John Keats’, “To Autumn”, is a poem that has three eleven-line stanzas. Each stanza is a stage of the season and, in parallel, a stage of a day: morning ripeness, afternoon harvest, evening decline. Keats is less interested in the speaker's aging body and more interested in the world's completed work. The irony is biographical rather than textual. Keats wrote a hymn to maturity while still young, already ill, and almost finished as a poet. The poem does not ask you to read that irony into every line. It asks you to notice that a season — or a life — can be richest at the edge of ending, and that mourning spring is a failure of attention when the present still has music. Written on 19 September 1819 after a walk near Winchester along the River Itchen, the poem appeared in 1820. Keats died in Rome the next year, at twenty-five. “To Autumn” ~ John Keats 1795 – 1821 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-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; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
    For summer has o’er-brimm’d 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-reap’d 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. (Credit) Photography from Winchester River Itchen by Fernando Matoso