On Imagery & Poetry: Ode to

Autumn & the Five Senses

JUNE 8, 2009By upinvermontin ABOUT IMAGERY,ANTHIMERIA,KEATS, JOHNTags: ANTHIMERIA,FIVE
SENSES,FORMALIST BLOG,IMAGE, IMAGERY,KEATS, JOHN, ODE TO AUTUMN,POETRY, VERBAL METAPHOR22
COMMENTS

Something Different
Ive been writing a fair amount of analysis centered on meter. So I thought Id take some time to
focus on imagery, how it has been used during different times, what it tells us about poets, which
poets use imagery well, which dont Etc.
Ive been tempted to enter into some of the theoretical conversation surrounding current trends in
poetry: poetry in academia; the various schools and their aesthetics; theories of composition, schools
of criticism, etc But, there are many other blogs devoted to these matters and, to be honest, the
subject matter bores me. The posts that interest me the most are those that help me write better
poems.
At the end of the day, all the chatter about schools, aesthetics and criticism will be relegated to
graduate programs, as always. Whats left behind and what matters, to the rest of the world, is the
poetry itself. Learn to write well and you will be remembered.
Anyway somewhat like my first post on Iambic Pentameter, this ought to be a post on the basics of
imagery.
What is it?
Im sure, if you search thoroughly, you can find dazzlingly complex and arcane definitions of what

does and doesnt constitute poetic imagery.

Rather than begin this post with an

exhaustive retrospective of what this or that critic, poet, dictionary, or encyclopedia considers
imagery, Ill limit myself to just one official source, then dandle with imagery on my own. The
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics starts with Image, then proceeds toImagery almost
ten pages of double-column, small type explication. The subject deserves it and its worth reading. Ill
just offer up the first paragraph:
Image and Imagery are among the most widely used and poorly understood terms in the poetic
theory, occuring in so many different contexts that it may well be impossible to provide rational,
systematic account of their usage. A poetic image is, variously, a metaphor, simile, or figure of

speech; a concrete verbal reference; a recurrent motif; a psychological event in the readers mind; the
vehicle or second term of a metaphor; a symbol or symbolic pattern; or the global impression of a
poem as a unified structure.
The Encyclopedia then goes on to explain how imagery was used and understood from the
Elizabethans through moderns. Good stuff.
My Own Take
Im not sure how Ill develop these posts, but the following seems like a good place tostart:

At its most basic level, an Image is anything that evokes any of the fives senses:
Visual (Sight)
Aural (Sound)
Smell
Taste
Sensation (Touch)
If you are writing poetry, keep this list next to you. Princeton states that although imagery has come
to be regarded as an essentially poetic device, many good poems contain little or no imagery. [p.
564] Note that Princeton does not say many greatpoems. All poems that have withstood the test of
time, that are now universally read and considered to be great poems, are distinguished, in part, by

the genius of their imagery.

The centrality of imagery to poetrys

power is not unique. Great novelists are also distinguished by their evocative prose .
While I dont suggest you compulsively stuff your poem with one each of the five senses, keep the list
next to you. Think about what senses you are evoking in your poetry. The vast majority of poets,
especially those lacking practice and experience, will usually limit themselves to the visual.
Perhaps the greatest poet, in this regard, was Keats. He was keenly aware of the world: its sounds,
tastes, texture and smells. His sensitivity and the delicacy of his imagery is part and parcel of his

