Language & Musicality in Keats’ Ode to Autumn
A stylistic analysis of Keats’ Ode to Autumn using Roman Jakobson's poetic function as the model. It elaborates the elaborate the selected theme of negative capability. Sound patterning & deviations in lexical, graphological, and semantic levels are used to convey thought and give the poem its stylistic impact. Certain devices are used to create impact with foregrounding on different levels in the poem & its form is a mirror for its content. The poem has the stamp of Keats' poetic style in sensuousness and his idea about finding a sort of permanence in this transitory world and life. “Had Keats left us only his odes, his rank among the poets would not be lower than it is, for they have stood apart in literature”. (Bridges, R., 1971, The Odes, p. 53). John Keats' concept of negative capability is tackled with an artistic, creative, and persuasive mastery in this ode as well. “To Autumn is …a sequence…not of time but of mood”. (Holloway, J., 1971, p. 166). The poem has universal appeal and touches the hearts of humanity. Keywords
Axis, Combination, Deviations, Foregrounding, Fulfilment, Music, Selection, Sound patterns, Stylistics.
Introduction
Romanticism and Keats
Romanticism was a general artistic movement (literature, music, visual arts, etc.) that dominated European culture from the last part of the 18th century until the mid-19th century. Among its key aspects were a deep appreciation of the power and beauty of nature, and a recognition of the influence of the senses and of personal emotions. An understanding of the deeper meaning of life. Keats’ poetry is widely acknowledged to be the true voice of feeling. To Autumn, is a rich and vivid description of nature, expertly achieved within a fairly intricate stanza the qualities of warmth and friendship. This ode is divided into three stanzas of eleven lines each. John Keats’ idea of poetry was that, if poetry does not come as naturally as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all. Keats in his letter to Tayler wrote. “I think poetry should surprise us by a fine excess and not by singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts and appear almost as a remembrance. Keats believed that the true artistic quality of any art resides in its intense infusion which is of such momentum that by virtue of its close linking with aspects of beauty & truth, the controversial notes and aspects defuse and get extinguished as if they are unseen vapors only. And he deemed that a poet becomes so mature & wise, he is so empathetic that he becomes a most unpoetical thing, as he persistently identifies, and speaks for some other essence. So, he inferred that the character of the poet is a curious amalgamation of being all or none, of a sort of strange wholeness & non-existence, he goes in this aspect of growth that he is capable of relishing both aspects of life, its light or darkness, bright sunshine or shade, dawn or dusk, happiness or sadness, so it gains what Keats has termed negative capability.
Biographical fact
Six months after writing this ode Keats died. He died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five and he knew he was about to leave the world; he had gained wisdom to accept it.
Humanization of the Autumn Season
Opening lines reveal an apostrophe to autumn addressing it like a human being, bestowing the season with animation and life-like aspects. The apostrophe is the poetic quality of addressing objects and non-living abstractions by giving them life-like characteristics and the poet speaks directly to someone who is not present or is dead, or speaks to an inanimate object. “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” (Keats, J., Ode to Autumn, 1919, Stanza. 1, line 1), “The poem opens with an apostrophe to the season and with a description of natural objects at their richest and ripest stage”. (Unger, L., 1971, p 184). In the twelfth line also, the element of Apostrophe is seen; “Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store”(Keats, J., 1919, Ode to Autumn, Stanza 2, line 1). Looking from the contemporary genre Cli-fi's favorite technique of humanizing nature, we can see the autumn season and nature are humanized by Keats in this lovely classic ode.
Literature Review
The theme I intend to analyze is related to creating something in life that becomes immortal or adds value in the larger scheme of life, to appreciate it as a whole. John Keats' odes probe into these themes with a brilliant stylistic finish apart from the extraordinary literary merits of odes that are acknowledged worldwide.
Nature comes in a vivid form, in the Ode to Autumn's picturesque details and its music and also in the Nightingale's song which are made immortal in these poems (works of art) in the Grecian Urn the world of human life of lovers is portrayed recursively, the vase (urn) has immortalized the unfulfilled love of the lovers and it is in turn again immortalized by Keats' ode on it.
