The Conspiring Seasons
Examining the Ecopoetics of John Keats’s “In Drear Nighted December” and “To Autumn”
And you and I, shall we lie still,
John Keats, while Beauty summons us?
Somehow I feel your sensitive will
Is pulsing up some tremulous
Sap road of a maple tree, whose leaves
Grow music as they grow, since your
Wild voice is in them, a harp that grieves
For life that opens death’s dark door.
Though dust, your fingertips still can push
The Vision Splendid to a birth,
Though now they work as grass in the hush
Of the night on the broad sweet page of the earth.
Countee Cullen, “To John Keats, Poet. At Spring Time”
In two of John Keats’s poems “In Drear Nighted December,” written in 1817 and published posthumously in 1829, and “To Autumn” written in 1819 and published in 1820, an ecological perspective appears in the form of ecopoetics. Keats personifies the natural world in these poems so that they appear as though they contain an awareness and responsiveness that is separate from mere human interaction. There is a sense of not only human agency but agency within the non-human beings as well. One of the aspects of the natural world that Keats chooses to represent in both poems through what can be considered ecopoetics is the season. It is the time of the year that Keats represents in these two poems, and there emerges a reading of the seasons as entities in and of themselves, being both non-human beings with agency and two very different responses towards ethical forms of relation to both each other and to the other non-human elements found in the natural world. In “To Autumn” and “In Drear Nighted December,” The ecopoetic Keats observes two different seasons, Autumn and Winter, and their individual influences over the other non-human beings who live through their presence—the trees, brooks, animals, insects, and even clouds—as well as the senses of agency and interconnectedness that the existence of these beings maintain.
One of the key elements of the idea of ecopoetics is the close observation on behalf of the author of the natural world and its intricacies. Keats observes not only the physical characteristics of the seasons in his two poems, but he also recognizes their characters. Keats opens “To Autumn” with the lines: “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; / Conspiring with him how to load and bless” (1-3), describing the season of Autumn as a “conspiring” friend with the sun, suggesting that perhaps the intentions of the season are not entirely clear. To Keats, Autumn is presented as a bringer of mists and fruitfulness, both a provider in the sense of the season’s bounty, but also somehow intangible in its mistiness and conspiracy. In a sense, to Keats, the season is intangible but its influence over the beings who inhabit its world will experience its presence. He observes that the conspiracy between the sun and the seasons results in these earthly changes to the plants, animals, and insects, all of the non-human beings who can not vocally express the phenomenon of the changing of the seasons.
In his poem “In Drear Nighted December” Keats continues with this ecopoetic way of presenting the season with a unique character. The scenery in “Nighted December” is a frozen landscape covered by the hand of winter. “In drear nighted December, / Too happy, happy tree, / Thy branches ne’er remember / Their green felicity– / The north cannot undo them / With a sleety whistle through them” (1-6). Winter, to the plants, is always a new experience, one that in a sense conspires with the other three seasons as the trees do not remember the seasons that have passed, nor the season that is to come. As Autumn was characterized as being conspiring, the season of winter in December here also comes across as darkened and dreary personhood through Keats’s choice to describe December as “drear”. In the light of this time of year, the trees have forgotten their once vibrant and full of life vegetation, and can find no solace from the north, as the winds of December’s winter continue to prevent their regrowth. Despite this lack of memory, Keats describes the temperament of the trees as happy, “too happy” he writes. In another element of ecopoetics, Keats closely observes the cycles of the seasons, and the fact that the trees do not mind this drear reality that they face at the hand of Winter, but instead remain happy as they do not remember their past nor their future, they exist merely in the moment.
In this observation of an interrelationship between the trees and the season of Winter, Keats recognizes a similar relationship in “To Autumn” between the different seasons themselves. As he presents the season of Spring as songful, “Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?” (23) he recognizes that each season brings its own song, responding to the question of Spring’s songs with, “Think not of them, thou hast thy music too” (24). Keats recognizes the differing songs of the seasons, their unique presence in the world during their times of the year. While the songs of Spring are unheard in Autumn, the songs of Autumn are described as “a wailful choir of small gnats mourn / Along the river sallows, borne aloft” (27-28). Similar to the drear of Winter, the songs of Autumn in “To Autumn” presents a mourning, reflective tone of the natural world. Keats chooses to recognize even the smallest beings, the gnats, as beings who experience the consequences of the changing seasons through their interrelationship of time and place.
