To Autumn诗歌点评Word格式文档下载.docx

1、 after a walk near Winchester one autumnal evening. The work marks the end of his poetic career, as he needed to earn money and could no longer devote himself to the lifestyle of a poet. A little over a year following the publication of , Keats died in Rome.The poem has three eleven-line stanzas whi

2、ch describe a progression through the season, from the late maturation of the crops to the harvest and to the last days of autumn when winter is nearing. The imagery is richly achieved through the personification of Autumn, and the description of its bounty, its sights and sounds. It has parallels i

3、n the work of English landscape artists,1 with Keats himself describing the fields of stubble that he saw on his walk as being like that in a painting.2The work has been interpreted as a meditation on death; as an allegory of artistic creation; as Keatss response to the Peterloo Massacre, which took

4、 place in the same year; and as an expression of nationalist sentiment. One of the most anthologised English lyric poems, has been regarded by critics as one of the most perfect short poems in the English language. describes, in its three stanzas, three different aspects of the season: its fruitfuln

5、ess, its labour and its ultimate decline. Through the stanzas there is a progression from early autumn to mid autumn and then to the heralding of winter. Parallel to this, the poem depicts the day turning from morning to afternoon and into dusk. These progressions are joined with a shift from the ta

6、ctile sense to that of sight and then of sound, creating a three-part symmetry which is not present in Keatss other odes.10As the poem progresses, Autumn is represented metaphorically as one who conspires, who ripens fruit, who harvests, who makes music. The first stanza of the poem represents Autum

7、n as involved with the promotion of natural processes, growth and ultimate maturation, two forces in opposition in nature, but together creating the impression that the season will not end.11 In this stanza the fruits are still ripening and the buds still opening in the warm weather. Stuart Sperry s

8、ays that Keats emphasises the tactile sense here, suggested by the imagery of growth and gentle motion: swelling, bending and plumping.10In the second stanza Autumn is personified as a harvester,12 to be seen by the viewer in various guises performing labouring tasks essential to the provision of fo

9、od for the coming year. There is a lack of definitive action, all motion being gentle. Autumn is not depicted as actually harvesting but as seated, resting or watching.11 In lines 1415 the personification of Autumn is as an exhausted labourer. Near the end of the stanza, the steadiness of the gleane

10、r in lines 1920 again emphasises a motionlessness within the poem.13 The progression through the day is revealed in actions that are all suggestive of the drowsiness of afternoon: the harvested grain is being winnowed, the harvester is asleep or returning home, the last drops issue from the cider pr

11、ess.10The last stanza contrasts Autumns sounds with those of Spring. The sounds that are presented are not only those of Autumn but essentially the gentle sounds of the evening. Gnats wail and lambs bleat in the dusk. As night approaches within the final moments of the song, death is slowly approach

12、ing alongside the end of the year. The full-grown lambs, like the grapes, gourds and hazel nuts will be harvested for the winter. The twittering swallows gather for departure, leaving the fields bare. The whistling red-breast and the chirping cricket are the common sounds of winter. The references t

13、o Spring, the growing lambs and the migrating swallows remind the reader that the seasons are a cycle, widening the scope of this stanza from a single season to life in general.14Of all of Keatss poems, , with its catalog of concrete images,15 most closely describes a paradise as realized on earth w

14、hile also focusing on archetypal symbols connected with the season. Within the poem, autumn represents growth, maturation, and finally an approaching death. There is a fulfilling union between the ideal and the real.16Scholars have noted a number of literary influences on , from Virgils Georgics,17

15、to Edmund SpenserMutability Cantos,18 to the language of Thomas Chatterton,19 to Samuel Taylor ColeridgeFrost at Midnight,20 to an essay on autumn by Leigh Hunt, which Keats had recently read.21 is thematically connected to other odes that Keats wrote in 1819. For example, in his Ode to Melancholy a