genius. Ive color coded one of his most famous poems, the Ode to Autumn, to help readers visually
appreciate his use of imagery. (Ive already analyzed the poem for its meaning and meter in
a previous post.) Considered among the greatest poems of the English language, its rich and
evocative imagery is essential to its reputation.
All Five Senses
Notice how Keats touches on all five senses. The poet fully engages us in the experience of autumn.
Theres nothing that will add more power to your poetry than inviting the reader into your sensory
world. The range of Keatss imagery adds immediacy. Without it, the poem would have the feel of an
intellectual exercise an essay.
Sensory Clusters
Notice too, by the color coding, that you can see Keatss mind works. There are image clusters. The
first stanza is primarily visual. Sight is our pre-emininent sensory experience, Keats knows it, and so
the first stanza creates the poems setting. But before the close of the first stanza, he dwells on
sensation (touch): thewarmth of the day, the clammy cells, the soft-lifted hair. Ive tentatively
included the winnowing wind as a sensation since we can both see and feel the wind .
The second moves us back to the visual experience of autumn. The fume of poppies engages our
sense of smell which scientists claim to be our most associative sense. But notice what happens in
the third stanza. With a kind of deliberateness, Keatss verse oerbrims with aural imagery. Keatss
visual terrain is filled with sound: thewailful choirs of mourning gnats, the lambs loud
bleating, the singing of the crickets, the treble-soft whistles of the redbreast as the swallows twitter.
The cluster of aural imagery is deliberate. Beginning with the wailful choirs andmourning gnats,
they effectively communicate a sense of autumnal loss that would have been more difficult to
communicate solely through visual imagery.
Verbal Imagery
Keatss use of verbal imagery (and his use of anthimeria) is also worth considering. Consider the first
stanza:
The use of swell and plump are visual cues, as is the adverbial budding more. Oerbrimmed is a
lovely example of anthimeria when adjectives are used as adverbs, prepositions as adjectives,
adjectives as nouns, nouns as adjectives (Shakespeares Use of the Arts of Language p. 63) .
Oerbrimmed is also an example of verbal metaphor in that summer is like a cup that is overfull
(though the words like or as are omitted).
The use of verbal imagery adds vitality and dynamism to the mostly nominal and static imagery. It
is also among the most difficult of poetic techniques to master. Keats learned the technique from
Shakespeare who, more than any poet before or since, could brilliantly and ingeniously coin new
words and put old words to new grammatical uses. When poets do it well, we see the world in new
ways.

Visual(Sight)
Aural (Sound)
Smell
Taste
Sensation (Touch)
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 mossed 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 will never cease,
For Summer has oerbrimmed their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft,
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Whats Next
Examing more poems! I still havent decided on the next poet or poem , but the best imagery leads on
to metaphor. And limiting myself to imagery means I can look at free verse poets too. So, if this has
been interesting to you, helpful, or if you have questions or suggestions, please comment.

NALYSIS: WHAT'S UP WITH THE

TITLE?

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"To Autumn" seems to be missing a key word when compared to Keats's other Great
Odes: the word "ode." You would expect the title to be, "Ode to Autumn," but maybe
Keats felt confident that he had this whole ode thing down and could just use a
shorthand.
However, "To Autumn" seems to change the meaning, as well. It sounds like a
dedication you might read in the front of a book: "To Mom and Dad," "To My
Kindergarten Teacher, For Not Failing Me At Finger-Painting," "To Autumn." Or Keats
could merely be helping us understand whom the speaker is addressing. Otherwise,
when he asks, "Who hath not seen thee?" in the second stanza, we might think he had
forgotten to introduce a character. Whatever your explanation, "To Autumn" stands out
as a title among Keats's odes.

TO AUTUMN SYMBOLISM,
IMAGERY, ALLEGORY

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The Figure of Autumn

Odes often address an inanimate object or abstract idea directly, but they do not always portray
that object/idea as a person, as Keats does. We think that autumn is a woman, because the
seasons we...

Weight and Ripeness

Autumn is the season when things fatten up and come to fruition. It is a season of harvest and
abundance, one with which we associate the overflowing cornucopia. Keats tries to illustrate the
incre...

Pastoral
A "pastoral" poem is inspired by shepherds, shepherdesses, and other forms of simple life in
rural settings. Pastorals commonly feature natural scenery so rich and vivid that you could
drown in it....

Spring and Summer

The poem doesn't miss the opportunity to contrast autumn with its competitors, spring and
summer. (Winter gets left out in the cold thanks, folks, we'll be here all night). Summer is
great,...

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THE FIGURE OF AUTUMN

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Symbol Analysis
Odes often address an inanimate object or abstract idea directly, but they do not always
portray that object/idea as a person, as Keats does. We think that autumn is a woman,
because the seasons were typically personified as beautiful women in European Art.
The Italian painter Botticelli, for example, depicted spring as a pregnant woman. (Check
out the painting here.) In this poem, the lady autumn teams up with the sun, basks in
the breeze of a granary, and takes lazy naps in a field.

Lines 2-3: Autumn is personified for the first of many times in the poem. She and the sun
whisper together like a bunch of gossipy teenage girls. But the goal is serious and
necessary: they are responsible for the bounty of fruit and crops that will sustain people
through the winter.