The analysis of stylistic patterns in Ode to Autumn clearly shows how purposefully Keats conveyed his feelings and theme with a stylistic flare stamping the impact. It belongs to the “canonical literature” that is much praised for not being explicitly didactic. Treatment of a subject from natural phenomenon is very unique and it does propagate Keats’s philosophy of life which is to accept all colors of life. It depicts the significance of contentment with pure phenomenon and life. The poem ironically & implicitly conveys a moral or a message that is implied by the use of language. It conveys thought blended with feelings. The form and content are interlinked. The poet deems autumn not as something inferior to spring but as something remarkably rich and sustaining seen in the scheme of nature as a whole and as very rich, beautiful, and melodious on its own too.
It seems generally agreed and a renowned critic asserted that Keats' Ode on Autumn is a vivid and elaborate picture of nature. He has made a very dexterous use of a complex stanza form. He has opted for words suitable for descriptions and they sparkle the imagination of the readers visually together and musically using rhythm in a creative way. The poem begins by saluting autumn for its heaviness and blessedness of the natural world of flora and fauna in their peak of ripeness and fruition- ready to give their fruit and on their nadir to be harvested. He added, “Art takes its truth from life and returns it to life as beauty” …. The details about the flowers and the bees constitute a lush and colorful picture of autumn and the effects of the “maturing sun”(Unger, L., 1971 ). He appreciates the poem for its highly imaginative treatment of the season in the second stanza. However, he points to the fact that there is a depiction of a sort of paradox as both aspects of autumn are portrayed simultaneously- staying and going both are felt clearly. He asserted that after this slow passage of time, there is an image of the day that is dying, yet the epithet soft is used by Keats, Unger asserted that the rare use of the verb is “appropriate and effective in suggesting the tensions of theme …. its latent theme of transistorizes and mortality is symbolically dramatized by the passing course of the day” (Unger, L., 1971, p 183-187)
Kenneth Muir appreciated this ode for its spontaneity and despite the fact it does not propagate a very straight moral message.
“Keats was being neither allegorical, nor Wordsworthian. …Keats in this poem is almost content with the pure phenomenon”. (Muir, K., 1971, p. 233).
Another renowned critic Mathew Arnold appreciated Keats among the romantic poets as he paid him a tribute saying, “No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness. “I think”, he said humbly, “I shall be among the English poets after my death.” He is with Shakespeare.” (Arnold, M., 1971, p. 52)
Research Methodology
It is qualitative research done with a humanistic perspective.
Data or text selected for analysis is Ode to Autumn, John Keats’s famous ode.
Data (text)
Ode to Autumn BY JOHN KEATS
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.
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.
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.
Framework & Model
Roman Jakobson’s model of poetic function, which he defines as “the poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination”. The present paper explores how the poet has selected appropriate devices and features in a manner that they combine to produce the desired impact and create the meaning they want to convey. Foregrounding is used as theoretical background to study where the poet purposefully deviates from norms of grammar as a purpose to bring the message of the poem to light. He has used different sorts of deviations in this poem. These deviations create an impact on the mind of the reader.
Data Analysis
The exploration of various stylistic features in the poem to see how these devices work together in producing a connection between the form and content of the poem. Literary works are special because they foreground their linguistic status, thus drawing attention to how they say something rather than what they say poetry deviates from everyday speech and prose by using meter, surprising metaphors, alliteration, and other devices by which its language draws attention to itself. (Leech, 1969, p. 43)
Foregrounding
Deviation Parallelism
The realization of foregrounding (Leech, 1969, p. 43).
Sound patterning & Phonological level
As the poem depicts the music of autumn to be attractive despite its shriller sounds, the poet has used sound patterning in this poem to set the minds of readers in tune with the musicality in the poem.
Alliteration
The repetition of consonant sounds at the start of the adjacent or closely connected words
“mists and mellow” /m/ sound alliteration
“fill all fruit” /f/ sound
“sweet and set” /s/ sound alliteration
“summer and cells” /s/ sound alliteration.
Assonance
Long vowels and then strong ones, are used in the poem.
“with and him” /i/ same vowel
“think and will” /i/
“summer and over” /> r/ and
Consonance
Tongue movement itself creates the impact of filling in the mouth.
“fill and all” /l/ sound
Meter
Iambic pentameter parallel to the traditional use, the meter most commonly used by the poets. The more stressed words in the first line are highlighted. It creates a living pulse and beat in the season .... which is considered equivalent to death. So, the metrical pattern is also related to the message of the poet to find life in this season in an iconoclastic way. Five feet of two syllables each, where the first one is less heavily stressed than the second one.
