To Autumn, season of mists

Keats wrote To Autumn on September 19, 1819, after walking near Winchester, and described the fields in a letter of the same week. The poem was printed in 1820 in his last collection, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems. Each of its three stanzas runs to eleven lines. Wikisource carries the text of his collected works.

Where this text comes fromThe page linked below is not the 1820 volume itself but a later collected Poetical Works, which is worth knowing before you trust its spelling. What you copy is the opening stanza only, the one that piles up the ripening: sun, vines, apples, gourds, hazel shells, and the bees that think warm days will never cease. The other two stanzas turn to the figure of Autumn sitting on a granary floor and then to the sounds of the evening, so the fragment stops at the point where the poem is still nothing but abundance.

What you might not noticeTwo words in this stanza are printed with a vowel cut out and an apostrophe standing in its place: moss’d and o’er-brimm’d. The second packs two apostrophes and a hyphen into twelve characters. Thatch-eaves, by contrast, is a plain compound. Source

What it trainsThe first sentence is six words long and ends on the one exclamation mark the passage contains. The second then runs seventy-nine words and 453 characters before a full stop arrives, so nearly the whole passage is one held breath. Four semicolons do the jointing that prose would hand to the six commas here, and on the US layout the semicolon needs no Shift: it sits in the home row beside L, which is why people reach it faster than they read it. Twelve capitals appear and nine of them open verse lines rather than sentences, so the little finger fires on the beat of the poem instead of on the grammar. Four words carry a hyphen with no space around it, the longest of them cottage-trees at thirteen letters.

Read the full text at the publisher: Wikisource