egotistical Sublime which is a
thing per se and stands alone’ as he believes that ‘the poetical character has no self – It is every
thing and nothing – it has no character it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair,
high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. – It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an
Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. It does no harm from
its relish of the dark side of things, any more than from its taste for the bright one, because they

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both end in speculation. A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no
Identity – he is continually in for and filling some other body. The Sun, – the Moon, – the Sea,
and men and women, who are creatures of impulse, are poetical, and have about them an
unchangeable attribute; the poet has none, no Identity – he is certainly the unpoetical of all God’s
creatures. – If then he has no self, and if I am a poet, where is the wonder that I should write no
more?’ The poet here suggests his own attribute of ‘negative capability’, which he ascribes to
Shakespeare. The poet further says that ‘ it is a wretched thing to confess; but taken for granted as
an opinion growing out of my identical Nature – how can it, when I have no Nature?’ This
‘negative capability’ has characterised the poet when he has written his poems and hence prods us
to consider that if the poet has missed mention of the winter or et alia, he has done it just
helplessly. This poem, likes, many of his, is apparently an effortless feat and can be rightly said to
be ‘a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.’ His omission of winter is not ‘careful’ but is
impulsive and artless. He has recorded what he has felt, and not to fulfil the expectation of a
special reader. He is a poet who does not, as already said, care even if his night’s labours – love’s
labour – are burnt every morning or no eye shines upon them. He writes out of fine frenzy
rolling in his brain and not to wrest admiration from the readers. The years do not bring
Keats a philosophic mind but spawns (generates) in him maturity, ‘ a mellow fruitfulness’ that
procreates in his brain a sedate state (‘tranquil restoration – Wordsworth) that makes him
discover fullness in autumn, ‘felt in the blood’. He is after a life of sensation rather than of
thought. The poet writes to Joshua Reynolds from Teignmouth on April 9, 1818 that when he
writes he writes for himself and when he is writing for himself, he writes for the mere sake of the
moment’s enjoyment and at that time nature (his self) has its course with him. The poet’s mood
can be gauged from what he says in his letter to Richard Woodhouse written from Hampstead on
October, 27, 1818 : ‘The faint conceptions I have of poems to come bring the blood frequently
into my forehead.’

As regards sublimity, the poet presents an altogether atypical theory in the letter of October
14 or 15,1818 written to George and Georgiana Keats from Hampstead. He writes that ‘there
is a sublimity to welcome me home. The roaring of the wind is my wife and the stars are through
the windowpane are my Children. The mighty abstract Idea I have of Beauty in all things stifles
the more divided and minute domestic happiness – an amiable wife and sweet Children I
contemplate as a part of that Beauty, but I must have a thousand of those beautiful particles to fill
up my heart.’ The sublime power that Wordsworth feels present in ‘ the rolling of the setting suns
/ And the round ocean and the living air, / And the blue sky, and in the mind of man’. It is ‘ a
motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought, / And runs through
all things.’ This is not so with Keats who feels the presence of a single spirit existent in all things
but ‘the meadows and the woods and the mountains’ do not produce in him ‘elevated thoughts’ or
‘lofty thoughts’ and ‘a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused’ which dwells in
the objects Wordsworth mentions. He is concerned with Beauty that Nature offers and he is
concerned with Beauty because to him ‘ a thing of Beauty is a Joy forever.’ Autumn presents this
beauty before the poet’s eye, making ordinary things appear extraordinary. Although the picture
of autumn is graphical, it is at the same time a vision, a work of imagination. And Keats affirms
in his letter to Shelley written on August 1820 from Hampstead : ‘My imagination is a monastery
and I am its monk.’

When we talk of sublimity, we must pay some attention to what Longinus says in his book On
the Sublime. Although Longinus lays most emphasis on rhetoric to attain sublimity that
transports the mind to an elevated plane, he also speaks of the role of natural genius as the
elemental foundation of the artist’s character. ‘Sublimity’, he says, ‘is the note which springs
from a great mind’. It is that effect which without any utterance, a notion, unclothed and
unsupported, often moves our wonder because the thought is great. Those genuine effects of

