To Autumn, John Keats, 가을에게, 존 키이츠

 

 

To Autumn

John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
      For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
   Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
   Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
   Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
      Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
   Steady thy laden head across a brook;
   Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
      Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
   Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
   And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
   Among the river sallows, borne aloft
      Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
   Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
   The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
      And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.




"To Autumn" is an ode by the English Romantic poet John Keats written in 1819. It is the last of his six odes (which include "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn"), which are some of the most studied and celebrated poems in the English language. The poem praises autumn, describing its abundance, harvest, and transition into winter, and uses intense, sensuous imagery to elevate the fleeting beauty of the moment. "To Autumn" is the last major work that Keats completed before his death in Rome, in 1821, where the 25-year-old succumbed to tuberculosis. 




Summary
Autumn, the season associated with mists and a general sense of calm abundance, you are an intimate friend of the sun, whose heat and light helps all these fruits and vegetables grow. You work closely with the sun to make lots of fruit grow on the vines that wrap around the roof edges of the farmhouses. You work to make so much fruit grow that it weighs down the branches of the mossy apple trees that grow outside the farmhouses. Together, you and the sun make every fruit completely ripe. You make gourds swell and hazel shells grow fat with a sweet nut inside. You make the flowers grow new buds and keep growing more, and when these buds bloom, bees gather the flowers' pollen. Those bees think your warmth will last forever, because summer brought so many flowers and so much pollen that the beehives are now overflowing with honey. 

Who hasn't noticed you, Autumn, in the places where your bounty is kept? Any person who finds themselves wandering about is likely to find you sitting lazily on the floor of the building where grain is stored, and notice your hair lifted by a light wind that separates strands of hair in the same way a harvester might separate the components of a grain of wheat. Anyone might also find you asleep in the fields, on an incompletely harvested crop row, fatigued because of the sleep-inducing aroma of the poppies. In that case, your scythe, which you'd been using to cut the crops, would be cast to the side—it would just be lying there, and therefore the next section of the twisted flowers would be saved from being cut. Sometimes, Autumn, you're like the agricultural laborer who picks up loose cuttings from the fields after the harvest—like this laborer, who has to be observant, you watch the stream with your full, heavy head of fruit and leaves. Other times you patiently watch the machine that juices the apples for cider, noting how the juice and pulp slowly ooze out of the machine over the course of many hours. 

Where is the music that characterizes spring (for example, birdsong)? I repeat, Where is it? Don't think about the spring and its typical music—you have your own music. The background for your music is a scene in which beautiful, shadowed clouds expand in the evening sky and filter the sunlight such that it casts pink upon the fields, which have been harvested. Your music includes gnats, which hum mournfully among the willows that grow along the riverbanks, and which rise and fall according to the strength of the wind. It includes mature, fully grown lambs that make their baah sound from the fence of their hilly enclosure. It includes crickets singing in the bushes and a red-breasted bird that softly whistles from a small garden. And lastly, it includes the growing flock of swallows, which rise and sing together against the darkening sky. 

 

Themes

Beauty and Death
As its title would suggest, “To Autumn” celebrates the bountiful beauty of the fall. In the poem, autumn is a season characterized by a rich abundance of life. The culmination of weeks of summer warmth and sunshine, autumn sees trees overloaded with fruit, beehives dripping with honey, and thick vines trailing up the sides of farmhouses. 

Often, the poem is taken to be no more than an ode to a lovely, life-filled time of year that is often overshadowed by spring and summer. And yet, running underneath this celebration of life is a sense of impending decay. Autumn’s abundance is only possible because it comes at the end of the growing season, and all this well-being exists on the brink of death; as winter approaches, fruit will rot, leaves will fall, and crops will be harvested. This doesn't diminish the loveliness of autumn, however, and instead suggests that beauty shines all the more powerfully in the moments before it will soon be gone. In a way, then, death is just as much a part of autumn's loveliness as is life. 

The speaker envisions autumn as a transitional season that straddles the line between abundance and decay. Tree limbs “bend” under the load of their apples, while gourds “swell” and the flowers are “set budding more, / And still more.” The fruits are at their sweetest and juiciest, ripe “to the core.” In a sense, they are beautiful and delectable precisely because they are on the verge of rot (that is, of dying). 

Indeed, all of these images veer close to destruction: were things to grow without end, perhaps the tree limbs would break under the weight of their fruit, the gourds would burst, and the bees would drown in "their clammy cells" (i.e., their over-filled hives). More life would transform this beauty into something grotesque—which perhaps is why the speaker appreciates autumn not as a season of growth, but rather one of impending death and reaping. 

The second stanza takes up this idea by focusing on the harvest, describing the “winnowing wind,” the “half-reap’d furrow,” and the harvester’s “hook.” Each of these images depicts the separation and cutting associated with farming, especially the “hook,” or scythe; each also clearly evokes death. 

But the speaker softens these images, lending all this death a kind of pleasure. The “winnowing wind” results in “hair soft-lifted”; the personified autumn lies “sound asleep” on the “half-reap’d furrow”; and the scythe does not cut, but “Spares the next swath.” Later, autumn loiters drowsily in the fields, gazing into the brook and the “last oozings” of the cider press. Like the swollen fruit from stanza 1, these end-of-autumn images bulge forth with sensuous beauty that combines both life and decay. 