Sea/son/ of/ mists/ and / mel /low /fruit/ ful /ness/
Rhythm
Iambic pentameter throughout the poem creates an ordered pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, along with alliteration and assonance creating a melodious rhythm in the poem. /n/sounds repeated in /naets/ and /mourn/, these repetitions of consonants create a rhythm and music in the poem.
Rhyme scheme
End rhymes are present, apart from internal alliterative half rhymes. The rhyme scheme is not fixed and it varies somewhat,
First stanza abab cde dcce
Second stanza abab cde cdde
Third stanza abab cde cdde
Phonological level
Patterns are used to give a living beat and music to the poem. “It is related to the sounds which are created on purpose to create music with consideration to rhyme” (Jafaar. E. A., 2014, p. 241).
Music
Sound patterns are used in such an excess to build up an atmosphere of musical sounds that excite our imagination. This pattern of musicality runs throughout the poem. The purpose is to build up atmosphere in support of claims made in the last stanza which describes the music of autumn.
Onomatopoeia
The word “oozing’s “shows an onomatopoeic effect, here the sound or pronunciation of the word evokes the actual phenomenon of juice trickling or seeping out of juicing machine…coming out slowly and oozing out of the presser. Word Twitter, also has this property of evoking the actual sounds produced by the bird.
Graphological level
Stanza Form
The poem has three stanzas of eleven lines each. These have a nice symmetrical structure. An additional line is used because the poem says something about Autumn which transcends the usual way of thinking.
Ode
An ode is a lyric poem written to praise a person, an event, or an object. It has the same structure and pattern throughout. Most odes have three stanzas of ten lines each written in iambic pentameter.
Pindaric odes
Ode with a set meter and rhyme like all other odes, it has a three-part structure. Ode to Autumn with three stanzas could be classified as a Pindaric ode.
Sentence structure: Creating the impact of heaviness and loaded blessings:
The poem has compound sentences and complex sentences. The first full sentence a long one that covers the first four lines of the poem, ends with “round the thatch -eves”. The first verb “conspiring”, in the third line of the first stanza, then the verbs, occur frequently. fill, to swell, plump, “Maturing” acts not like a verb but as an adjective for the noun “sun”. The second stanza, here line three has the hub subject, predicate, and complement, around which satellite constituents are found before and after. Keats is famous for his joy in the excessive use of beautiful, enchanting phrases & he had asserted that he was fond of phrases. He loads “every rift with an ore”, literally.
Graphological deviations
The line three of the first stanza ends with words,
….”to load and bless”, and the next line conveys this sense by the fact it is loaded with more words which not only outnumber the words in the previous lines but convey the meaning by filling the lines with words that have more alphabets as compared with the remaining lines, he, however, retains the number & level of stresses, “With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run” (line 3, stanza 1). The data added in this paper clearly shows the variations in the typology.
The visual impact of the use of imagination to create pictures that can touch the soul & the words when read in the context of the poem are enough to re-create an amazing picture of the season in the minds of the readers. Therefore, the statuesque and pictorial quality is worth noting in the poem. Pictures of arrested motion are found, & the purpose is to link up a cycle of four seasons with human life's cycle. This very parallel enhances the capacity to experience the natural phenomena and perceptive readers cannot but notice the message is to see oneself in the wider spatio-temporal context. Sidney Colvin “The touches of literary art and Greek personification have an exquisite congruity and lightness. In words so transparent and direct we almost forget they are words at all and nature herself and senses seem speaking to us”.
Sensuousness
It is noted that sensuousness was the most prominent quality of Keats’ style of portraying natural beauty, a renowned critic asserts.
Stanza 1: The prominence of atmosphere sense of sight and touch are evoked
Stanza 2: The description of figures, sense of sight, smell (fumes of poppies and consequent intoxication)
Stanza 3: The expression of emotion, sense of hearing, the music of autumn described, also a sense of sight is evoked. Sense of sight (with touch & smell) and then sound prominent. Sense of sound is evoked in the last stanza as a prominent sense, it shows internal foregrounding because the pattern of sense of sight is prominent in the first two stanzas. The third stanza itself had a pattern of sound, sight, and sound.
“It keeps eternal whisperings around/
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run/
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core”
Symphony of sounds
It is found in the last three lines of Ode to Autumn.
