Impermanent of nature is well illustrated in ‘Ode to Autumn’

In the following lines, I would like to analyze how the poet, John Keats portrays the “impermanent of nature” in his poem “Ode to autumn”. Ode generally refers to a lyric poem in the form of an address to a particular subject, often elevated in style or manner and written in varied or irregular meter and also it is a poem meant to be sung”.

“Ode to autumn” shows the maturity of the poetic career of John Keats. It is believed that this is the last poem of his life. The poet died after one year of writing this poem. So, the poet tries to embed the thought of “impermanent of nature and life” in his last poem as he knew that he want to stop writing after this. This very thought is clearly portrayed in his sonnet “When I have fears” as well. The poet initiates the sonnet with the following lines.

When I have fears that I may cease to be 
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;

 

When we have a glance over the ode superficially, we can understand that the ode comprises of three stanzas. In the first stanza the poet deals with the fruitfulness and the maturity of autumn. In the second stanza he speaks about the mid autumn and the yields of it through personifying the autumn. In the last stanza he epics the twilight moment of the autumn and the beginning of spring with an ample use of audible imageries. So, the poet proposes the idea of impermanent of nature by stating the stages of autumn as it can be seen outwardly.

When we go deeply into the ode, it’s peculiar that the Impermanent of nature is stated in the very first line of the ode. The poet starts the ode with “The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”. The word “Mist” shows the impermanent clearly, because the mist vanishes when the sun appears. Through that the poet proposes the idea of impermanent at the beginning of the ode.

In this short poem, the first stanza shows the ripeness and fruitfulness of autumn as the summer ended, the ending of summer gives birth to the autumn. The death of summer gives birth to the new born baby “autumn”. During the summer people went outings and the sunny days gave them a way to enjoy the life in the way it can be enjoyed. But now the summer is not there. The only thing they can see is the autumn and its bounties. None can wish to have the summer throughout the year, because it is not eternal. It has to end and the other season has to arrive, because the nature and season are transient. They are not everlasting. 

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

In the above lines the poet states that the bees assume that the warm day will never come and this season will not cease. They are enjoying the “Sweet Kernel” of the flowers. They have ample of flowers to get the honey from. So, they are in the imagination of everlasting autumn, but the poet implies a thought in these lines that the bees are in delusion. They wish to have the autumn forever, but it is passing. When the time comes, it has to keep going and leave the way to the upcoming one.  

In the second stanza, the poet passes his concentration to the harvesting and the activities in mid autumn. Mid autumn is the time of harvesting. Through personification the poet describes the autumn. The autumn is personified as the harvester, reaper, gleaner, and watcher of cyder-press. All the above mentioned works are under taken by the farmers in the mid autumn. The farmers harvest their paddy fields, they reap them, people glean and collect the left over, and they make juices from the fruits. While doing all these things they are rarely admired by the nature and autumn as they are very busy with their works. In the second stanza the poet put forward the idea that the autumn has done its part. It has given its yield to the people. The people harvested their paddy fields and they have kept them in safe places. Now it is the time for the autumn to depart, because someone is going to be present here and occupy the place of autumn.

“Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

thou watchest the last oozing hours”

The phrase “oozing hours” suggests as if the autumn is waiting patiently for the arrival of the winter. 

In the last stanza, there are many words and phrases which are related to death can be found, Such as soft-dying day, wailful choir, mourn, and wind lives and dies. All these words and phrases suggest the death, because death gives an end to the life. Death shows the fidelity and impermanent of life. The poet takes these words to describe the twilight moment of the autumn. Through the use of these words and phrases the poet shows the impermanent of autumn. It gives the idea that the autumn is going to leave the place, while making the creatures to yearn for that. 

Moreover! The "barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day," and "the light wind lives or dies" give premonition of mortality of the nature. It says that the day is dying and the gnats, lambs, crickets, and birds all seem to be aware of the approaching darkness. The "full-grown lambs" bleat as they understand their destiny, because the full-grown lambs are slaughtered at the end of the autumn. All these sounds are portrayed as the mourning of the creatures for the departure of the autumn. On the other hand it can be considered as the farewell of the creatures for the autumn and the premonition of them for the upcoming season.

On the other hand! The autumn will be followed by the cold and barrenness of winter, winter will in turn give way to a fresh spring. The seasons pass, the nature is impermanent. When the summer passes autumn falls, when autumn leaves the winter falls. In a nutshell the nature is not permanent. It is always moving. It will not be stable.

