'THE MOST BEAUTIFUL POEM IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE'

On July 5, 1969, two days after the death of Brian Jones, Mick Jagger strode to the front of a stage in London’s Hyde Park, blew kisses, and bowed deeply to a crowd estimated at 250,000 to half a million people attending a free concert. There was a small blue book in his right hand.

Looking very much the part of a Romantic poet himself, Jagger asked the crowd to “cool it, just for a minute,” so that he could read two passages in the book from Shelley’s “Adonais” because “they go with what happened to Brian.”

Jones, the 27-year-old estranged founder of The Rolling Stones, had drowned in his swimming pool "while under the influence of alcohol and drugs," according to the coroner. “Death by misadventure” was reportedly the final ruling. Here are the passages Mick read, declaiming the italicized “We” accusingly, as if it wasn’t Jones but we the living who were actually dead, convulsed and consumed by fear and grief, consoled only by false hope:

XXXIX
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep,
He hath awaken'd from the dream of life; 'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife, And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings. We decay Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

LII

The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-colour'd glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.—Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek! Follow where all is fled!

John Keats, the poet Shelley was eulogizing in (and as) “Adonais,” died even younger than Brian Jones, at the age of 25 in 1821, of tuberculosis rather than personal excess. But Like Shelley and the Stones (think of “Gimme Shelter”), Keats in his poems often partakes of Sturm und Drang. Though perhaps at a lower pitch than the work of those other artists, Keats’s poems—even truly great ones like “Ode on Melancholy”—often feel “strenuous,” or “tormented,” or “resigned” (to death), as the poet Anthony Hecht pointed out in “Keats’s Appetite,” a paper published in 2003.

The finest and rarest and calmest exception is Keats’s “Ode to Autumn,” the poem of his I find myself coming back to more than any other. To Hecht, it’s “a poem of matchless beauty and great delicacy of feeling” and “a poem of great and gentle conclusion.” In fact, the critic and mystery writer Gregory Dowling recalls that Hecht’s essay, when it was delivered as a lecture by another speaker at a Keats-Shelley festival in Rome in September 2003, ends with a more startling judgment: “It is the most beautiful poem in the English language.”

Dowling acknowledged to me in an email that his memory of words he heard nearly 18 years ago “may be at fault.” And when Hecht’s essay was published in the Keats-Shelley Review, its bet was hedged: “It is one of the most beautiful poems in the English language.” (The italics are mine.) But after many years as a lover of ranking systems, including those rating the greatness of baseball and basketball players and the mastery of poets, I’ve come to feel that the application of relative and absolute superlatives tend to do more harm than good.

To be sure, Keats himself subscribed to the idea of a poetic pantheon, one that he fantasized joining one day. “I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death,” he wrote in 1818 to his brother George and sister-in-law Georgiana, who had moved to the United States. (In the same letter, in which he declared that “the humanity of the United States can never reach the sublime,” the poet declared that if he were to pray “for any great good,” one of his prayers “should be that one of your Children should be the first American Poet.”)

In the case of the “Ode to Autumn,” though, I think an Olympian rating by a great artist like Hecht might prick a potential reader’s ears to its many-splendored music. With its enchanting “s” sounds—the sound of dry grain hissing, perhaps—alternating with the firmness of the “m” sounds—an assurance that the reader is held in the securest of poetic hands—the first line of the poem can be trance-inducing: “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.”

The magic-carpet-like lightness of that line is borne out by a gentle wit I’ve only just discovered in the poem. It’s funny, for instance, to think of the season of autumn and the sun as bosom buddies and, further, that the two are “conspiring” like secret agents in a plot to spawn…a bountiful harvest. The conspiracy is likely to be hapless, since Keats also personifies the season as a careless grain-sifter on a granary floor; a harvester conked out on a half-reaped furrow after consuming opium; or a tipsy gleaner never too far from the cider press. All the while, with an “insidious mastery of song,” in D.H. Lawrence’s phrase, the poem further intoxicates us. “Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours,” the poet writes, and our mouths can’t help but move to mimic the “oozings” and, then, the “hours by hours.”

Beneath the bountiful pleasures the poem celebrates—the sweet kernels of hazel nuts, the budding flowers, the bleating of full-grown lambs—many readers have detected more than a hint of mortality. The oozings of the cider press are moving with each hour to a final drop, after all, and the full-grown lambs are ripe for slaughter. The time being described is the “soft-dying” of day. In a rich Zoom lecture and discussion on “Ode to Autumn” last week that included his moving reading of the poem, Dowling noted Keats’s affinity for the dark themes of King Lear, averring that it was the poet’s favorite of the Bard’s plays. More Keats marginalia can be found in it than any other, the scholar noted.

“And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core,” the poet observes, suggesting paradisal abundance, but also the closeness of rot and winter and death. Most tellingly, Dowling noted, it echoes the famous words of Lear’s godson, Edgar: “Men must endure/Their going hence, even as their coming hither:/Ripeness is all.” (“Going hence” is commonly interpreted as dying, just as “coming hither” is thought to mean being born.)

In a nice phrase, Hecht dubs Keats a “connoisseur of mortality.” Speaking in the essay of Keats’s poems overall, he observes that Keats has an “appetite for everything that is perishable, for everything that, because it is perishable, must, of necessity, confer pain.” Hecht does acknowledge, however, that the “Ode to Autumn” is different. “It instead exhibits an absolute and mesmerizing sense of calm…a profound and knowing acceptance of mortality,” Hecht writes, “a concluding softness utterly free of grief.”

I would go further. While the poem lightly expresses acceptance of death, it turns powerfully in the direction of a more than equal appreciation of life. “Where are the songs of Spring?” it asks. “Think not on them, thou hast thy music too,” it answers. Rather than brooding, like Yeats’s Fergus, on hopes and fear, the poem refuses to look back to a prior season only to find the present one wanting. The present moment, with its abundant living and subtler dying, is sufficient. Yes, it is one of the most beautiful poems in the language. It is Keats in the here and now.

Ode to Autumn
By John Keats

1.

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.

2.

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,
Drows'd 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 cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

3.

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 red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

PICTURE CREDIT: "Nunca chega a ser coroado pela imortalidade quem teme ir aonde lhe conduz vozes desconhecidas. John Keats, 1795-1821" by Eugenio Hansen, OFS is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0