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sublimity which please always and please all. To carry the reader or hearer to ecstasy (lofty
zone), genius needs the assistance of skill, invention and power of orderly arrangement. Nature,
says Longinus, a law to herself as she mostly is in all that is passionate and lofty, yet is no
creature of delighting random impulse without a method. … “ She herself is indeed the first and
originating principle which under all things, yet rules of degree, of fitting occasion, of unerring
practice, and of application can be determined by method and are its contribution.” Longinus
further says that ‘all greatness ( or genius) is exposed to the danger of its own if left to itself
without science to control, ‘unsteadied and unbalanced’, abandoned to mere velocity and
uninstructed venture.’ He takes into account what Demosthenes’ theory that of all good things the
greatest is the good fortune and the second, never inferior to the first, is good counsel. The
absence of the second mars all the prospects of the first. In literature, Longinus says, ‘Nature fills
the place of good fortune, Art of good counsel.’ Here Longinus anticipates Coleridge’s theory of
Imagination. Primary Imagination is Nature’s (‘genius’) gift; the secondary involves the poet’s
artistic power. The first persuades and pleases while the latter, the marvellous, being always and
necessarily stronger than the first, has the power to amaze. Again, one factor of sublimity is
necessarily the power of choosing the most vital of the included elements and of making these, by
mutual superimposition, form what appears as it were a single body. On one side the hearer is
attracted by the choice of ideas, on another by the accumulation Keats, knowingly or
unknowingly, attains Longinusian sublimity in this Ode as he is found to exercise poetic art to
give shape to what his genius catches sight of or glimpses into or hears. He selects the objects he
presents very carefully and amalgamates them into an attractive design. That the poet exercises
effort – not strenuous effort; the poem is not a laboured output – is evident in the stanza pattern
and in the questions he puts to himself one after another. The picture is vivid but not ‘frigid’.
All this is the result of the fact that the poet relentlessly nurtured his genius through arduous study
as did Shakespeare, Milton, Pope and Rabindranath Tagore, to name a few men of genius. Keats
who was more Hellenic than the later Greeks or whom Shelley called a Greek comforting him for
his lack of knowledge of the Greek language suggestively calling upon him not to lament for this
reason was an avid reader and perhaps knew what Plato says in his Republic: “ Those who are
unversed in wisdom and virtue and spend all their days in feastings and the like, are borne
downwards, and wander so through life. They never yet raised their eyes to the true world above
them, nor were they lifted up, nor tasted of solid or pure pleasure; but like cattle, looking down,
and bowed to earth and to the table, they feed and fill themselves and gender; and in the
greediness of these desires they kick and butt (hit) one another with horns and hoofs of iron, and
kill because they cannot be satisfied.’ This entails the necessity of ‘imitation and emulation of
great writers and poets who have been before us.’ Keats gives a wide description in his letter of
September 21, 1819 written to George and Georgiana Keats. He says that ‘in course of a few
years he would be as good an Italian scholar as he is French one. He speaks of reading Ariosto,
Dante and the Latin works Aretino and Sannazaro and Machiavelli and his writers Chaucer,
Milton and Chatterton whose English he calls purest. Writing to Taylor on 24 April, 1818 Keats
says: ‘ I mean to follow Solomon’s directions, “ Get learning – get understanding.” I find earlier
days are gone by – I find that I can have no enjoyment in the world but the continual drinking of
knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good for the world ….
There is but one way for me. The road lies through application, study and thought. I will pursue
it.’

The Autumn Ode is a product of this mind and hence features excellence and greatness. If it
were not so, it would not give us so much delight and would fail to attain sublimity. Keats may
not fulfil all the criteria propounded by Longinus, but that he attains sublimity is doubtless.
The Ode is amazing and there is no scope to disagree with this view. That the poet
cultivated his genius and was careful of the method is evident in the well-chosen epithets,
interrogations, selection of objects and their assortment in an orderly manner.

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If we talk about imagination, we ought to reminisce Coleridge who speaks of the distinctive
features of both imagination and fancy – imaginatio and phantasia. During the 17th century, the
terms ‘Imagination’ and ‘Fancy’ had generally been used vaguely to refer to the realm of fairytale
or fantasy. Yet here and there ‘imagination’ was distinguished from ‘fancy’ as Hobbes did in the
opening section of Leviathan. While fancy was held as the sober liberalism of sense impressions,
imagination was considered as survival of these impressions in memory. After going through ups
and downs in course of years, in the second decade of the 18 th century imagination was assigned
dignity superior to that fancy. Coleridge writes in Chapter XIII of Biographia Literaria :

‘The imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary

imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human
perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in
the infinite I am. The secondary, I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing
with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its
agency, and differing only in degree and in the mode of its operation. It
dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create or where this process is
rendered impossible, yet still at all events, it struggles to idealize and to unify. It
is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with but fixities and
definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from
the order of time and space; and blended with, and modified by the empirical
phenomenon of the will which he expresses by the word choice. But equally with
the ordinary memory it must receive all its materials readymade from the law of
association.’

Equally important it is for us to consider what Coleridge says in Chapter XIV of Biographia
Literaria. Here he calls imagination a magical and synthetic power and adds that

‘this power, first put in action by the will and understanding and retained under
their irremissive, though binding gentle and unnoticed, control reveals itself in
the balancing or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities; of sameness
with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea with the image; the
individual with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with the old
and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual
order; judgment over awake and steady self-possession with enthusiasm and
feeling profound or vehement and while it blends and harmonises the natural and
the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our
admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry.’

The passages clearly bring out Coleridge’s views on the nature and function of imagination, and
the ways in which it is distinguished from fancy. As Coleridge says, imagination has two forms –
primary and secondary. Primary imagination is the mere power of receiving impressions of the
external world through the senses. It is the power that enables one to experience the sense objects
both in their parts and as whole. It is an involuntary act of the mind; the human mind works as a
receptacle of impressions and sensations from the outside world unconsciously and involuntarily;
organises them giving shapes and sizes so that the mind can form a concrete image of the outside
world. It is in this way that clear and coherent perception becomes possible.

