Why Keats Wrote To Autumn After a September Walk

John Keats wrote To Autumn on September 19, 1819, after a walk in the water meadows near Winchester, and described the same fields in a letter written that week. The poem is short, three stanzas of eleven lines each, and it was the last of the odes he finished. The first stanza is the passage you can type here, 494 characters long.

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-eaves run;

John Keats, printed 1820.

Where did To Autumn come from?

Keats was twenty three, living away from London, and had spent the year writing the odes that now carry his name. The walk near Winchester came at the end of a warm September, and what he saw in the stubble fields went into the poem within days. He printed it the following year in his last collection, which appeared under the title Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems, published in London by Taylor and Hessey of Fleet Street in 1820.

That 1820 volume is the reason the poem survives in a settled form. Keats died in 1821, so no later revision by his own hand exists. Everything printed since works from that book or from the collected editions assembled after his death, which is where the small differences described below come from.

What does the first stanza describe?

Nothing happens in it. The stanza is one long address to autumn itself, which is described as a friend of the sun, and the two of them are shown conspiring to load the vines, bend the apple branches, swell the gourd and fill the hazel shells. The last three lines turn to the bees, who are fooled by late flowers into thinking warm days will never end.

The other two stanzas move on: the second shows autumn as a figure asleep on a granary floor or watching a cider press, and the third asks where the songs of spring have gone and answers that autumn has its own music. Gnats, lambs, crickets, a robin and gathering swallows close the poem. The whole ode runs 33 lines.

What is easy to miss on the first reading?

Two editions of the same first line do not agree. The 1820 printing, which Project Gutenberg reproduces from the original volume, ends the opening line with a comma and spells the fourth line thatch-eves. The collected Poetical Works text used for our practice passage ends that first line with an exclamation mark and spells it thatch-eaves.

Neither is a mistake. Editors after 1821 worked from manuscripts and from Keats’s own corrections in other copies, and the exclamation mark comes from that tradition. For a typist the difference is not academic: an exclamation mark is a Shift reach in the first line, and a comma is not.

There is a second detail in the same stanza. Keats writes moss’d and o’er-brimm’d rather than mossed and overbrimmed, because the contracted forms keep the line to ten syllables. Those apostrophes are original, not modern shorthand.

What do you practice by typing this stanza?

The stanza is marked hard, and the difficulty is punctuation rather than vocabulary. Eleven lines are held together by semicolons instead of periods, so the sentence never really lands until the last word. Typists who pause at every line break lose more time than typists who read the semicolon as a comma and keep going.

Three specific reaches come up repeatedly: the exclamation mark in line one, the apostrophes in moss’d and o’er-brimm’d, and the hyphens in bosom-friend, thatch-eaves, cottage-trees and o’er-brimm’d. Hyphenated compounds are rare in modern prose and common in nineteenth century verse, which makes this passage a better hyphen drill than any invented exercise.

FAQ

When did Keats write To Autumn?

On September 19, 1819. He had walked out to the fields near Winchester and wrote about the same scene in a letter that week, which is how the date is known so precisely.

How long is To Autumn?

Thirty three lines: three stanzas of eleven. Only the first stanza is used as a practice passage here, at 494 characters.

Which collection was it printed in?

Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems, published in London in 1820. It was the last collection Keats saw into print.

Why does the first line end differently in different books?

The 1820 printing uses a comma, later collected editions use an exclamation mark. Both readings are in circulation and our passage follows the collected text.

Is To Autumn hard to type?

It is marked hard on this site, mostly because of the semicolons and the hyphenated compounds. The words themselves are short and the line lengths are even.

Type it, then keep going with the season

The stanza waits in the typing test, with author, year and source on the page. Three passages sit close to it. Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins is 282 characters of dappled things and is the shortest way into the same kind of praise poem. April in England by Robert Browning turns the year around at 251 characters and drills the apostrophe hard. Loveliest of trees by A. E. Housman is 403 characters and counts the springs a person gets to see.

If the semicolons are what break your rhythm, the habit behind that is worth naming, and our list of seven typing mistakes covers pausing at punctuation. The full 1820 volume, including the two ode stanzas not used here, is on Project Gutenberg.