“Hedge-crickets sing and how with treble soft
The red breast whistles from a garden aloft
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.”
Synesthesia
Expressing one sense in terms of the other. 1st stanza shows this quality in this Ode sense of (sight and taste). But in the Ode to Nightingale, the experience of two or more kinds of sensations mixed is more comfortable and conspicuous where wine is depicted in its color (sight) not taste, in this technique one sense is being inspired like, color is qualified to sound, sound to color, sound to touch and so on.
Sensuous imagery
1) sense of motion; season, maturing, conspiring, oozing.
2) sense of color; cottage-trees, mossed, flowers, granary
3) sense of taste: fruitfulness, apples, vines
4) sense of sight: mists, watches
5) sense of sadness: bloom, willful, mourn
6) sense of heat: sun, summer
7) sense of hearing: sound, music, whistles, twitter.
Pictorial quality & Imagery
Personification, Metaphor, and simile
Opening line “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” A renowned critic asserted, about Keats’ Ode to Autumn, “The poem opens with an apostrophe to the season and with a description of natural objects at their richest and ripest stage”. (Unger, L., 1971, p 184) Also, in the twelfth line, an element of the apostrophe can be noted;
“Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store/
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor”
Autumn is described as a garner, reaper, gleaner, and cider presser.
Ontological Metaphor
A metaphor in which an abstraction such as an activity, emotion, an idea is represented as something concrete, such as an object, substance, container, or person. Autumn is personified and described by an ontological metaphor used in the second stanza, showing the deeper concerns with being & non-being.
Simile
“Like a gleaner” apart from the personification of autumn, a comparison is made between autumn and human beings engaged in their various activities.
Transference
Three types of parallelism have been recognized, “one might even extend the idea and talk of semantic parallelism where two sentences are linked because they mean the same thing” (Cook, 1989)
“Thee sitting careless on a granary floor
Thy hair soft lifted by winnowing wind …….
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laiden head across the brook
Or by a cider-presser, with patient look.”
All these lines are closely linked with each other because these lines are defining the character of one thing i-e autumn.
“And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core/
And still more, later flowers for the bees.”
And is also used to connect two phrases it acts as a coordinator for instance “season of mists”, is linked with “mellow fruitfulness”, with “and”. Similarly, we have “load and bless”, “to swell the gourd and plump the hazel shells. Hence, these lines of the odes are interconnected. The temporal conjunctions that are used in the ode are then in line number 26 and until in line number 10.
Semantic level
Semantic Deviation
On the level of theme, is it found in this Ode. The theme is the transitory quality of nature and acceptance of this fact. Autumn is a source of fulfillment and a setting stage for the spring which prepares nature to be in full bloom and spender in the spring, here ripeness is all in autumn. Autumn is not considered in the usual pessimistic light.
“Where are the songs of Spring? Ay where are they---Think not of them, thou hast thy music too!”
Also,
“And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core”.
The phrase treble soft in the ode is also a deviation that is used to convey the theme of the union of contradictory aspects of life.
Negative Capability
Keats’ concept about the meaning of life & truth is to accept facts of life without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. Keats’s concept of negative capability or acceptance of life as it is, with joys & sorrows, sadness & and happiness mixed beautifully. The rhetorical question at the start of the third stanza shows a dramatic turn of thought but this subversion is just momentary, in the very next line he asserted, “Think not of them”
Here the poet deviates from the pattern of thought going on in the poem so far. This deviation is just momentary and gives way to parallelism with the previous pattern of the poem: the apostrophe to autumn and it’s all fulfilling and bounteous rewards and charms. It can be called internal foregrounding on the semantic level.
Diction & lexical level
Lexical Deviation
Coins new words (wailful, hilly, aloft) Keats uses are, He makes verbs of nouns and nouns of verbs. Uses epithets after nouns. The order of words is also varied. Diction guided by the color and atmosphere.
Conversion
“Maturing” acts not like a verb but as an adjective for the noun “sun”.
Use of Oxymoron
It is used by Keats in linking with his theme and desired impact. Two contradictory ideas united together “treble soft, treble is a sharp sound.
Use of Compound words
Very prominent use of compound words (two meaningful United words) two aspects of life make it better not less.
Bosom-friend, Thatch-eves, Cottage-tree, Over-brimmed,
Soft-lifted, Half-reaped. Cider-press, Stubble-plains, Hedge-crickets.
