There is a strong comparison between the innocence of a virginal child that can bring any man to love her and in his dreams he sees all the men that she has dangerously lured to their deaths on the side of the mountain, and once he awakes he finds that he has been treated the same way; left to die by the Femme Fatale. This lady, who is mentioned in many of Keats’s poems who is known as the “Femme Fatale”, links to Fanny Brawne. She could be so innocent but yet distract Keats away from his writing and so he did not want to be stupid fall for her ways of meaningless seduction, even though he had fallen in love with her.
Imagery of nature is a typical idea to write about by Romantic poets. They believed that God is in everything and is contained in his creations. This is also known as Pantheism, which means all God. Keats shows extremely relevant examples of natural imagery and enjambment in “To Autumn”: “With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run; To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees.
The use of enjambment has made it easier to imagine the vines growing so much that the apples that are being produced are leaning over, as the description is into the next line. With all the explicit imagery Keats has given to the reader it is easy to see why Keats was named a romantic poet. In the second stanza Keats has used alliteration to help the reader feel the wind in the autumn: “Thy hair soft-lifted by the willowing wind;” It is not only visual imagery that Keats is trying to give to the reader but also a sense of movement through Autumn as he uses time scales between each stanza and a carefully placed stasis as the girl falls asleep in the granary:
“on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,” It breaks up the poem to show effect of the vivid descriptions that the reader has just read and prepares them for the beginning of another nature filled stanza: “And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;” Once the lambs were newly born in spring and now in autumn the lambs are not quite fully adults but between those two ages, as autumn is the almost forgotten season as that age is. Sound imagery is used by Keats to bring more life into his writing.
Autumn is seen as female by Keats and uses it in his poem. Keats relates the fact that he is slowly dying to the last days of autumn as they slowly die themselves: “Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.” The whole poem could be relevant to his own life where he his life has been filled to the brim with happiness and cannot be overloaded any more as in the end of Summer, but it slowly all turns and gets colder and darker, just as his life would have. The growth of Romanticism led some writers such as Keats to embrace a fascination with Gothic forms that emphasized the supposedly bizarre and grotesque aspects of the Middle Ages.
The words “I felt before I thought” was the basis of these radical Romantic Poets. They didn’t want to think logically about life and the way they wrote but from the heart. An example of this in one of Keats’s poems, “The Eve of St Agnes”, is when Angela, the elderly servant lady, chose to let Porphyro see Madeline even though she knew that he could be killed if he stayed in the castle: “Mercy, Porphyro! hie thee from this place; They are all here to-night, the whole blood-thirsty race!” Angela has a heart and chose to follow her feelings instead of using her brain and making Porphyro leave or be killed.
Keats’s use of vivid description for the reader follows the use of Rousseau’s words. Keats poems are typical of a wide range of contrasts to show the true extent of the two factors used in the contrast. Natural imagery is a very important part of the poems and without it Keats would not be a Romantic poet. The natural descriptions do not only show nature but they also illustrate life and ways of living. The natural descriptions used by Keats wanted to break away from the Augustan Satirists that wrote in an intellectual manner, which the Romantic poets disapproved of and so wrote in a free-style manner. Romantic poets were republic due to they saw people as freed spirits. Keats has used the same qualities of contrasts, great use of nature and the Gothic style of writing, which follows the same manners as other Romantic poets.
