Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Thursday, October 10th, 2004. And because it is well into my favorite season of the year, autumn, today's poem is an autumnal classic from John Keats, his ode to autumn. It is one of his

famous odes, and many believe it is the final ode composed by the great poet. Some believe

it is the final poem composed in any complete form by the great poet before his untimely death.

He would have known at the time that his health was in decline.

Certainly his material fortunes were in decline.

And so you could easily read this poem as a meditation upon that downward trending of life.

The season of autumn obviously gives way to winter,

which metaphorically gives way to the end of things.

And yet we find in Keats' ode a very hopeful reading.

He wrote in a letter to a friend that,

though the climate did not always corroborate this, since the outward visual trappings of autumn always conveyed a great sense of warmth to Keats, the colors and textures, and that he believed this to convey something about the inner reality of autumn.

There's still a great liveliness there.

It is the season of harvest and abundance, after all.

We will see all of these themes woven together as Keats praises and personifies autumn

and ultimately gives it pride of place as the season of experience over and against

spring with its transitory and inferior music.

Here is to autumn.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, close bosom friend of the maturing sun,

conspiring with him how to load and bless with fruit the vines that round the thatch eaves run,

to bend with apples the moss cottage trees, and fill all fruit with ripeness to the core,

to swell the gourd and plump the hazel shells with a sweet kernel,

to set budding more and still more later flowers for the bees, until they think warm days

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