Ode to Autumn, John Keats. Substance

John Keats, the prolific romantic poet pinned for love all his life. Death which is so imminent took away his brothers and father at a very early age. This dispelled his ignorance of his birthright to be a poet. It kindled in him an epicurean taste for literature and he left all his aspirations to be a surgeon. He was also profoundly in love with a woman, but his love was never consummated. He rot in his own cocoon of sweet yet aching and unrequited love for his lady love. Therefore in most of the poems written by Keats the mood is set in such a manner so as to express his overwhelming grief and emotions.
Ode to autumn, one of the poems by John Keats expresses a mood of absolute serenity. In the poem he expresses the inability of an individual to accept the imminent changes in life. Amongst all the seasons, autumn can be said to be a season of contentment and the threshold to the treacherous winters. Keats ruminates and analyses the penultimate season in a cycle be it the cycle of life or nature. Autumn is the season when fruits ripen, crops are harvested, bees fill their cosy cells with ample honey for the ensuing winters and birds even make a move for the warmer places.
In the second paragraph he personifies autumn and describes how she seems to be lying lazily on a granary and drowsy by the smell of poppies blooming in the field. He glorifies the beauty of the season by comparing it with that of the delicate steps of a gleaner carrying a load of harvest across the brook. He also compared autumn to a demure beauty who was rambling about the countryside enjoying the mellow sun and fiddling time away by immaculately looking at the last drop of juice in the cider press. The poet uses these tools to bring in the mood of an idyllic afternoon and the sense of time maturing to turn into dusk at the end of the day.
The season is a mellow beauty with sights and sounds unique to itself which fills all the five senses of a person with heightened pleasure. But this pleasure is unlike the pleasure drawn from the vibrant colours of other seasons. This pleasure is eternal and sustains a feeble soul who is vanquished and prepares to depart from this world. Autumn provides solace and warmth from the ensuing chill of the winters. The last line in the poem which says about gathering swallows in the sky epitomises the fact that certain changes are imminent in life. One cannot help but accept the inevitable losses and be content with them. Autumn justifies and rightly illuminates the thoughts of Keats. He has merely used it as a metaphorical tool to highlight his vanquished and sad life.