Imagery And Personification In To Autumn, By John Keats

All of the seasons are not the same, are they? What separates autumn from spring? Is it a song... the day? Maybe it is who makes up that day and who initiates that song. In the poem "To Autumn," by John Keats, imagery and personification are manipulated to symbolize the unique autumn day. Keats uses his poem to compare and contrast the unmistakable events that ensue during the days of autumn to eventful days of the other seasons.

Within the first stanza Keats personifies autumn to "conspire" with the sun on how to "load and bless" the fruits (3). Accordingly, he depicts the sun as bending over to fill the fall apples to the core "with ripeness" and then "swell" the gourds and "fill" the hazelnuts (6). Furthermore, in stanza one, Keats characterizes the sun as setting a bud to "later flowers"(9) for the bees. He then portrays the sun as continuing to shed its light on the way down towards the horizon.

In stanza two the poem shifts away from the description of the sun falling to paint a picture of other details in the descending season, autumn. Keats uses olfactory imagery to describe the smell that only autumn can deliver. "Drowsed with the fume of poppies" (17) brings about the sense of smell as being overwhelmed by a floral scent that would be worn by a woman. Within the next lines, Keats uses visual imagery to

In line 23 the narrator asks where the spring’s song is, continuing to tell the reader to "think not of them" (24) because autumn has music that is just as pretty to the ear as it is to the eye. Keats commences to describe autumn’s song as "barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day" (25). The "barred clouds" give the reader an image of broken clouds that "bloom" to provoke the thought of spring’s song again (25). Keats describes the song as dying, however not an aggressive death, but a "soft" death equivalent to the natural bend of the sun in the first stanza