Apart from that, the poet says that all the seasons have their good and bad. This is implicitly conveyed with wonderful effect in the very last line of the ode. “and gathering swallows twitter in the skies” in one way the line gives a premonition of the coming winter, for the swallows are gathering in preparation to migrate to warmer climes. Yet we remember that migratory birds return when the cold weather ends, so that the very hint of their impending departure carries with it an implied suggestion of their reappearance when warm days come again. 

To sum up! “Ode to autumn” is a short poem written by a Romantic poet John Keats in his last few days of life. He wrote this poem when he walked the English countryside in the autumn of 1819. He was admired by the beauty of nature.  He suggests the impermanent of nature in the poetic lines through fine division of stanzas and stating the stages of autumn in them vividly. This ode is a clear illustration for the impermanent of nature.

MCMXIV

MCMXIV

Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day;

And the countryside not caring
The place-names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheats' restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word--the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

About the poet

Born in 1922 in Coventry, England. He attended St. John's College, Oxford. 

His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945 and, though not particularly strong on its own, is notable insofar as certain passages foreshadow the unique sensibility and maturity that characterizes his later work. In 1946, Larkin discovered the poetry of Thomas Hardy and became a great admirer of his poetry, learning from Hardy how to make the commonplace and often dreary details of his life the basis for extremely tough, unsparing, and memorable poems. With his second volume of poetry, The Less Deceived (1955), Larkin became the preeminent poet of his generation, and a leading voice of what came to be called 'The Movement', a group of young English writers who rejected the prevailing fashion for neo-Romantic writing in the style of Yeats and Dylan Thomas. Like Hardy, Larkin focused on intense personal emotion but strictly avoided sentimentality or self-pity. 

In 1964, he confirmed his reputation as a major poet with the publication of The Whitsun Weddings, and again in 1974 with High Windows: collections whose searing, often mocking, wit does not conceal the poet's dark vision and underlying obsession with universal themes of mortality, love, and human solitude. Deeply anti-social and a great lover (and published critic) of American jazz, Larkin never married and conducted an uneventful life as a librarian in the provincial city of Hull, where he died in 1985.

Popular Poems:

A Study Of Reading Habits
Ambulances
An Arundel Tomb
Annus Mirabilis
Arrival
At Grass
Aubade

Background, themes,and symbols of "Animal Farm"

Background information for George Orwell's Animal Farm 

Animal Farm is a satirical novella (which can also be understood as a modern fable or allegory) by George Orwell, ostensibly about a group of animals who oust the humans from the farm on which they live. They run the farm themselves, only to have it degenerate into a brutal tyranny of its own. 

The book was written during World War II and published in 1945, although it was not widely successful until the late 1950s.
Animal Farm is a satirical allegory of Soviet totalitarianism. Orwell based major events in the book on ones from the Soviet Union during the Stalin era. Orwell, a democratic socialist, and a member of the Independent Labour Party for many years, was a critic of Stalin, and was suspicious of Moscow-directed Stalinism after his experiences in the Spanish Civil War.

Themes and Symbols in Animal Farm

Themes

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

1. Corruption

2. Exploitation 

3. Foolishness

Symbols

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

1. Animal Farm

Animal Farm, known at the beginning and the end of the novel as the Manor Farm, symbolizes Russia and the Soviet Union under Communist Party rule. But more generally, Animal Farm stands for any human society, be it capitalist, socialist, fascist, or communist. It possesses the internal structure of a nation, with a government (the pigs), a police force or army (the dogs), a working class (the other animals), and state holidays and rituals. Its location amid a number of hostile neighboring farms supports its symbolism as a political entity with diplomatic concerns.

2. The Barn

The barn at Animal Farm, on whose outside walls the pigs paint the Seven Commandments and, later, their revisions, represents the collective memory of a modern nation. The many scenes in which the ruling-class pigs alter the principles of Animalism and in which the working-class animals puzzle over but accept these changes represent the way an institution in power can revise a community’s concept of history to bolster its control. If the working class believes history to lie on the side of their oppressors, they are less likely to question oppressive practices. Moreover, the oppressors, by revising their nation’s conception of its origins and development, gain control of the nation’s very identity, and the oppressed soon come to depend upon the authorities for their communal sense of self.