Historical deviations
The use of archaic words Thy, Thee … to go be it a classical and timeless feeling and impact. Replacing these words with colloquial words would make it lose the impact the poet wants to produce.
Epithet & ellipsis
Repetition is not always undesirable but too much repetition may result in “bad style”, but elegant repetition provides variety to the text. In elegant repetition synonyms or more general words or phrases are used. Various elegant epithets are used for describing autumn as a “season of mists”, “mellow fruitfulness”, “close bosom friend “, gleaner,” cider presser”,” winnower” etc. The use of such devices results in an elegant style and precision in the “ode”. These are also examples of substitution as all these words refer to autumn.
The device most beautifully used in the” ode “to provide coherence is ellipsis. In the first stanza, the poet describes autumn as a “season of mists”, and a “close bosom friend of sun”. Once the identity of autumn is established, Keats talks of the conspiracy autumn is involved in with the sun, but he does not say again and again that autumn is doing this and that but he describes things autumn plans to do. Similarly, in the third stanza also Keats explains the music of autumn but he does not specify that it is the music of autumn. But we can understand it
“Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river swallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind live or dies
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from the hilly bourn.”
The season is linked up with deeper interpretation so its use as a repetitive keyword is avoided.
Grammatical Level & Binding
The poem has compound sentences and complex sentences. The first full sentence a long one that covers the first four lines of the poem ends with “round the thatch -eves”.
Conjunctions
These are explicit markers of cohesion in a text. Analysis of ode reveals that only two types of conjunctions are used; additive and temporal. Additive conjunctions and, or are used. “And” is used for eleven times and “or” is used for three times. And serves two functions, it is used to add more concepts.
Anaphoric references
Ode to Autumn is rich in referring expressions. Keats has made use of the anaphoric references and only one cataphoric reference. In the first stanza, a pronoun him is used to refer back to the maturing sun. To interpret the pronoun “him” correctly one needs to reach the second. Hence two lines are interconnected. In line number four that is used to refer back to vines.
Cataphoric reference
The word “music”, in the third stanza is a cataphoric reference, it refers forward. The next lines describe the music of autumn.
Cohesion
It is the measure of strength of functional relatedness of the elements and by relating one part of a text to another part of the same text, it lends continuity to the text. Thus, “Ode to Autumn”, emerges as a cohesive text by interlinking various devices and techniques discussed above.
In short, it can be asserted that Keats’ poem shows a very creative use of Jakobson’s poetic function. The words opted along the axis of selection are united along the axis of combination with a poetic function and purpose.
Conclusion
“Conspiring”, the usual negative aspects linked with autumn, are turned upside down in this very word showing its innocent, benevolent conspiring is to “load and bless” the trees with fruit. & “to set budding more”, a note of optimism is found when Keats says that the process of fruition and ripeness that begins in autumn. The second last line of 1st stanza connotes the word “conspiring” from the third line of the same stanza. “Until they think warm days will never cease” (Ode to Autumn, Stanza 1, line 10). This delusion if created in someone’s mind is dangerous and it happens to all of us. We live in this world as if we will never die till, we breathe our last breath and leave this world, desiring and wishing to have a little more time to do more meaningful tasks. Almost all people die with regrets only those who never forget this reality of life and keep preparing themselves for it can leave this world with a sense of peace.
The personification of autumn in the next stanza, uses an ontological metaphor, to give this abstract idea of natural phenomenon in a more concrete form of human appearance. Presenting autumn as a person or an entity not only depicts it more vividly but also conveys the activities that can be observed in the season. Autumn season and human beings are linked up in this way so we can apply the concept of a cycle of seasonal changes to the same sort of cycle of life in our lives which can be said to show different phases each symbolized by a certain season. The fact that in the larger scheme of nature one particular set of flowers and trees are shed and replaced with new ones, human beings also die and their new generation replaces them. Nature makes sure to prepare itself for the next stage by working silently and progressively.
