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To Autumn
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Illustration of "The Lamb" from "Songs of Innocence" by William Blake, 1879. poem; poetry
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4:043 Dickinson, Emily: A Life of Letters, This is my letter to the world/That never wrote to me; I'll tell you how the Sun Rose/A Ribbon at a time; Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul
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Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) only confirmed photograph of Emily Dickinson. 1978 scan of a Daguerreotype. ca. 1847; in the Amherst College Archives. American poet. See Notes:
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To Autumn

poem by Keats
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History

To Autumn, last major poem by John Keats, published in Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820). “To Autumn” (often grouped with his other odes, although Keats did not refer to it as an ode) comprises three 11-line stanzas. Written shortly before the poet died, the poem is a celebration of autumn blended with an awareness of the passing of summer and of life’s ephemerality. Less melancholy than Keats’s earlier works, the poem treats autumn not as a time of decay but as a season of complete ripeness and fertility, a pause in time when everything has reached fruition and the question of transience is hardly raised.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Kathleen Kuiper.