Walking with Keats

To Autumn as a democratic landscape

Courbet, The Wheat Sifters (1854)

Last week’s post on the so-called ‘middle-distance poem’ has had one of its desired effects: people have been sending me poems. Do take a look in the comments for the full discussion. I’m especially grateful to

Victoria

Moul, whose newsletter this week picks up one of the questions my ‘elegy’ threw out, and to William Poulos for pointing me to Peter Porter’s An Exequy.

Victoria also discusses Tony Harrison’s brilliant long poem, A Kumquat for John Keats. The news about Harrison’s death came a few days later. There will be better tributes to Harrison than I can deliver, though it’s hard to shake the feeling he never got the respect he deserved.¹ He was also a brilliant reader of his own poems; you can find some on the Poetry Archive.

Another important genealogy identified in the responses last week was the Romantic poets, which is a theme I want to come back to: Wordsworth and Co. are almost Freudianly absent in the original essay. This week, however, I’ve been thinking about Keats in particular. Keats is one of those poets who utterly consumed me when I first started reading poetry. I have an old paperback copy of the Complete Poems which has been with me at least a decade, probably picked up at a second-hand book stall in Cambridge.² On the title page, in green biro, I’ve scrawled the date, the address I was living at, and underneath, in capitals: TO WHAT GREEN ALTAR???

It’s a good question, but it will have to wait, because the poem on my mind is, of course, To Autumn. This is one of those poems probably best met with the stillness reading it out loud produces. You can read it here (read it out loud). But here are three thoughts.

I.

The poem is a rush of images. It is, in fact, a list—or rather, three lists. Each verse is a self-contained moment moving through the season, rather like a triptych: all that ripeness; then the lazy, lazy harvest; then the coming cold.

Keats wrote To Autumn while he was staying in Winchester, England’s old capital, in what was then a very rural but fast-changing Hampshire. While there, he wrote a letter to a friend describing his surprise at a stubble-field that looked warm, just like a painting of a stubble-field. Some critics see the poem as a response to the growing tradition of English landscape painting. The images are left as images, with little exclamation or explanation.

It is, in that sense, an unusually modern poem: the poet draws back from the scene. The Romantic poets are often caricatured as being all about the ‘inner light’, the celebration of the self. That autumn, Keats was looking.

II.

What was Keats looking at? In their article Keats, ‘To Autumn’, and the New Men of Winchester Richard Turley, Jayne Archer and Howard Thomas point out that most recent readings of the poem abstract it from its particular place:

As diverse as they may seem, the most resonant recent readings of ‘To Autumn’ share a feature in common: all, in various ways, abstract the ode from its specific Winchester setting… Helen Vendler’s formalist critique recognizes the poem’s ‘remarkably meticulous topography’, but, finally refers the land’s (and the poem’s) meaning back to literary precursors and classical myth. Nicholas Roe’s… takes its brio from the relocation of the dissenting energies of Keats’s ode some 200 miles north to [Peterloo]. Jonathan Bate, in his provocative analysis of the ode as ‘ecosystem’… [contends] that the poem is a ‘meditation on how human culture can only function through links and reciprocal relations with nature’.³

When Winchester is mentioned, To Autumn is usually associated with the water meadows south of the city (you can take a guided walk in that direction). The great relevation in the article is that the place which matters most is, in fact, another loation Keats visited: St Giles’s Hill, on the east side of the city. The slopes are now occupied by a multi-story car park, while the South Downs beyond have been cut through by a motorway—a huge chalk scar I’ve driven through hundreds of times.⁴

The article goes on to argue for the importance of the poem’s engagement with the local agricultural economy and the shifting social make-up of the town. I did not find this discussion entirely convincing, interesting as agricultural history always is. But the topography matters. From St Giles’s:

the walker faces due west, and in the late-afternoon may observe the ‘maturing sun’ together with the tincturing changes it brings to the landscape (the ‘rosy hue’ of the ‘stubble-plains’), as well as indigenous wildlife such as low-flying swallows gathering insects over the Itchen’s reed beds before nightfall. From its brow, the sights and sounds remembered in Keats’s poem—from the ‘half-reaped furrow’ on which the reaper sleeps, to the bleats of ‘full-grown lambs’ on ‘hilly bourn’—could be observed in one glorious sweep.