One fact of life is once, we realize the importance of planting a tree, in our old age when we know we would most probably not benefit from its shade then we have to understand the truth that as artists we have to keep creating meaningful and stylistically curious works of art. Such works achieve a sort of immortality if they remain cherishable even after our death. These works are also a source of inspiration for coming generations who contemplate them and they draw curious insights from them through their innovative minds, Keats has touched on this particular idea in all his odes, especially in the Ode on a Grecian Urn, and Ode on a Nightingale, his famous lines from the former;
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all,
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” (to Grecian Urn, stanza 5, lines 9,10)
These lines can be interpreted as each of us is given by nature a certain potential and bestowed with a purpose, once we realize this thing and try to fulfill it, we can attain a sort of immortality by doing something of eternal significance. We have to realize the truth that life is transitory and not perfect yet we must realize it is beautiful in this very way because of the of blending joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure. All the colors of life have to be accepted, to get a peaceful and optimistic state of mind which is required to put our energies and efforts into some creative work.
The second stanza by its verbs “sitting careless”, “Drows’d”, and “keep steady thy laden head”, and the final line of the stanza,
“Thou watchest the last oozings hors by hours” (to Autumn stanza 2, line 11)
All these verbs of action depicting frozen pictures also depict different phases of activities that are performed during this season and on the deeper thematic level they show different sorts of phases of life every human being has to face in his life, sometimes we wait in anticipation of something. We also get distracted from our purposes and sometimes we have to be patient when the process of accomplishing our goals takes time.
The third stanza of the data of this research paper, i-e of Keats’ Ode to Autumn, immediately shifts the focus and grabs our attention, the rhetorical question;
“Where are the songs of spring? Ay where are they?” (To Autumn, stanza 3, line 1)
This depicts the usual behavior of a common man who yearns for the spring in the autumn or more broadly wants that which he has not and undervalues that which he has.
“Think not of them, thou hast thy music too”. (Keats, 1919, Ode to Autumn, stanza 3, line 2).
Keats says Autumn need not worry since it has got its own music too. The word “music”, in this line refers to the last lines of the ode in which Keats gives a description of the music of the autumn season. This word refers forward to the description of music in the last lines of this ode.
In the next lines, a picturesque description of the autumn evening is given. “the soft dying day”. The word dying can also be taken for the autobiographical element. The scenic description continues in the next lines,” rosy hue”, over the “stubble plans” stirs our imagination. The sounds or music of the autumn season are described as “the full-grown lambs”, a "loud bleat from hilly born”. The sounds or voices are high pitched but still are they there this very thing imparts this season with its own music. “treble soft”, the oxymoron describes the sound of a bird in autumn and it unites the opposites, shrill high-pitched sound is called it's opposite.
The dilemma of knowing the fact that some things are better than others taken separately but taken as a whole different things unite in the scheme of Nature to create an overall beautiful picture of life.
The word, “twitter”, has an onomatopoeic quality in the phonetic form or the actual sound of the word has a close resemblance with the actual sound swallows create in the world of nature and studying this ode together with Ode to a Nightingale and Ode on a Grecian Urn we can say that here a parallel between the world of Nature and Art is discerned in the Ode to Autumn as well as in these odes.
Stylistics is defined as “the analysis of distinctive expression in language and the description of its purpose and effect”, Verdonk, (2002, p. 4) as cited by (Jaafar. E. A, 2014, p. 239)
“The linguistic and literary patterns fuse as color and compositions in a painting” Carter & Stockwell, 2008: 44, as cited by (Jaafar. E. A., 2014, p. 239)
The analysis of the poem using the stylistic model of Jacobson's poetic function and the aesthetic background of Foregrounding unveils its meaning and purpose behind the words selected by the poet from a pool of available vocabulary and the deviations on lexical, graphological, and semantic level are used with a purpose.
References
Works Cited
Fraser, G., S., (1971). John Keats: Odes, Hong Kong, McMillian Education Ltd. ISBN 0-333-00053-6.
Jaafar, E., A., (2014), A Stylistic Analysis of Two Poems, Journal of College of Education for Women/p-ISSN: 1680-8738. vol. 25(1) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311873842_A_Stylistic_Analysis_of_Two_Selected_Poems/link/5de132c292851c836454751b/download
Simpson, P., (2004) Stylistics: A Resource Book for Students, IBSN 0-203-57093-6, Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
Bibliography
C., M., Bowra, (1949), The Romantic Imagination, Harvard University Press.
Lyons, J., (1981), Language and Literature: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press.
Toolan, M., (1996). Language in Literature: An Introduction to Stylistics, Routledge Press, Taylor & Francis Group.
Yule, G., The Study of Language, Third edition.
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