Line 12: The speaker asks a rhetorical question to introduce a connection he believes
the reader will recognize, between autumn and the harvest.

Lines 13-15: The personification of autumn feels most explicit in these lines, where her
long hair is gently lifted by the wind. "Winnowing wind" is an example of alliteration.
Implicitly her hair is compared to chaff, the inedible part of a grain that blows away after
the threshing process.

Lines 16-18: Autumn has several different roles in this poem. Here she is a laborer in the
fields, taking a nap after working hard to harvest the flowers with her "hook." The hook,
too, is personified. It is presented as a conscious thing that chooses to "spare" the
flowers, rather than as a tool that just lies idle.

Lines 19-20: From a laborer, autumn then becomes like a "gleaner" in this simile, which
compares her to the people who pick up the scraps from the field after the harvest.

Lines 21-22: Autumn's "look," the appearance on her face while watching the cider, is an
example of metonymy when the word "patient" is attached. An expression cannot itself
be patient, but her look is associated with the patience of her character.

Line 24: Autumn is addressed for the final time, as the speaker tells her not to feel
jealous of spring.

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WEIGHT AND RIPENESS

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Symbol Analysis
Autumn is the season when things fatten up and come to fruition. It is a season of
harvest and abundance, one with which we associate the overflowing cornucopia. Keats
tries to illustrate the incredible thickness and richness of autumn in the language of the
poem. He contrasts images of lightness and heaviness, of things falling and things
flying.

Line 3: Fruit doesn't just grow on the vines; the vines are "loaded" with fruit, the way you
might "load" a shelf with heavy items.

Line 7: The gourd is "swollen" with ripeness and the hazel nuts are "plump" with meat.

Line 15: In this implicit metaphor, autumn's hair is like the light chaff that surrounds a
heavy seed. On a threshing floor, the weight of the grains prevents them from being
blown away in the air.

Line 20: Autumn's head is described as "laden," or heavy, when she crosses over the
brook.

Line 29: The line contains a vivid image in which the gnats rise and fall in concert with
the strength of the wind.

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PASTORAL

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Symbol Analysis
A "pastoral" poem is inspired by shepherds, shepherdesses, and other forms of simple
life in rural settings. Pastorals commonly feature natural scenery so rich and vivid that
you could drown in it. Like the ode, pastoral artworks are a staple of Ancient Greece, so
it's natural that Keats paired the two together. As autumn traipses through the
landscape, we're treated to a full range of traditional images of the joys of the English
countryside.

Lines 4-5: Pastoral artworks often show how nature and humans coexist within a
landscape. Here the vines run around the eves of thatched houses, and mossy trees
grow next to cottages.

Line 24: The reference to music could allude to the tradition in which shepherds and
other outdoorsy-types played rustic music on a lyre or pipe. Keats's "Ode on a Grecian
Urn" features a musician playing a pipe, for example. Here Keats uses "music" as a
metaphor for the harmonies of the scenery.

Line 27: Gnats are an unusual choice to include in the symphony of autumn's
metaphorical "music," but Keats describes them so well that we don't notice an
incongruity. In this extension of the metaphor about the "dying" of daylight in line 25, the
gnats are the metaphorical chorus that "wails" in mourning at the funeral.

Lines 30-33: Lay it on us, Keats. He decides to go all-in with the pastoral imagery,
picking out some of the genre's most recognizable images: lambs on the hillside, crickets
in the hedge, and birds in the garden.

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SPRING AND SUMMER

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Symbol Analysis
The poem doesn't miss the opportunity to contrast autumn with its competitors, spring
and summer. (Winter gets left out in the cold thanks, folks, we'll be here all night).
Summer is great, but it has to end sometime, a fact that the bees don't seem to realize.
And spring has some kickin' songs, but autumn's playlist is just as good.

Line 11: Silly bees, you can't hide inside those flowers forever. "Clammy cells" implies a
metaphor that compares the insides of the flowers to the small, damp cells of monks or
even prisoners. The warmth of summer reaches all the way inside the flowers.

Line 23: The speaker asks a rhetorical question to begin the third stanza, as he did with
the second. He alludes to the tradition in which poets and lyricists sang to celebrate the

new life of springtime. He might be thinking specifically of Ancient Greece, where the
ode as a form of poetry was invented.

