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I hope someone will comment in the last reading group on the Shakespeare Sonnet, we haven't quite finished that.

Nonetheless, here's the newest reading group text. As always, just post underneath what you think the poem is about roughly so we can get a discussion started.

To Autumn
John Keats

I.

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.

II.

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.

III.

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.

It could be the season personified, no? The first stanza starts with direct address (in other languages, one could imagine a name in the vocative case beginning it, "Season") and describes that "Season" as a "friend" of the "sun."

Alright. So let's say Autumn is being personified here. What's happening to her?

Shakespeare is cool.

Anyway, I agree with the Autumn-not-being-very-happy-with-herself thing. But Shakespeare's imagery always has a way of putting beauty into things people normally see as...normal? I guess... ><

I'm not exactly a poetry expert... sweatdrop

You're doing the right thing. You're breaking down the poem into the sections it's naturally divided for analysis, even though I'm pushing a general question.

So yeah, let's look at your claim autumn wants to be like summer. "Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun" would indicate some proximity to summer, given that's the time the sun dominates. And the "pregnant" imagery of the first stanza, where the sun's warmth with autumn's "conspiring" makes the world overabundant with life, seems to link autumn with summer.

Only one thing: the sun beating down on stuff by itself, the peak of summer, isn't enough to get the overabundance. Autumn is distinct here, I don't think she wants to be summer. She's happy to have had her tryst with him, to settle down with him, and reproduce.

Does that help bring the first stanza into perspective? Where's the "maturing sun," or Summer, in the second or third stanzas? Is it there?