In my research of Keats’ life and his poetry, I found that “To Autumn” was one of the last major pieces that Keats ever wrote before his death at 25 in early 1821. The poem was published in 1820, the year Keats was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and is a beautiful piece about beauty, nature, transition, and death. Towards the end of 1820, Keats and a friend, Joseph Severn, an English painter, traveled from England to Rome. They hoped that the warmer weather would be better for Keats’ disease and also hoped to find a doctor to treat Keats’s tuberculosis. Unfortunately, because of the state of medicine at the time, Keats’ treatment was surprisingly brutal. In Rome, he met a physician named Dr. James Clark. Keats’ “therapy” consisted of a strict diet of a single anchovy and a piece of toast per day. On top of this, Keats would also have scheduled bleedings and was taking heavy amounts of opioids. Needless to say, this treatment did not save Keats effectively, and he died the year later at the age of 25.
Below is a note written by Lord Byron to his publisher on hearing of Keats’ death:
“Is it true, what Shelley writes me, that poor John Keats died at Rome of the Quarterly Review? [a dismissive 1818 review, written by John Wilson Croker, of Keats’ Endymion] I am very sorry for it, though I think he took the wrong line as a poet, and was spoilt by Cockneyfying, and Suburbing, and versifying Tooke’s Pantheon and Lempriere’s Dictionary.–I know by experience that a savage review is Hemlock to a sucking author—and the one on me (which produced the English bards &c.) knocked me down—but I got up again.—instead of bursting a blood-vessel—I drank three bottles of claret—and began an answer …”
“To Autumn” is such a beautiful poem to represent the end of one’s life as it is a poem of immense abundance and life, yet there is a clear understanding that this abundance will soon erode. Phrases such as “mellow fruitfulness” allow us to see Autumn as a character that represents the beauty that comes before death. It is a poem that forces the reader to understand that the beauty and abundance of autumn is contingent on the death that comes afterword. For Keats, death takes nothing away from the beauty of Autumn, but in fact contributes to its meaning. Autumn is only abundant in the context of the desolate winter, and in this poem, Keats is saying that death is a pivotal piece in our appreciation of beauty and life. I hope this was one of Keats’ final poems because it is quite a beautiful parting message to the world. Keats is telling us that beauty and life are most abundant when on the cusp of death, which means that when writing this poem, Keats was in the “autumn” of his life. Like Autumn turning to winter, the young Keats was most full of life and youth just before his ultimate degeneration.
