Keats in ‘To Autumn’ personifies the autumn, however not for the same reason. He appears contradictory to his attitude in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ portraying short life as a good thing. Throughout the poem Keats visually illustrates the abundance of the autumn. He describes how the “summer has o’er-brimm’d…” with abundance through the repetition of “more” and the constant use of ‘o-sounding’ words representing the “plump…relaxed” ripeness of the harvest. Keats even places a rhyming couplet at the penultimate lines of each stanza, representing the fact that not even the poem can contain the profusion. It’s incomplete. All of the imagery used helps show the reader Keats attitude in this poem: that there is too much to do in life, with too little time, leaving no time for escapism. This means that both poems state that life is short, using visual imagery. However they disagree on whether this is a positive fact.
In ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, Keats uses the paradox of a “Sylvan historian,” one that cannot speak, to describe the Urn. His use of the word historian describes the Urn’s new reason for sustained existence, to teach the world of the Ancient Grecian society. However, to do so it needs to “live” forever. This gives the reader yet another paradoxical subject: the Urn is the past but it lives on. This, Keats idealises in his poem, helping to show the briefness of human life, through the necessity of the Urn’s existence: to remember the past.
In ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ Keats brings to attention the pictures painted on it; showing the immortality that Keats so desperately desires. The pictures seem to stimulate the poet’s imagination allowing him to escape. He describes the “fair youth…[who] canst not leave
Thy song” and the “Bold lover [who]…never canst thou kiss” but who will stay transfixed in the position of “almost embrace.” This concept, Keats adores. The woman will never loose her looks and the suspense between the lovers will stay immortal. Unlike the real world where the human life will end at old age in death, without good looks and after breaking the “glorious” suspense of love. This human life shown against the life of the characters on the Urn helps support the argument that ‘human life is soon over’ though “dreaded death.”
This attitude does change and this is a clear difference between this poem and ‘To Autumn’. Cleantin Brooks in ‘The Well Wrought’ said despite the immortality of the Urn, Keats’ conclusion seems to be that “no matter how beautiful the realm of imagination one cannot free him from actuality and live in the imagination permanently.” This view is clearly linked to “To Autumn” where Keats states that life is too short for daydreaming. Brooks statement appears true to all of Keats’ poems relating to escapism. Keats looks to escape; “Oh for a life of sensation rather than of thought,” but then understands that he cannot because the length of human life wont allow him to.
In the final stanza of ‘To Autumn’ Keats describes the concluding part of the ‘short’ human existence using musical reference; “crickets sing…treble soft… The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft.” The stanza is a sung elegy for the end of autumn and the start of winter, representing death. The three stanzas of the poem, depicting the three stages of life help to show just how short life is. However, whereas Keats is usually negative about death, here the descriptions of death are offset by the musical references. This suggests that he views death more positively. Food riots of the time could be commenting through Keats in this stanza, but Keats is a seen by critics as a-political so possibly not. Either way, this helps the reader to see how Keats characteristically gives visual form to the idea that human life is soon over.