The First Stanza of "To Autumn"

The first stanza of Keat's "To Autumn" draws me in the most. I rather love the whole poem, but the first stanza is "tattoo-worthy" in its beauty, as we discussed in class. Firstly, the stanza draws me in because it literally looks chalk-full on the page. It's lines are of relatively even length and the lines themselves appear rather dense. This immediately evokes the image that the "swell" and "ripeness" put forth in the beginning of the poem (7, 6). Autumn is here, and the world is bursting. Secondly, even the very first line is perfectly poetic--both for the image it depicts, and the sounds it makes when one reads it aloud. The alliteration of the words "mists" and "mellow" contains a very languid breeze in and of itself. Because "mists" ends with a hissing "s" sound and so does "fruitfulness," the line also loops back in on itself. The line is plump: contained, but filled to the brim with loveliness.

Moving further into the stanza, I like that much of the description of autumn is in noun-verb form. Yes, there are plenty of adjectives, but Keats chose strikingly apt verbs and nouns. As someone who tends to prefer a more Hemingway-esque read, I always appreciate when prose or poetry makes good use of the English language. I had a high-school teacher who subscribed to this philosophy so thoroughly that she once said that "there will never be an adjective or adverb that you could not omit for use of a superior noun or verb." While I don't think she was correct in such a firm philosophy, she had a point. She would make my classmates and I go through our work (personal essays, poems, and fiction) and physically cross out every adjective and adverb we had. Keats' diction might not be that spartan, but his words all have a certain weight to them. Take, for example, his use of the word "clammy" in line 12. While this is ironically an adjective, I like it because I would never think to describe the insides of flowers as clammy prison cells. But, once I read the line, it struck me as though nothing could be more fitting. I think that is perhaps the magic of Keats: you truly wish you had said it first, but you didn't (and if so, only in some deja vu, dreamy echo of a way).