No hill, no poem. I can believe it.

III.

At some point in the last century, critics began to worry that To Autumn was unrealistically idyllic. How could Keats write such pastoral scenes when 18 people had just been killed at Peterloo (any many more wounded) the Napoleonic wars had wrecked the economy, and bread prices were soaring? Was the ‘season of mists’ an ideological smoke-screen?

In response, the authors of the New Men of Winchester suggest we can read To Autumn as being ‘as much of a rebuke’ to the ‘speculating and deadening forces of the age’ as the pamphlets and essays Keats’s friends and associates were writing against Lord Liverpool’s government and the price of grain. The poem does this, we’re told, not by idealising rural life but by carefully exposing the tensions of Winchester’s local economy.

So, in the second stanza, we can read ‘store’ in the (ironic) light of local bankers hoarding grain for speculation, while the ‘careless’ labourers below suggest both fears of exploitative landlords and the real problem of declining yields and a dearth of skilled labour. Rural work was poorly paid, and better opportunities were opening up elsewhere. The ‘fumed poppies’ and ‘twined flowers’ sound nice, but left unchecked they will eventually end in scarcity.

Even if we entertain these readings—I remain pretty sceptical—there’s an important distinction the authors never make: were these associations deliberate, or something we only appreciate in retrospect (and with their assistance)? The implication is that it doesn’t matter: unwittingly or not, the really important issues have made their way into the poem, which in turn gives us the green light to admire it with our social conscience clear. But this still begs the question: what if we’d never considered reading the poem this way and liked it all the same? What would Keats’s friends have thought?

Better, surely, to resist the terms of the debate. As a depiction of Winchester’s economy, To Autumn is a classically inspired fantasy. If it were the only document surviving from 1819, that might be cause for concern. But it isn’t—and, of course, it is more than just a fantasy. It is an ode to the season by a young man called John Keats, a man who was racking up debts to support his family and friends while attempting to pursue a life in poetry that could slip away at any moment; a man whose critics dismissed him as a vulgar upstart and told him he would be better off as a poor surgeon than a poor poet.

To understand why this matters we have to go back to the second verse:

 Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
   Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor...

Perhaps this has been said before—someone would know, I don’t—but I always hear and feel those lines as an invitation, a levelling gesture: Keats claiming the season—and its poetry—for himself and everyone. The pronouns matter. Who hath not? Everyone has. Whoever seeks abroad. Anyone might. And then we’re off into the landscape, seeking and finding. Keats’s walk up St. Giles’s Hill is as present in those first two lines it is in the sights and sounds that follow, and the poetry is in the act of walking as much as it is in any one particular view. We are always on the move.

The poem is asking: who do experiences like this belong to? Who has a right to them? Who gets to decide what’s beautiful?

You can hear Keats’s answer in his diction, and in his attention to the everyday: in the specificity of moss’d cottage-trees, stubble-plains, the garden-croft; the unfussiness of bleat and twitter. That robin might be one of the first fully recognisable birds in English poetry—and it’s just an ordinary bird in an ordinary person’s garden. To Autumn doesn’t need to justify itself politically: the whole poem is its own rebuke.

1. But then, Harrison never cared for certain kinds of applause. When he was mentioned as a possible Poet Laureate he swiftly put out a poem: “There should be no successor to Ted Hughes... / Nor should Prince Charles succeed our present queen”.

2. It is just possible I ‘borrowed’ it from my parents’ house.

3. The Review of English Studies, Volume 63, Issue 262, November 2012, Pages 797–817, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgs021. You need an institutional login to access it.

4. It’s a useful place to park if, like me, you’re going to Winchester Poetry Festival next month (10—12 Oct.). There’s lots online, too.