Ode to Autumn

If Keats’s works are examined within the context of expressing a philosophy and system for dealing with and understanding life – including Beauty and the painful – then in Ode to Autumn we see a maturation and culmination of this system where Keats transcends the transcendent.

Keats moves away from examining the conflicts and harmonies existing in the search for beauty and truth, to the purity of the image and the here and now. He lowers his guard and ceases to fight, and instead accepts what Is – bringing the idea of negative capability to fruition and maturation as a mode of understanding/interpretation.

To Autumn is a celebration of the present, as the exploration of negative capability ceases. It’s a total embrace of the human condition, including death. Death is present, but even so does not distract from the poem’s intention. Death is part of acceptance; the acceptance Keats has sought so ardently is fully expressed here. Keats reminds us very clearly that summer will cease; that life comes full-circle and part of that circle is death.

Until they think warm days will never cease;	10
For Summer has o'erbrimm'd their clammy cells

Only by living intensely in present moment, and fully committing to acceptance of life, good and bad, can one discover autumn has its own music:

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too

One year before his death, Keats muses he’s seen beautiful foreign flowers in hot houses, but it’s the simple local flowers he wants to see again. We're witnessing a culmination of his life philosophy – born, filtered, compressed and refined in such a short time: At the end, Keats is not seeking the transcendent idea of a Flower, or fusing of the mind and nature.

The simple flower is itself enough.