Keats’s To Autumn.
Here, north of the Equator, a chill strikes the air. The waters of the earth turn slowly to frost and hail. Autumn is here. As the seasons change, the senses recover; the memory stirs. John Keats’s To Autumn eyes this time and espies its virtue. (*) A recent Atlantic article by Sven Birkerts provides an introduction. (†) Keats asks of his titular subject what is beauty. He eschews the approach of the aesthetician and attempts to take autumn’s properties directly into his perception—first by sight, then by touch, finally by hearing—certain all along of their beauty, seeking only to know them.
It is the tragedy inherent in autumn that is upheld here as beautiful, for in every ripeness is a future of decay and demise. The true glory of fall is not in a pretty snapshot of it, but in the groundwork it lays for the rebirth to come.