The Human Seasons (John Keats)

Four Seasons fill the measure of the year;
There are four seasons in the mind of Man:
He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear
Takes in all beauty with an easy span:

He has his Summer, when luxuriously
Spring’s honeyed cud of youthful thought he loves
To ruminate, and by such dreaming high
Is nearest unto heaven: quiet coves

His soul hath in its Autumn, when his wings
He furleth close; contented so to look
On mists in idleness—to let fair things
Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook:—

He has his Winter too of pale misfeature,
Or else he would forego his mortal nature.


Hi ladies! Sorry I've been gone for a while. I've been writing an article that has completely taken over my life; it's devouring me like an alien in a movie, I swear. But I'm almost done.

This poem is by John Keats. It is not in our short anthology. But I am including it here because we have been talking so much about seasons, and this is a classic poem about seasons. One of the best ways to build up your background knowledge about poetry is to study the most famous poems in English--not because famous poems are always the most important poems, or even the best poems, but because famous poems tend to be imitated a lot. If you understand famous poems and poets, you will be likely to understand and appreciate the way later poets borrow or steal from their predecessors. So today we will look at Keats, who is a widely imitated poet and one of our best. Then we will move on to talk about other poets, but we will come back to Keats later.

The other reason we are doing this poem is that the poems we have planned for the next few days are going to be sonnets (especially, I think, Renaissance sonnets). So this poem, a sonnet about seasons, provides the perfect transition.

We will begin like we always begin: by reading the poem with our imagination and our senses wide open. (I am using my teacherly "we" here because I am reading the poem right now, just as you are: I am about to go read the poem with as much imaginative commitment as I can. I'll be back.)

Okay, this time we will go line by line again, then we will make some general comments.

"Four Seasons fill the measure of the year;..."

What do you notice? Well, the word "Seasons" is capitalized; that's interesting.

When you try to visualize this line, what happens? What does it mean to "fill" a "measure"? When do we fill a measure? Usually when we are measuring out a substance: wheat, for instance, or flour, or coffee; something we can scoop. Otherwise, we probably wouldn't use the words "fill" and "measure" together, right?

So we know, now, that for Keats, the passage of the year is a "measure"--a predictable quantity--and also that it can be "filled" with Seasons, just as a container could be filled with a measure of wheat. That's a beautiful idea; that the year is filled with time just like a container can be filled. It creates a sense of abundance or sufficiency.

Now we go to line 2: 'There are four seasons in the mind of Man:..."

Well, the first thing, of course, is that lines 1 and 2 create a comparison. What's more, now that the idea of "seasons" has been loaded up with a sense of abundance or sufficiency, those feelings carry over into line 2. We might wonder something like this: "Is the mind of Man also a measure?" Elsewhere, Keats writes about it as if it is: he wrote another famous sonnet that begins,

"When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain..."

So, with lines 1 and 2, we definitely seem to be in Keats' territory: here, as elsewhere, he is picturing the mind of man as a "measure" full of ripe abundance.

Is your mind a measure full of ripe abundance?

Maybe it is and you just don't realize it yet.

Let's give Keats the benefit of the doubt and assume that your mind, and my mind too, are both measures full of ripe abundance.

Another thing to notice in these two lines is that Keats is making a very specific use of this famous set of images (the seasons of man/seasons of the year thing). He is not just telling us about the seasons of man; he is telling us about the seasons of a man's mind. So all of the images and metaphors that follow will apply specifically to the intellect and imagination. That's one way that Keats is making this ancient and famous idea his own.

Now we go on to line 3 and 4:

"He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear
Takes in all beauty with an easy span:..."

A young man's mind, Keats suggests, is full of fancy. I think that's true. I think that you people are full of far more hopes and fantasies and dreams about the future than even most people my age.

Let's talk about the word "lusty." You know what it means: it's a word for erotic desire. But it's also a word for passion or desire in general. By choosing this word, Keats suggests that the desires of a young man's mind are as intense as the desires of his body; that the intellect and imagination, just like the body, are full of desire when we are young.

Can you think of anything that can be "clear" and that can take in "beauty" and that has a "span"? Maybe our vision. It seems to me that the action of mind suggested here is the action of a very wide gaze.

This first stanza is full of metaphors for abundance (and maybe even metaphors for satisfaction).

Now we have a line break. Sonnets don't always have line breaks: in fact, more often than not, don't. Why do we have a line break? Why does Keats want to create some space or silence? I don't know. My guess is that it will only be clear when we look at the whole poem.

Let's move on to the next stanza, which I find to be tricky!

