Songs of Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun . . .
. . . touch[ing] the stubble-plains with rosy hue . . .
To Autumn
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 mossed 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'erbrimmed 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-reaped 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.

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.

by John Keats, English Romantic Poet (1795 - 1821)

[*my favorite lines]

Last OozingsThis picture is from a couple of nights ago when I was out in the yard with my camera waiting for the Harvest Moon to rise. Unfortunately, I didn't get any satisfactory photographs of the moon after all -- have to wait 'til next month and try again. However, I was pleased with this view of our back deck, complete with grapevines, both artificial and real. It looks almost as if the "warm days will never cease," but no, what we have here are the "last oozings."

Note on "To Autumn"
"In a letter written to Reynolds from Winchester, in September, 1819, Keats says: 'How beautiful the season is now--How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather--Dian skies--I never liked stubble-fields so much as now--Aye better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow, a stubble-field looks warm--in the same way that some pictures look warm. This struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it.' What he composed was the 'Ode To Autumn.' "