There is something very autumnal about John Keats (October 31, 1795 – February 23, 1821); he resided in the drawing down moments of life, death's antechamber, dying at age twenty-five. Perhaps it is fitting his last great ode was a sort of pallbearer to this portentous season.

Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

We recognize him as a poet, a gifted gatekeeper of some shape of beauty, but he came to poetry quite late. Before becoming a poet, Keats registered as a medical student at Guy's Hospital and began studying there in October 1815. He continued to study medicine but spent increasingly more time writing and studying literature. He sufficiently changed course and announced his desire to write poetry professionally (or however one claimed such things in the early 19th century) in 1817. However, he only published his work four years before his early death in 1821 from tuberculosis.

Guy's Hospital, Southwark: the entrance courtyard, with the patient being carried in on a stretcher. Engraving from 1799.

When I consider Keats, I cannot help but think he must have known he could die young; after all, he lost his mother and brother to the same illness, which was known to be hereditary and infectious. Did that knowledge precipitate his becoming a poet? To make the most of his little life and unveil that unknown real mortality? He wrote once of having a feeling that his real life had passed.

Imagine existing in that feeling and stepping aside from a line of life that, while imagined, will never be taken nor lived. At last, Endymion, the title and subject of Keats' most famous poem, was banished to eternal sleep for angering the gods.

Robert Anning Bell's Arts & Crafts style cover plate for a 1909 edition of Keats' major poems, including "Ode to Autumn."

Keats' "To Autumn" is a perfect poem for Keats because it captures that lingering melancholy, pending chill, and immediate combustion of everything at once that characterizes the human and his subject matter. It takes its power from language as well as structure.

The Ode is an "open form of lyrical verse," according to Stephen Fry   Stephen Fry, a character of humour and unblinking self-awareness, is my preferred guide to pretty much everything and especially the categories in which he blends deep, childlike wonder and effortless knowledge. Like his wonderful retelling of ancient mythology, Mythos, which was sprung into being - fully formed like Athena - during a dinner party conversation. in his uncanny The Ode Less Traveled: Unlocking the Poet Within, "deriving from odein, the Greek for to chant."

Fry writes:

Deriving from odein, the Greek word to chant, the ode is an open form of the most grand, ceremonial and high-minded of forms, but for the last hundred years or so it has been all but shorn of that original grandeur, becoming no more than a (frequently jokey) synonym for 'poem'. Partly this is due to the popularity of John Keats' four great odes 'To Autumn', 'Ode to a Nightingale', 'Ode on Melancholy', and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' which, together with the odes of Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and the rest, turned the form in on itself.

Poets today may choose to call their works odes, but rather than suggesting any formal implications this is likely to promise, in the shadow of Keats, a romantic reflection on such themes as nature, beauty, art, the soul, and their relationship to the very making of a poem itself.

Keats's ability to alter a significant poetic form and render it more useful for his emotion during his short, short poetic existence is astounding. When he wrote the last of his major odes, "To Autumn", in September 1819, he had been ill but not gravely ill, and it was mainly in the context of collecting funds for his brother George. He was indeed what Fry called a "troubled ode writer."

Manuscript of "Ode to Autumn," written in Winchester, 1819, and published in 1820. Learn more.

George Keats, an expat in America, had lost all his investment in a scam to chart (and likely colonize) the undeveloped lands near the Mississippi River. Desperate for funds for his brother, John Keats wrote to his publisher for an advance but was declined; his publisher expressed uncertainty about the young artist's potential. Despite Keats' obvious talent, this rejection underscores just how posthumous Keats' popularity was, namely, arriving once his Letters were published in 1848.

Despite all this, Keats manages to walk outside in Winchester, the ancient town where he was staying, and summon the creativity and contemplation to write "Ode to Autumn." In this piece, he reimagines this season of sweeping change and - let's face it, death - as one of bounty, plenty, rest, and recovery. As you read, look for the traditional ode-like questions, the mournful wondering.

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'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.

"Keats Walk" alongside the River Itchen, Winchester. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

Whether written as collateral for funds, from a splendiferous inner drive to partake in beauty, or merely the expulsion of breath corroding his lungs, "Ode to Autumn" is wondrous.

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,
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.

As the life oozes (what a surprising word choice!) from the apple, it slips from the man. A souring in any event. After this poem was written, Keats's life passed quickly. He returned to London, and a succession of colds were ultimately diagnosed as tuberculous the following autumn (although Keats recognized he would die as early as February 1820.) A year later, he moved himself to Rome for the warmer climate. He died there within five months and was interred in his beloved city.

"The great beauty of Poetry is that it makes everything every place interesting," Keats wrote to his brother George the day before composing "To Autumn." That spell-binding feeling, the release and emptying of self, the sensory transcendence true to his wish "I may overwhelm myself in poesy."

This three-stanza ode concludes:

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.

Buttressed interior of Winchester Cathedral, completed in 1093. "The palatine venice and the abbotine of Winchester are equally interesting," Keats wrote on September 20, 1819, of this ancient British and Roman city of Winchester. He'd completed the "Ode to Autumn" draft the previous day. Does "wailing choir" refer to the Cathedral? Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

Pair Keats' expansive final summoning of feeling and season with the little-known but well-sown verse of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a contemporary of Keats whose life was equally marred by tuberculous.

Or consider this collection of thoughts that emerge when walking and wandering, Thoreau's melodies of walking, Mary Ruefle's step into the deepest possible venue of imagination: "I have lived with my imagination, and in my imagination, for so long that I have no memory of any time on earth without it." Or Zadie Smith on the role as the artist in tough times, which imagines that art is formed firmly and internally. 

It is that internal combustion and its illustrious, sublime, artistic by-products, that we seek to capture here.