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“How to load and… bend”: Syntax and Interpretation in Keats's To Autumn

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Annabel M. Patterson
Annabel M. Patterson*
Affiliation:
York University, Downsview, Ontario, Canada
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Abstract

Keats’s To Autumn is now generally accepted as a stable poem in praise of maturity, process, and the natural condition. Can new techniques of interpretation ever be objectively applied to such a poem, when its meaning is so well “known”? This question is germane to two recent attempts to apply syntactical analysis to To Autumn. Donald Freeman uses Chomskyan transformational procedures on the first stanza and endorses the conventional reading; Geoffrey Hartman discovers in the poem’s grammar signs of its status as a poem of the antisublime, or “Hesperian,” mood. Both readings are shown to depend on preunderstanding of the poem. Its grammar can equally be shown to support a quite opposite reading, one that undermines the traditional ideology of Autumn and presents the analogy between Autumn and human maturing as a cruel delusion.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 94 , Issue 3 , May 1979 , pp. 449 - 458
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1979

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References

Notes

1 Central in defining Keats's intentions hitherto has been the letter of 21 September 1819 to J. H. Reynolds, describing the mood of pleasurable observation that initiated To Autumn. See The Letters of John Keats, ed. H. E. Rollins (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), ii, 166–68: “Chaste weather—Dian skies—I never liked stubble fields so much as now—Aye better than the chilly green of the spring.”

2 Despite the fact that he noted a repressed, or “absorbed,” elegiac mood in the poem, Walter Jackson Bate established definitively its overall optimism (John Keats [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963], pp. 581–82). For a recent restatement, see Stuart M. Sperry, Keats the Poet (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 336–42.

3 Hartman, “Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats's ‘To Autumn,‘ ” Literary Theory and Structure, ed. F. Brady, J. Palmer, and M. Price (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1973); rpt. in The Fate of Reading (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 124–46.

4 Freeman, “Keats's ‘To Autumn’: Poetry as Process and Pattern,” Language and Style, 11 (1978), 3–17.

5 “The Role of Linguistics in a Theory of Poetry,” Daedalus, 102 (1973), 231–44.

6 The edition used throughout is John Keats: The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1973).

7 In the “Autumn” letter to Reynolds (ii, 167), Keats described his having “given up Hyperion—there were too many Miltonic inversions in it—English ought to be kept up.”

8 This point was made trenchantly by Barbara Herrnstein Smith, in “Surfacing from the Deep,” Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature, 2 (1977), 151–53, a review of another paper by Freeman. The idea was first suggested to me by Stanley Fish, to whom this sentence is insufficient acknowledgment.

9 Eugene R. Kintgen, in “Is Transformational Stylistics Useful?” College English, 35 (1974), 821, objects to transformational analysis of literature as often being a fancy, or even obscurantist, restatement of things otherwise understood. It is hard to disagree with his proposal that communication will be best served “if the simplest, most public theory is used.”

10 They seem a direct refutation of phrases in Bate's reading that suggest a shadow of anxiety in the poem: “the strain of the weighty fruit,” “a funeral dirge for the dying year” (pp. 582–83).

11 Elsewhere Keats associated poppies with imaginative brainsickness, as in Endymion, I, 554—72, or with escapism, as in his letter to Fanny Brawne of 1 July 1819: “do all you can to console me … and make it rich as a draught of poppies to intoxicate me.”

12 John Dryden, The Works of Virgil, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961), p. 106.

13 See Ralph Cohen, The Unfolding of the Seasons (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 237–43, for Thomson's use of the Georgics.

14 James Thomson, Complete Poetical Works, ed. J. L. Robertson (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1908).

15 William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets, in Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe (London: Dent, 1930), v, 90.

16 Thomson, Castle of Indolence, in Works, p. 256.

17 This passage has been persuasively (but differently) analyzed by Christopher Ricks, in Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), pp. 123–28.

18 Jones, John Keats's Dream of Truth (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969), pp. 15–16. There is still another extraordinary anticipation of the georgic “kernel” in Endymion, where Endymion berates himself for inaction:

Whoso encamps
To take a fancied city of delight,
O what a wretch is he! and when 'tis his
After long toil and travailing, to miss
The kernel of his hopes, how more than vile:
Yet, for him there's refreshment even in toil;
But this is human life: the war, the deeds,
The disappointment, the anxiety,
Imagination's struggles, far and nigh,
All human; bearing in themselves this good,
That they are still the air, the subtle food,
To make us feel existence, and to show
How quiet death is. Where soil is men grow …
(ii, 142–47, 153–59; italics mine)

19 See M. R. Ridley, Keats's Craftsmanship (Oxford: Clarendon, 1933), pp. 288–89, for an analysis of Keats's drafts of the poem.

20 Hartman, “Poem and Ideology,” p. 129.

21 Ridley, p. 288.