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ANALYSIS: FORM AND METER

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Ode in Iambic Pentameter

As a poet, Keats is probably most famous for his odes. An ode is a poem that
addresses a person or object that can't talk back. The form originated in Ancient
Greece, where poets like Pindar and Horace sang them at public events, often
accompanied by music. Here Keats addresses a season of the year. To use a technical
term, it's like one big long case of apostrophe. (Apostrophe is when an idea, person,
object, or absent being is addressed as if it or they were present, alive, and kicking.) But
the ode is more than just a device; it's a highly structured form with built-in divisions and
transitions. Compared to Keats's other odes like, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" or "Ode to a
Nightingale," "To Autumn" is shorter at three stanzas of eleven lines each (the other two
are five and eight stanzas apiece).
The rhyme scheme of each stanza is ABAB CDEDCCE. You'll notice that this scheme
divides the stanzas into a section of four lines and a section of seven lines. The first four
lines set up the specific topic of each stanza ripeness, harvesting, and song,
respectively and the last seven lines elaborate.
The meter of the poem is generally iambic pentameter, in which each line has five

("penta") iambs consisting of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented one:

A-mong | the riv|-er sal|-lows bourne | a-loft.
But the iambic pentameter is more like the default setting than a strict requirement in "To
Autumn." Maybe critics have marveled at this poem's complicated use of many different
kinds of rhythm. For example, the beginning each stanza departs from the iambic meter
in the same way: with an accented syllable right off the bat: "Sea-son," "Who," and
"Where." You could write an entire paper on the meter alone, never mind the meaning.

ANALYSIS: SPEAKER

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The speaker of the poem has a direct hotline to speak with the seasons. He also has an
omniscient viewpoint on this woman named "autumn" who likes to relax in various
autumn-y places. He manages to track her down from place to place, which sounds like
no small feat. He has a keen imagination and takes notice of things the rest of us might
miss, like the "bars" in the clouds or the moss on the cottage-trees. His perspective has
the effect of a magnifying glass.
He assumes that everyone knows who this lady autumn is, and that all of us readers
have seen her sitting in granary. What he really wants to say is, "I've seen autumn on
the granary floor." He's also slightly aggressive when it comes to springtime. At the
beginning of the third stanza, he puts his hand to his ear and is like, "Where are you at
now, Spring?" He looks around and shouts, "I can't hear your songs, Spring!" He's
obviously protective of autumn and, on the plus side, he would make a loyal friend. He's
the kind of person who always wants to remind you of your good qualities when you're
feeling a little inadequate. "But what about the time you did this cool thing?" Oh, yeah,
thanks!

ANALYSIS: SETTING

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Where It All Goes Down

Can you guess which season this poem is set in? "To Autumn" gives us all the ripe,
growing things we would expect from a poem with this title, and Keats even throws in an
aimless, super-chilled-out lady, to boot.
When you look closely at the poem's images, you notice all kinds of hidden movement.
In the first stanza, you get a sense of the "conspiratorial" tone between the sun and
autumn, as the unassuming vines and fruits creep around houses and trees until
boom! everything bursts into a surge of ripeness. The setting of the first stanza is
characterized by growth and swelling under the influence of the sunlight, and this
growth even carries us into the spring and summer, as if time itself were expanding.
The second stanza is all about the harvesting process. Autumn sits with her "store" of
grains like King Midas with his gold. She may have been hanging around the poppy
plants too much, because she seems a little tipsy. She just kind of wanders around,
inspecting things and taking occasional naps. What a life. Despite being a tad out-of-it,
she's a tough bird to track. The speaker follows her around like a bodyguard, from field
to brook to, um, cider factory.
In the last paragraph, Keats ties everything together with the idea of music and songs.
He uses a few powerful images to suggest that all of nature works in harmony to
produce the beauties of autumn. This music is associated with the sunset, in particular,
and you might think that the sun has been slowly going down through the entire poem.
Only we were too busy admiring the poetic landscape to notice the passage of time, just
as the speaker is too busy admiring autumn to notice the approach of winter.