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While primary imagination is universal and everybody is capable of it, secondary imagination is
in the hold of the artist only. It is more active and deeply influences the artist’s consciousness. It
demands will and effort, and it works on the sensations and perceptions, the raw material,
provided by the primary imagination. It is thus esemplastic i.e. ‘a shaping and modifying power’
which by its plastic stress reshapes objects of the external world and steeps them with a glory and
a dream that was never on sea and land. An active agent, and a catalyst force as it is, it ‘dissolves,
diffuses, dissipates in order to (re)create’. It is, to say briefly, what makes artistic creation
possible. Primary imagination and secondary imagination thus differ not in kind but only in
degree.

Fancy differs from imagination in kind. It is not a creative power at all; it only combines, often
not in an order, the impressions and sensations into certain shapes, having no power to blend and
unify. It serves its purpose by producing images coherent or not coherent. It will be useful to hear
what Keats says about Fancy in the last couplet of his poem Fancy which is all but a repetition of
the opening lines:

Ever let the Fancy roam

Pleasure never is at home:
At a touch sweet pleasure melteth,
Like to bubbles when rain pelteth;
Let the winged fancy wander
Through the thought still spread beyond her:
Open wide the mind’s cage-door,
She’ll dart forth, and cloudward soar.

At the end of the poem, the poets says:

Quickly break her (Fancy’s) prison-string

And such joys as these she’ll bring. –
Let the winged Fancy roam.
Pleasure never is at home.

Fancy is a light-winged creature; it flies low in small flights. It soars cloudward but not higher. I
does not soar into the silver sphere like Shelley’s Skyark which soars

Higher still and higher

From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar and soaring ever singest.

It soars so high that

Like a star of Heaven

In the broad daylight
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight.

This is the nature of creative imagination, – both Primary and Secondary.

The Autumn Ode is the working of secondary imagination. Fancy helps the poet to espy certain
pictures and primary imagination enables him to have a total, but not integrated or cohesive,

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picture of the season. It is the secondary imagination that has prompted the poet to passionately
process the images into a concrete structure by dissolving, dissipating, diffusing the images and
unifying them into an organic whole. Here the poet’s imagination is active. The first stanza thus
portrays the mellow ripeness of the seasonal vegetation, the second stanza presents the human
activities and the third stanza organises the songs and music. The landscape, the soundscape and
the sphere of human activities in the very lap of nature are the three lines of a golden triangle that
required inspired effort to be built up. Together, the three stanzas form an organic whole through
the process of unification so much so that not a particle of it can be withdrawn. If this ode be not
a great poem, then where is it ?

If we turn to Coleridge for an interpretation of imagination, we should also pay attention to what
Longinus says about this faculty of the mind. He says :

Weight, grandeur, and energy of speaking are further produced in a very high
degree… by appeals to Imagination, called by some ‘image-making’.
Imagination means one thing in rhetoric and another with the poets; and you
cannot fail to observe that the object of the latter is to amaze, of the former to
give distinctness; both seek to stir the mind strongly.

Coleridge does not differ from Longinus in the general line; but gives an in-depth and more
analytical construal of the poetical faculty. Keats also writes in such a way as not to defy the
theory of Longinus as he does with Coleridge. All this make up for the greatness of the poem.
Keats does not give to airy nothing a local habitation and name, but applies his imaginative power
to concrete substances and clothes them with a glory. He has added strangeness to beauty as
demanded by Walter Pater and stimulates our wonder by making common objects uncommon.
These things ordinarily pass by our eyes and we would never care to look at them unless Keats
prompted us to do so. I feel tempted to quote two of Rabindranath's compositions that stir our
imagination. One is a rhyme for the children reading in kindergartens and the other one is written
for the mature persons.

The first one goes thus :

Kàl chila dàl khàli

âj phule jày bhore;
Bal dekhi tui màli
Hay se kemon kore.

Bare were the branches of the tree yesterday,

But they are full a bloom today
O Gardener, tell me how it happened,
Would you please say?

The second one is poem no: 34 under the title Sphulinga included in the famous anthology of
Tagore’s poems entitled Sanchaita:

Vahu din dhare vahu kro÷ dåre

Vahu vay kari vahu de÷ ghure

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 Dekhite giyechi parvatmàlà
Dekhite giyechi sindhu;

Dekhà hay nài cakùu melia

Ghar hate ÷udhu dui pà phelià
Ekti dhàner ÷iùer upare
Ekti ÷iùirvindu.

Sanchaita: Page 757: Poem No: 34 of Sphulinga (A Flaming Splinter)

Countless days have I spent roving,
In lands miles and miles far;
And in this venture I have emptied
Nearly all that I had in my coffer.

I have seen the mountain ranges,

The Indus too I have seen;
But my eyes did not care to see
A dewdrop on a stalk of paddy
Just a few steps from my home,
O, just a few steps from my home.

The Romantic wonder which adds strangeness to otherwise ordinary objects cannot better
exemplified. The first four lines are also imbued with mysticism, pointing out that there is a
divine force working behind the organisation called nature and everything in the universe. That
power may be ‘immanent in and transcendent from the universe’ but this is mighty abstract idea
of Beauty, which manifests itself in all objects – sensate or insensate.

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