Timeline
John Keats - To Autumn, published 1820
Autumn is in many respects the perfect season for that concern with change and permanence at the heart of Romantic sensibility.
The poem sets before us beautiful images of the timeless recurrence of autumn but forever in process of changing summer to winter. Hence the emphasis throughout on present mutability: "conspiring", "budding", "oozings", "sinking", "gathering swallows".
Interestingly, recent criticism has raised the question of Keats' relationship, and perhaps that of Romantics more generally, to the actual history of human suffering.
This poem was composed on 19 September 1819, less than a month after the Peterloo Massacre of 16 August in which thirteen unarmed people were killed. Is this event an absence which is present in the poem's brooding melancholy?