16、 major theme is the acceptance of the process of life. When this theme appears later in ,22 however, it is with a difference. This time the figure of the poet disappears, and there is no exhortation of an imaginary reader. There are no open conflicts, and dramatic debate, protest, and qualification

17、are absent.23 In process there is a harmony between the finality of death and hints of renewal of life in the cycle of the seasons, paralleled by the renewal of a single day.24Critics have tended to emphasize different aspects of the process. Some have focused on renewal; Walter Jackson Bate points

18、to the theme of each stanza including its contrary idea, here death implying, though only indirectly, the renewal of life.24 Also, noted by both Bate and Jennifer Wagner, the structure of the verse reinforces the sense of something to come; the placing of the couplet before the end of each stanza cr

19、eates a feeling of suspension, highlighting the theme of continuation.13Others, like Harold Bloom, have emphasized the exhausted landscape, the completion, the finality of death, although Winter descends here as a man might hope to die, with a natural sweetness. If death in itself is final, here it

20、comes with a lightness, a softness, also pointing to an acceptance of process beyond the possibility of grief.25 The progress of growth is no longer necessary; maturation is complete, and life and death are in harmony. The rich description of the cycle of the seasons enables the reader to feel a bel

21、onging to something larger than the self, as James ORourke expresses it, but the cycle comes to an end each year, analogous to the ending of single life. ORourke suggests that something of a fear of that ending is subtly implied at the end of the poem,26 although, unlike the other great odes, in thi

22、s poem the person of the poet is entirely submerged,23 so there is at most a faint hint of Keatss own possible fear.According to Helen Vendler, may be seen as an allegory of artistic creation. As the farmer processes the fruits of the soil into what sustains the human body, so the artist processes t

23、he experience of life into a symbolic structure that may sustain the human spirit. This process involves an element of self-sacrifice by the artist, analogous to the living grains being sacrificed for human consumption. In , as a result of this process, the rhythms of the harvesting artist-goddess p

24、ermeate the whole world until all visual, tactile, and kinetic presence is transubstantiated into Apollonian music for the ear, the sounds of the poem itself.27In a 1979 essay, Jerome McGann argued that while the poem was indirectly influenced by historical events, Keats had deliberately ignored the

25、 political landscape of 1819.28 Countering this view, Andrew Bennett, Nicholas Roe and others focused on what they believed were political allusions actually present in the poem, Roe arguing for a direct connection to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819.29 Later, Paul Fry argued against McGanns stance whe

26、n he pointed out, It scarcely seems pertinent to say that To Autumn is therefore an evasion of social violence when it is so clearly an encounter with death itself . it is not a politically encoded escape from history reflecting the coerced betrayal . of its authors radicalism. McGann thinks to resc

27、ue Keats from the imputation of political navet by saying that he was a radical browbeaten into quietism.30In his 1999 study of the effect on British literature of the diseases and climates of the colonies, Alan Bewell read the landscape of as a kind of biomedical allegory of the coming into being o

28、f English climatic space out of its dangerous geographical alternatives.31 Britains colonial reach over the previous century and a half had exposed the mother country to foreign diseases and awareness of the dangers of extreme tropical climates. Keats, with medical training,32 having suffered chroni

29、c illness himself,33 and influenced like his contemporaries by colonial medical discourse,34 was deeply aware of this threat.According to Bewell, the landscape of presents the temperate climate of rural England as a healthful alternative to disease-ridden foreign environments.35 Though the clammy as

30、pect of fever, the excessive ripeness associated with tropical climates, intrude into the poem, these elements, less prominent than in Keatss earlier poetry, are counterbalanced by the dry, crisp autumnal air of rural England.1 In presenting the particularly English elements of this environment, Keats was also influenced by contemporary poet and essayist Leigh Hunt, who had recently written of the arrival of autumn with its migration of birds, finished harvestcyder . making and migration of the swallows,21 as well as by English landscape p