To Autumn

John Keats (1820

Some works of art are magnificent beyond their flaws — I think that Meville’s Moby-Dick is like that, and it may be so of all works that stretch man’s powers to the utmost. “No one ever wished it longer,” said Dr. Johnson, about Milton’s Paradise Lost. But then you sometimes find a work which is perfect, flawless in its kind, and yet not little, either, but as sublime as the great epics. Such a poem is John Keats’ three-stanza ode, “To Autumn.”

It was one of the last things Keats ever wrote, as he was dying of consumption, what we call tuberculosis. He barely made it to the age of twenty-five. Yet that young man of immense intelligence and deep feeling had known very well that his life was going to be short, and in this poem we get his manly acceptance, not of the inevitability of death, but of the beauty of things that pass away, even in their last lingering among us. Spring is beautiful, but so is autumn. And it is not a sentimental splash of color that he gives us. …