We start off without trouble:

"He has his summer, when luxuriously..."

It seems that we are moving on, no problem, to a new topic. But wait!:

"Spring's honeyed cud of youthful thought..."

I thought Spring was "clear fancy"?

This Summer stanza is deceiving! Not only does it describe Summer, it gives us a new image for Spring. Why does Keats revise his old image of Spring in the process of describing Summer?

I don't know. But it seems to me that one of the things Keats is getting done in this poem is not only to describe the seasons of man to us, but also to describe the relations of the seasons of man to each other. This poem is not only about the times of a human life; it is also, and perhaps especially, about the connections among times of human life. The image of Spring that Keats provides in the second stanza shows us how Spring and Summer relate to each other: when you are a young adult, you reflect on the sweet pleasures of your youth. So this image not only describes summer; it describes the transition and relation between spring and summer. It turns out that this pattern repeats in the next stanza: the first image, or metaphor, links Summer and Autumn (because the picture of a bird flying is used both at the end of the Summer stanza and the beginning of the Autumn stanza), while the second image, or metaphor, in the poem pertains only to Autumn.

This is another very interesting thing! Keats is going to some trouble to suggest that the times of our life do not simply pass--bump--from one to the next; the progression is gradual, and each season is related to the previous one. Maybe that's because this sonnet is about the mind of man. Our minds are always reflective, thinking about the past and connecting past and present.

So we will say that in lines 5-6 we have a transition image showing us the relation between Spring and Summer, and then in line 7 we have a new image for Summer:

"To ruminate, and by such dreaming high
Is nearest unto heaven..."

Now the image of the cow--which is a very grounded, earthy image--is replaced by an image of a soaring creature (most likely a bird, especially when you read it in the context of the following lines). Maybe we can read it like this: the relation between Spring (youth) and Summer (adulthood) is sweetly ruminative. More generally, however--independent of its relation to youth--the adult mind is characterized by lofty goals.

Why does Keats think that people are nearest unto heaven when they are in summer of their lives? I don't know.

But we did find something else exciting. Do you remember the first sentence of our Dylan Thomas poem, "Poem in October"? It began "It was my thirtieth year to heaven..."

Guess what?

Dylan Thomas is making a Keats reference. I did not know that until just now.

Look at line 8: Keats says that, when we are in the summer of our lives, we are "nearest unto heaven." Thomas recycles the phrase "to heaven" in the first line of his poem...about being in the summer of his life. He is borrowing this phrase on purpose to remind us of the Keats poem. If we know the Keats poem, we will experience the Thomas poem more deeply.

That's one reason we read famous poems.

Thomas doesn't use the phrase in exactly the same that Keats does (as you will see if you go back and reread). He makes it his own, just as Keats makes the idea of seasons his own.

Okay, now we are going to stop going line by line because I have to catch my bus. It would be much, much better if we could talk about how the poem works as a whole, but you guys can think about it on your own.

Here are some questions:

Why are there stanza breaks? How would the poem be different if it were just 14 lines with no spaces?
Where is the climax of the poem?
Why does Keats use the word "forego" in line 14? Look it up. What is Keats getting at? How on earth can one "forego" mortal nature? Mortal nature comes to you, whether you like it or not: you can't usually just say, "Oh, no, I don't think I will have any Death today. I'm all set, thanks." So we have to think about what Keats means.
In your (well-founded, rational) opinion, what crisis might have prompted him to write this sonnet?
Is there an important transition between lines 8 and 9? (Often, in a sonnet, there is an important transition between lines 8 and 9).
How would you describe the purpose of the couplet? What is its relation to the poem as a whole? How can we connect the couplet to the idea of "the mind of man"?

I think that the phrase "pale misfeature" is probably a description for a frozen brook, for the following reason: In between stanzas 1 and 2 and stanzas 2 and 3, a metaphor is carried across the stanza break. So I would expect it to happen again between stanza 3 and the couplet (or if it didn't happen, I would wonder why). The metaphor at the end of stanza 3 is a "brook." So I ask myself, does "pale misfeature" describe a brook in winter? I think so. Ice is pale and misfeatured.

But why is the mind of an aged man like a frozen brook?

And what does it mean to "forego" mortal nature?

And what is the connection between the answers to these two questions?

And how do these answers, and this connection, relate to the arc of the poem as a whole?

Hmmmmmm.

I might think some more about this poem, or look it up in some good books, and if I come up with some wonderful answers I will post them in the comments section. If you all come up with wonderful answers you should post them in the comments section, too.

Have good weeks, everybody!