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-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd 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 o'er-brimm'd 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-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd 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 cyder-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 red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

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Ode To Autumn is known as the subtlest and most beautiful of all Keats odes. It seems generally agreed that Ode To Autumn is a rich and vivid description of nature.

The first stanza describes the natural process and the remaining two stanzas are sensuous observations of the consequences of that process: first sights of the harvest in its final stages; then, post-harvest sounds, heralding the coming of Winter. These three stanzas represent the seasonal sequence of events: pre-harvest ripeness, late-harvest repletion and post-harvest natural music.

The Autumn of the first stanza is a process and a beneficent agricultural conspiracy, plotting secretly with the sun to bring ripeness to all. The stanza is aureate. The fullness of nature's own grace, her free and overwhelming gift of herself, unfallen, is the burden of this ripe stanza, evoked primarily through the bees and their honey. There is only a slight, but vital premonitory shading: the later flowers deceive the bees.

As the second stanza opens, we see Autumn already "amid" her score. The promised overabundance of the first stanza has been fulfilled; the harvest plot has been successful, the blessing so overflowing that nature's grace abounds.

Autumn is now no longer an active process, but a female overcome by the fragrance and soft exhaustion of her own labour. She is passive, an embodiment of the earthly paradise, the place of repose, after the sexual and productive activity hinted at by her having been "close bosom-friend of the maturing sun." However, she is also the peasant girl drunk with the odours and efforts of gathering, winnowing, reaping and gleaning.

In the last stanza, Keats praises the red-breasted robin and Winter's other singers and finds in the pre-departure twitterings of the gathering swallows an emblem of natural completion. Winter descends here as a man might hope to die: with natural sweetness. Whereas Ode To A Nightingale leaves us with contraries, Ode To Autumn lets warm love in and resolves contraries because there is no further need for progression.

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