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ANALYSIS: SOUND CHECK

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"To Autumn" doesn't sound very much like normal speech. It has a formal quality
appropriate to the ode form. It sounds like Poetry with a capital "P." Not to say that the
elevated tone feels unnatural at all. It's as if the speaker were delivering a complicated
three-part argument to a crowd of skeptical people who are thinking, "Who is this
'autumn' we keep hearing about? We want spring!"
You can see what we mean when we say it's not like normal speech if you imagine
someone walking up to you and starting a conversation, "Season of mists and mellow
fruitfulness!" Even if our name were "autumn" this would be a confusing opener. He
starts right off with description and does not let up until the end of the poem. Look, for
example, at the number of adjectives. There's hardly a noun in the poem without an
adjective attached: "twined flowers," "winnowing wind," "soft-dying day," "rosy hue,"
even, oxymoronically, "full-grown lambs."
The complicated rhyme scheme contributes to a sense of formal difficulty. Some of the
rhymes are right next to each other (in the first stanza, "brook" and "look"), while others
are spread out over several lines ("trees" and "bees"). Finally, if you've read any
Shakespeare, you'll notice that Keats sounds remarkably similar. Keats obviously read a
lot of Shakespeare, and this poem has the grandeur and the descriptive range of a
great soliloquy. Like Keats, Shakespeare had a thing for adjectives

Drunk on Nature
A bouncer should have carded Keats every time he took a walk outdoors. "My name is
John Keats, and I'm a nature-holic." No one else we know of becomes so intoxicated
simply from the sights, sounds, and smells of nature. Don't just take our word for it.
Check out his other poetry. In "Ode to a Nightingale" Keats describes his need for a
"draught of vintage" (a glass of wine) that tastes likes "Flora and the country-green." In

the "Ode on Melancholy" he laments the "poisonous wine" of an herb called "Wolf'sbane." In "To Autumn," he describes autumn as "drowsed with the fume of poppies."
Poppies are used to create opium, so we're fairly sure he's making a drug reference
here. But he's also simply pointing out the effect of smelling flowers. He finds nature
intoxicating

ANALYSIS: TOUGH-O-METER

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(5) Tree Line

"To Autumn" is probably the most straightforward of Keats's Great Odes. It does not
contain any references to Greek mythology or complicated metaphors spanning five
stanzas. The main challenge with Keats is the density of his images. You can't skim a
poem like this, but then again, why would you need to: it's only three stanzas. When you
slow down your pace, you recognize the little things, like the comparison of a flower to a
monk's "cell" or the connection between the choir of gnats and the death of daylight.
These small connections are what makes the poem great, so you don't want to miss out
on them. Also, look for hidden patterns, like the use of rhetorical questions
Summary
Autumn joins with the maturing sun to load the vines with grapes, to ripen apples and
other fruit, "swell the gourd," fill up the hazel shells, and set budding more and more
flowers. Autumn may be seen sitting on a threshing floor, sound asleep in a grain field
filled with poppies, carrying a load of grain across a brook, or watching the juice oozing
from a cider press. The sounds of autumn are the wailing of gnats, the bleating of
lambs, the singing of hedge crickets, the whistling of robins, and the twittering of
swallows.
Analysis

"To Autumn" is one of the last poems written by Keats. His method of developing the
poem is to heap up imagery typical of autumn. His autumn is early autumn, when all the
products of nature have reached a state of perfect maturity. Autumn is personified and is
perceived in a state of activity. In the first stanza, autumn is a friendly conspirator
working with the sun to bring fruits to a state of perfect fullness and ripeness. In the
second stanza, autumn is a thresher sitting on a granary floor, a reaper asleep in a grain
field, a gleaner crossing a brook, and, lastly, a cider maker. In the final stanza, autumn is
seen as a musician, and the music which autumn produces is as pleasant as the music
of spring the sounds of gnats, lambs, crickets, robins and swallows.
In the first stanza, Keats concentrates on the sights of autumn, ripening grapes and
apples, swelling gourds and hazel nuts, and blooming flowers. In the second stanza, the
emphasis is on the characteristic activities of autumn, threshing, reaping, gleaning, and
cider making. In the concluding stanza, the poet puts the emphasis on the sounds of
autumn, produced by insects, animals, and birds. To his ears, this music is just as sweet
as the music of spring.
The ending of the poem is artistically made to correspond with the ending of a day: "And
gathering swallows twitter in the skies." In the evening, swallows gather in flocks
preparatory to returning to their nests for the night.
"To Autumn" is sometimes called an ode, but Keats does not call it one. However, its
structure and rhyme scheme are similar to those of his odes of the spring of 1819, and,
like those odes, it is remarkable for its richness of imagery. It is a feast of sights and
sounds.