3. The Windmill

The great windmill symbolizes the pigs’ manipulation of the other animals for their own gain. Despite the immediacy of the need for food and warmth, the pigs exploit Boxer and the other common animals by making them undertake backbreaking labor to build the windmill, which will ultimately earn the pigs more money and thus increase their power. The pigs’ declaration that Snowball is responsible for the windmill’s first collapse constitutes psychological manipulation, as it prevents the common animals from doubting the pigs’ abilities and unites them against a supposed enemy. The ultimate conversion of the windmill to commercial use is one more sign of the pigs’ betrayal of their fellow animals. From an allegorical point of view, the windmill represents the enormous modernization projects undertaken in Soviet Russia after the Russian Revolution.

Animal Farm

George Orwell

Eric Blair was born in 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, in the then British colony of India, where his father, Richard, worked for the Opium Department of the Civil Service. His mother, Ida, brought him to England at the age of one. He did not see his father again until 1907, when Richard visited England for three months before leaving again until 1912. Eric had an older sister named Marjorie and a younger sister named Avril. With his characteristic humour, he would later describe his family's background as "lower-upper-middle class." 

Orwell's works

During most of his career Orwell was best known for his journalism, both in the British press and in books of reportage such as Homage to Catalonia (describing his experiences during the Spanish Civil War), Down and Out in Paris and London (describing a period of poverty in these cities), and The Road to Wigan Pier (which described the living conditions of poor miners in northern England). According to Newsweek, Orwell "was the finest journalist of his day and the foremost architect of the English essay since Hazlitt." 

Contemporary readers are more often introduced to Orwell as a novelist, particularly through his enormously successful titles Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The former is considered an allegory of the corruption of the socialist ideals of the Russian Revolution by Stalinism, and the latter is Orwell's prophetic vision of the results of totalitarianism. Orwell denied that Animal Farm was a reference to Stalinism. Orwell had returned from Catalonia a staunch anti-Stalinist and anti-Communist, but he remained to the end a man of the left and, in his own words, a 'democratic socialist'. 

Orwell is also known for his insights about the political implications of the use of language. In the essay "Politics and the English Language", he decries the effects of cliche, bureaucratic euphemism, and academic jargon on literary styles, and ultimately on thought itself. Orwell's concern over the power of language to shape reality is also reflected in his invention of Newspeak, the official language of the imaginary country of Oceania in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Newspeak is a variant of English in which vocabulary is strictly limited by government fiat. The goal is to make it increasingly difficult to express ideas that contradict the official line - with the final aim of making it impossible even to conceive such ideas. (cf. Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis). A number of words and phrases that Orwell coined in Nineteen Eighty-Four have entered the standard vocabularly, such as "memory hole," "Big Brother," "Room 101," "doublethink," "thought police," and "newspeak."

Ode to autumn

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-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed 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'erbrimmed 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-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed 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 redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Clod and Pebbles

Clod and Pebbles

"Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a heaven in hell's despair."

So sung a little Clod of Clay,
Trodden with the cattle's feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:

"Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a hell in heaven's despite."
WILLIAM BLAKE

Before entering......

before we enter into the poem i hope that some basic information about the works of Blake will throw some light on the understanding that we have about the poet.

Basically Blake has two main poetic collections. They are "Songs of Innocence", "Songs of Experience". These two collections are interconnected. In the first collection the poet sees everything with a child's heart. Almost he praises everything he sees, Love, religion, god, the king, and the country; all are praised. on the contrary in the second collection he almost blames everything. He thinks that when a man gets the experience from the world he becomes a bad person. He becomes corrupted through the experience he gets from the atmosphere around him.

Moreover! It is worth saying that most of the poems in the first collection have the counter poems in the second collection. For instance we can take the poem "Chimney Sweeper" In the "Songs of Innocence". This poem deals with a small boy who was sold to work as a "Chimney Sweeper". The boy doesn't blame his parents, Kings, religion and everything. He sees everything with a child's perspective or the poet sees everything with the child's heart. The counter poem in the "Songs of Experience" deals the things in a different view. In this poem the poet scolds everyone who come across.

With this view, If we enter into the poem "Clod and the Pebbles", we can understand that this poem deals with the two above mentioned perspectives; innocence and experience.

Before proceed....

Hi friends,
               I start this blog to share some important notes on literary items taught in the classrooms of HNDE of SLIATE. I hope this will be a fine place to share our different ideas about the materials analyzed in the classrooms.

Thank you