Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, willful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?
Looking at the words highlighted in blue this is an Anglo Saxon riddles (a kenning) used to describe the clouds as if they were floating around in the sky and he used these riddles so that he did not have to use the exact words and he also wanted to use them as they were used in Anglo Saxon poems so that he did not have to use rhymes to make the poem flow and instead use alliterations to make it flow and there are many examples of the use of alliterations such as ‘what wind-walks’ in Hurrahing in Harvest and ‘long and lovely and lush’ and taking this as an example he uses asinations where he uses repeated vowel sounds to try and make the poem flow. However Keats does not use either asinations or alliterations to make the poem flow and he uses rhyme schemes to do this.
Similar words are also used in the poems such as the word ‘lambs’ although they are superficial and have very minor similarities but the differences are great as Hopkins uses the words ‘the racing lambs’ to emphasize new life whereas Keats uses the words ‘full-grown lambs’ to suggest ending. There is also the use of the word ‘bloom’ however it is used as a noun in ‘Spring’ but as a translative verb in ‘To Autumn’ in ‘While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day’ where it is a translative verb because it should not be used to describe clouds.
However probably the most obvious difference in the poems is how Hopkins shows energy in the language that he uses such as the words ‘shoot, strikes, racing, rush and fling’ which all suggest movement and energy whereas Keats uses much more passive language such as the words ‘oozing, mossed, mellow, maturing’ which all imply slowness and they are also words that are affected by the words around them and once the feeling of slowness has been implied then all of the words suggest a feeling of slowness. The word that implies this most is the first word which season which without clocks is the slowest and longest measure of time. Also it is obvious to me that Hopkins is very bold in showing what he believes whereas Keats is very more subdued in showing his feelings and an example of this would be the first line in ‘Spring’ which is ‘Nothing is so beautiful as spring –’ as this shows his feelings and is not a description of the landscape, whereas the first line in ‘To Autumn’ which is ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!’ can be seen as a visual image and is also an ‘apostrophe’ as it is used to attract the attention of the reader.
However all of the differences and similarities highlighted above lead to the actual underlying mean for Hopkins as from looking closely at his two poems he suggests in ‘Spring’ that it is the same as the Eden Garden and he also suggests that you can learn as much about God by looking at nature as you can by looking at the Bible and that the beauty of nature is there to remind people that god was the one that created life and this is shown by the following quote ‘A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning In Eden garden’. Although it also suggests that God made the world in the first place and that it is the action of the people on the Earth that is destroying the beauty of nature and that they need to try to appreciate the beauty of nature. This is what Hopkins strongly believes and this is shown in ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’ where he says ‘I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes, Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour’ which suggests that he needs the grain (glean) to keep the body alive and Jesus and God (Saviour) to keep the soul alive and also the word ‘glean’ also suggests that he wants all of this and this is also backed up by the words ‘have’ and ‘get’ in the poem of ‘Spring’. He also suggests that all of these things are here but that we have not seen them using the words ‘These things, these things were here and but the beholder Wanting’ and an example of this would be ‘And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder’ which suggest that God is in the distance holding the world.
Whereas Keats’s poem does not focus in on God but it focuses in on the Ceres the goddess of Harvest and the sense that the seasons are like a cycle and that even though there is some sense of ending there is the sense that there is also beginning and from looking at the surface of ‘To Autumn’ it seems that there is less to do with thoughts and more description but if a closer look has to be taken to find Keats’s thoughts whereas Hopkins is much more blatant in showing his feelings. In Keats’s poem it also suggests that the ‘sun’ has joined with Ceres to create this season of Autumn and that it was not created by God.
Overall both of the poems use quite similar visual description to underline very different underlying means.
