My Opinion About A.A.Milne's "A Word for Autumn"

For centuries, seasons have been understood to stand for the same set of meanings. Seasons are easily understood by the reader, and are easy for the writer to use; as Foster states, “Seasons can work magic on us, and writers can work magic with seasons” (Foster 192). The different seasons are a huge part of our lives; we live through each one every year, and we know how each of them impacts our lives. This closeness between people and nature allows us to be greatly impacted by the use of seasons in literature. In addition, Foster lays out the basic meanings of each season for us: autumn is harvest, decline, tiredness; winter is anger, hatred, cold, old age; summer is passion, love, happiness, beauty; and spring is childhood and youth. On the

Jeremy Karr Karr 1 Mrs. Overbeck AP Literature & Composition November 29th, 2014 “To Autumn” Explication John Keats’ “To Autumn” uses the beauty, and abundance in the season of autumn in his ode to create a sense of transformation and rebirth. The poem begins with talks of autumn’s abundance and ripeness of fruit along with the beauty of autumn’s ability to begin the process of rebirth for plants, showing autumn’s simplicity and beauty. However, the speaker begins to talk as if autumn is a woman, one that wants to enjoy the harvest she has worked for during her life, finally using the beauties or songs of autumn that come out as the day ends to suggest that the speaker would rather enjoy what autumn has to offer in his final moments.

Summer brings a sense of joy with its bright days. In Ray Bradbury's excerpt from his novel "Dandelion Wind". Bradbury utilizes rhetorical devices throughout the excerpt to provide a mysterious atmosphere to his novel.

It was in the clove of seasons, summer was dead but autumn had not yet

“...I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.” p. 4

The poems “Spring and Fall” by Gerard Hopkins and “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden both represent a major point in life. In “Spring and Fall” a young girl begins to notice death and feel the since of mortality. While in “Those Winter Sundays” a young boy does not realize his father’s love until he is grown up. Both Poems show how as a child grows up he will look a life differently.

In Second April Millay, uses nature’s beauty through her description of the seasons, the changing of the colors of leaves, city trees versus country trees, even animals going about their daily duties; accentuating the existence of death and human natures divergent to it. Through her use of free verse and passionate sonnets, Millay asserts the value of poetic inspirations in a harsh world. Her use of metaphors is a clear indication of the underlying reality concerning death and it’s inevitable consequence. Ultimately, Millay achieves a level of melancholy and disillusionment throughout Second April’s collection of poetry.

“From the sphere of my own experience I can bring to my recollection three persons of no every-day powers and acquirements, who had read the poems of others with more and more unallayed pleasure, and had thought more highly of their authors, as poets; who yet have confessed to me, that from no modern work had so many passages started up anew in their minds at different times, and as different occasions had awakened a meditative mood.” (2) (paragraph 31).

Misty dew covers the entire surface of the field. The yellowing corn stalks stand erect and proud until my grandpas tractor comes to end their growth. Autumn slowly weaves its way in and leaves a stain of brilliant color in its wake. Not everyone enjoys such colors, but when you take a second to step outside your doorstep, and look at all the wonders that surround you, you’d be surprised at how marvelous the world can truly be. To me, Autumn is a time for relishing in the colors. Soaking in the oranges and reds while sitting by a warm fire. It’s a time for remembering that everything does end, but it does not have to end in the dreadful way we think it will. Autumn is a time for the closeness of others to keep out the chill of the morning and the starry-eyed darkness of the night.

By analysing the structure (shift from external to internal landscape), language (tenses, pronoun), and presentation of the experience of seeing the daffodils, I seek to demonstrate that feelings of the sublime are only evoked when the narrator’s imagination participates in the scene he has internalized in his memory. While the first three stanzas exemplify a merely physical stimulus and response mechanism to nature, the last stanza shows how active poetic imagination enables man to recreate and amplify emotions encountered, thus resulting in feelings of the sublime. Why does the observer not recognise the ‘wealth’ the scene brings in that moment? How does poetic imagination connect the physical eye and the inner eye to allow for sublime, transcendental experience? Hess argues that the poem “depend[s] for [its] power on the narrator’s ability to fix a single, discrete, visually defined moment of experience in his mind, to which he can later return in acts of private memory and imagination” (298). An example of the recapturing of emotions is seen where “gay” (I. 15) is recaptured as “pleasure” (I. 23) at the end. Active imagination, which draws inspiration from memory of the initial encounter, is now a permanent possession that

The fleeting changes that often accompany seasonal transition are especially exasperated in a child’s mind, most notably when the cool crisp winds of fall signal the summer’s end approaching. The lazy routine I had adopted over several months spent frolicking in the cool blue chlorine soaked waters of my family’s bungalow colony pool gave way to changes far beyond the weather and textbooks. As the surrounding foliage changed in anticipation of colder months, so did my family. My mother’s stomach grew larger as she approached the final days of her pregnancy and in the closing hours of my eight’ summer my mother gently awoke me from the uncomfortable sleep of a long car ride to inform of a wonderful surprise. No longer would we be returning

Overall, summer is just a wonderful season with so much to offer. The best thing about this time of the year is that everyone is so happy, whereas, compared to the winter, everyone is

According to Bracher, this loading and overloading makes Autumn quite the ambivalent figure, traditionally standing for death, but being attributed to fulfilment in the poem. Autumn’s actions unite both meanings within them, abundance and ripening symbolizing death and decay – through the anxiety of bursting and rotting –, as well as fulfilment (Bracher 1990, 646

At one time or another, every person has experienced the beauty of summer. In this time of the year, nature is full of life, the weather is at its finest, and the paramount joys of life can be experienced to their fullest. Then the fall comes, the trees turn lovely shades of red and yellow, and the wind offers a nice chill breeze for relief. Unfortunately, seasons change and the beauty that people once experienced vanishes. People focusing only on the material and petty aspects of life, rather than the beauty around them, will let life pass them, missing out on the true wonders of the world. In his poem “To Autumn,” John Keats utilizes imagery to express the importance of indulging in the beauties of nature, while alive, because humans are mortal beings bound by the limits of time.