'Until they think warm days will never cease': Discuss the ways in which Keats presents the passage of time in 'To Autumn'

AS and A Level question papers often encourage students closely to study the language, imagery, and verse form of the text in question. In helping my tutee answer this, I would ensure that these techniques were of primary concern to them, but would also encourage them to think about the contexts of the poem in order that they might demonstrate a deep and confident understanding of the literature given, and exhibit panache in their treatment of it. I would analyse the first stanza of ‘To Autumn’ in order to help guide the student in how to respond to the question, before asking them to study the rest of the poem in the same manner. The thesis for this question would be to argue that Keats presents the passage of time as an inevitable process, but (and herein the nuance lies) a process that one might trick oneself into not accepting. For autumn is personified from the very first line, it is the eponymous ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’. As the epigraph to this question states, the first stanza of the poem may deceive us into believing that the ‘warm days will never cease’. For the personified autumn is the ‘Close-bosom friend of the maturing sun’, or the personified season of summer. They carefully work together in order to ‘fill all fruit with ripeness to the core’. Keats captures this process of growth over time in his description of the plants in (7-9):                                 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 There is a lot of linguistic detail to unpack here, from the swollen assonance of (7), mimetic of the growth of the fruits themselves, to the enjambment of the entire description, a technique that literally enacts on the verse what autumn enacts on the flowers, making them run on and on as the flowers bud ‘more’ and ‘more’, ever ‘later’ in the year. At this point we too, as the bees, might think that ‘warm days will never cease’, but the choice of the verb ‘Conspiring’ in (3) may remind us that there is more than meets the eye. Summer and autumn are conspiring with each other to do precisely that, to convince us that the fruits will ripen and swell forever, but in a case of dramatic irony, we know something the bees do not; that the passage of time and the seasons is inexorable, and decay is inevitable. For the fruit cannot ‘o’er-brim’ forever without eventually spilling over. Now that the frame for the argument has been established, I would encourage the student to look for more evidence to support the stance throughout the poem, and then to analyse the quotations that they light on. This ensures that they do everything the task requires of them; they respond to the question, and they exhibit a close attention to all types of poetic technique throughout the text. Having built a sturdy response, we could then start to embellish it by thinking about the personal, literary, and historical contexts to the poem. We could consider the significance of its publication date, for example. It was published in 1820, two years before Keats died, and it was composed in 1819, the year of the Peterloo massacre. Or we could look at allusion in the poem, for example, the numerous connections to Shakespeare’s As You Like It. By decking out a solid exam response with trappings such as these, a candidate can not only distinguish themselves from other examinees, but can also make their essay a pleasure for the examiner to read.