Ode to Autumn. Keats. Landscapes of imagination.

Beautiful poetry for a beautiful time of year. Thank you to John Keats for his eye which could see this and his vision which led him to write it down.

One of the things I have always loved about this poem is the personification of autumn – it brings the sense of the imaginal world in to focus, as being present. In the same way, when we dream we feel that we are walking through an actual landscape – well we are, but it is a dream landscape. This focus in different ways of understanding ‘landscape’ is very important when trying to understand the ‘inner’ world (what James Hillman called the soul). The inner world is a landscape. It is a landscape as peopled as the landscape we see in the ‘outer’ world, but it is of a different order.

This point about the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds is the essence of depth psychology, and it is where deep, imaginal psychology – the work of beauty and meaning and spirit – differ from the science of a psychology which lives in the mind only. There is nothing wrong with science, obviously (speaking as a researcher who works within a Health and Social Care department of a university I am very comfortable with science and psychology!). But it is limited. The exploration of the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ world – the imaginal, the soul…..that is where the poetics of our work can begin.

So here we have the poem – always worth reading at this time of year. I hope you enjoy it.

1.

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 which 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; and set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees

Until they think warm days will never cease

For summer has o’er-brimmed their clammy cells.

 

2.

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 twine’d flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou doest keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cider press, with patient look

Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

 

3.

Where are the songs of spring? Aye, 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. 

 

John Keats. Obviously. Fabulous.