Page "To Autumn" Paragraph 53

Others, like Harold Bloom, have emphasized the " exhausted landscape ", the completion, the finality of death, although " Winter descends here as a man might hope to die, with a natural sweetness ".

If death in itself is final, here it comes with a lightness, a softness, also pointing to " an acceptance of process beyond the possibility of grief.

" The progress of growth is no longer necessary ; maturation is complete, and life and death are in harmony.

The rich description of the cycle of the seasons enables the reader to feel a belonging " to something larger than the self ", as James O ' Rourke expresses it, but the cycle comes to an end each year, analogous to the ending of single life.

O ' Rourke suggests that something of a fear of that ending is subtly implied at the end of the poem, although, unlike the other great odes, in this poem the person of the poet is entirely submerged, so there is at most a faint hint of Keats's own possible fear.