Another element of ecopoetics that appears in Keats’s seasonal poems is the sense of the seasons having a non-human agency. In “To Autumn” and “In Drear Nighted December” the seasons of Autumn and Winter appear as forces capable of change themselves. By choosing to title “To Autumn” as such, Keats is addressing the season directly, using the literary device of apostrophe to address the season itself. Keats repeatedly asks the season questions throughout the poem, as well as “In Drear Nighted December” when he asks the season if it believes anyone has experienced life in the same way the Earth does: “Ah!” he writes, “would ‘twere so with many / A gentle girl and boy– / But were there ever any / Writh’d not of passed joy?” (17-20). By questioning this, Keats points directly to the difference he observes between the life of the human and the life of the non-human. To Keats, the forgetfulness of the plants as they pass from season to season is a privilege, one that humans can not understand as we have the capacity for memory and are burdened by our knowledge that the earth was once green and the seasons will again change.
In “To Autumn” Keats presents the influence of the season upon the Earth as a period of growth and change. Keats observes the ground of the Earth in Autumn as “stubble-plains with rosy hue” (26) after he describes the season “like a gleaner thou dost keep / Steady thy laden head across a brook” (19-20). The juxtaposition of the imagery of the Summer season prior to Autumn promoting such growth that will result in the “gleaning” of the crops and the “stubble-plains” of the harvest paints an image of the world as a living being. The imagery mirrors the human body, the “rosy hue” of the land suggesting the rosy cheeks of a freshly shaven human. Keats depicts the natural world as having a human-like ability to grow and to change through this interconnected relationship between the season and the other elements of the natural world, at the hand of the changing season and its weather.
The vibrant hues of the Autumn season change to the “frozen thawings” (7) in “In Drear Nighted December,” and the sense of the living Earth is not found in its seasonal color but is instead found in the trees and the brooks. Both the trees and the brook are observed by Keats as possessing agency in their vitality. The happy trees live presently within the moment captured by Keats, not remembering the seasons as anything other than Winter, and the “Too happy, happy brook, / Thy bubblings ne’er remember / Apollo’s summer look” (10-12). The brook in Keats is content to exist forever within the season of Winter, “Never, never petting / About the frozen time” (15-16). The brook and the trees exist in a state of ignorance to the passage of time and the changing of the seasons, and while Keats observes the conspiring of the seasons in both “To Autumn” and “In Drear Nighted December” the beings who experience those seasons seem to be oblivious to this conspiracy. As the brook will soon unfreeze, the trees will bud again, and the flowers of summer will again grow only to be gathered leaving a rosy hue, the seasons are depicted as being able to extort this power over the living beings that exist within their world.
While Keats chooses to focus on the trees and the brook in “In Drear Nighted December,” he observes the plants, birds, and insects in “To Autumn.” In his choice to include even the smallest presences in the natural environment, he is showing how closely he is observing the natural world. This element of ecopoetics speaks to both the interrelationship of all elements of the natural world as well as the recognition of the ethical forms of relation between non-human beings. Keats observes the crickets, lambs, swallows, fruit, bees, and clouds in “To Autumn.” In comparison with “In Drear Nighted December,” “To Autumn” appears as a pastoral depiction and representation of the natural world. These observations of both creatures great and small illustrate the interconnectedness of the natural world, a key element of ecopoetics. Even within these brief observations worthy of mention by Keats, he depicts their presence as alive. The “barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day” (25), the word bloom here evoking a sense of growth and fullness. The “full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn” (30) and the smell of the blooming poppies “drows’d” the landscape of the “furrow sound asleep” (17). All beings are alive and vital in Keats’s poems, despite the season they exist within. Even the frozen trees and brooks are alive within the moment in “In Drear Nighted December” despite their cold and withered existences.
Another representation of ecopoetics in Keats’s two poems is his rhythm and repetition. Keats picks up on the pulse of the natural world in his poems. In his poem “In Drear Nighted December” he repeats the phrase “too happy, happy” twice, to refer to both the trees and the brook’s existences in Winter: “Too happy, happy tree” (2) and again with “Too happy, happy brook” (10). He represents the feelings of the natural world in its ignorance of the seasons in a rhyme: “The feel of not to feel it, / When there is none to heal it / Nor numbed sense to steel it, / Was never said in rhyme” (21-24). With this rhyme scheme the sense of a beating heart emerges as representing the existence of the trees and the brook in his poem. The line “The feel of not to feel it” (21) suggests that the natural world, the winter landscape, has a capacity beyond human knowing. The season feels its own non-feeling, an experience wholly unlike the human experience of feeling. Through this, the season is capable of maintaining a presence that is distinctly unique to the natural world. The rhyming lines throughout the poem contribute to this sense of presence. Similarly, in “To Autumn” the rhyme scheme helps to express the natural world’s embracing of the present as it does in “In Drear Nighted December.” Keats stresses the present in both of his poems, and how the natural world is in a state of ever presentness beyond the scope of human awareness.
Works Cited:
Keats, John. “In Drear Nighted December.” 1829.
Keats, John. “To Autumn.” 1820.