#120: Natural History Poetry #1: 'To Autumn'

Alongside the other sources that students will be exposed to during the GCSE in Natural History courses, poetry will play a part. This variety of cultural sources including art and literature and music is one of the interesting aspects of the course, and the selection of these sources will be interesting, and will I am sure lead to some debate about inclusion and exclusion. 

It will certainly need to be diverse and not just created by old (and possibly dead) white men.

Having said that...

As we enter the season of autumn, here's a classic which is full of natural history references... and written by a dead white man: aged just 25 when he died of tuberculosis in Rome.

To Autumn (1820)

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 cider-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.

Image: Conkers and autumn leaves, Alan Parkinson - shared under CC license