The poem ultimately presents death as a sort peaceful rest at the end of frenzied activity. To this end, the speaker depicts the day's transition into night (and the broader seasonal transition into winter) as a process similar to falling asleep. First comes the onset of evening, as “barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day.” Like autumn and its fruits, the day is dying—but softly. This process has the beautiful quality of a flower that slowly blooms and wilts. Next, the dying sunlight “touch[es] the stubble-plains with rosy hue.” It makes the freshly mowed plains, an image of death, appear gentle and beautiful.  

Meanwhile, a chorus of animals elegizes the end of autumn. Knowing death is on the horizon, the speaker interprets the gnats’ hum as “wailful” and mournful. The speaker also recognizes beauty in the singing crickets and the robin who whistles “with treble soft.” Finally, the swallows gather and sing against the void of the darkening sky, which will soon pummel the land with harsh weather. All this music, which might appear any time of year, takes on a special beauty in the gathering shadow of death.  


Embracing the Present
In “To Autumn,” the speaker stays rooted in the colorful world of the moment. The speaker urges personified autumn not to think about “the songs of spring,” but rather to appreciate that “thou hast thy music too.” That is, the speaker asks both autumn and the reader to focus exclusively on the here and now. Yet even while focusing on autumnal imagery, the speaker can’t help but be reminded of what comes before and after this particular season. As such, the poem suggests that embracing the present somewhat paradoxically leads to a deep appreciation of the past and future as well. 

The poem’s first lines contain bending apple trees, swelling gourds, ripe fruit, and beehives overflowing with honey. These images of teeming life emphasize that this poem is about the bounty of autumn. This bounty results from autumn’s close relationship with the “maturing sun, / Conspiring with him to load and bless.” While appreciating this specific point in time, then, the poem also recognizes that autumn only appears as the end of a long process of growth and ripening. 

Indeed, focusing on the fruits of the present leads to an obvious question: where did all this come from? To answer it, the poem must acknowledge autumn’s precursor: summer. For instance, the bees see autumn as a lovely extension of summer—“they think warm days will never cease / For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.” In other words, the bees recall the summer that enabled their hives to thrive. 

On the one hand, then, the poem urges readers to simply stop and take in the beauty of this particular moment. At the same time, the poem subtly implies that to do so properly requires an appreciation of everything that led to this moment—as well as an appreciation of what will come next.  

To that end, the poem presents autumn as a sort of mixture of winter and spring by highlighting features shared among the seasons. First off, both autumn and spring are full of noise and diverse life. The bleating lambs, whistling robin, and twittering swallows of the third stanza might just as well appear in a description of a spring morning, as might the “river sallows” (or willows), “Hedge,” and “garden.”  

At the same time, these images hint at the impending winter and its associated forms of death. The lambs, for example are “full-grown,” and therefore ready for slaughter. The swallows, which would perish in the cold, are gathering to migrate south. Thus, although autumn is distinct from these other seasons, it contains hints of each of them in its characteristic imagery. The poem conveys autumn’s depth without explicitly referring to the other seasons. Instead, it focuses on “thy music”—autumn’s music. At the same time that it distinguishes autumn, this lively, mournful music joins it with the past and future. 





가을에게 　

 

안개와 무르익은 결실의 계절,
성숙시키는 태양의 절친한 친구여.
태양과 공모하여 초가집 처마 둘레에 덩굴진
포도나무에 열매를 지우고 축복하고,
이끼 낀 시골집 나무들을 사과들로 휘어지게 하고
온갖 열매를 속속들이  익게 하고,
박을 부풀게 하고, 개암 껍질을
달콤한 인으로 살찌우게 하고, 늦게 피는 꽃들을
벌들을 위해 더욱더 피게 하는,
마침내 꿀벌들이 따뜻한 날들이 결코 끝나지 않으리라 생각하고,
여름이 끈적끈적한 벌집들을 넘치게 하였기에.

누가 너의 수확물 속에서 너를 자주 보지 못했으랴?
가끔 집 밖에서 찾는 사람은 누구나 찾아내리라
곡물창고 바닥에 무심하게 앉아
키질하는 바람에 머리칼을 부드러이 나부끼는 너를.
혹은 네 낫이 다음 벨 줄과 온갖 뒤꼬인 꽃들을
아껴 놔두는 동안 양귀비의 향연에 취하여
반쯤 벤 이랑에 깊이 잠든 너를.
그리고 이따금 이삭 줍는 사람처럼 너는
짐을 인 머리를 개울 너머로 한결같이 향하고 있구나.
혹은 사이다 압착기 곁에서 참을성 있는 모습으로
몇 시간이고 마지막 방울을 지켜보누나.

어디에 봄의 노래는 있는가? 그렇다, 어디에 있는가?
봄의 노래를 생각지 말라, 네게도 음악은 있으니-
줄무늬 구름들이 조용히 사라져 가는 낮을 붉게 물들이고
그루터기 들판에 장미의 색깔로 칠하는 동안.
그때 구슬픈 합창으로 작은 각다귀들이 슬피 지저귄다.
강가의 버드나무들 사이에서, 가벼운 바람이
일거나 잘 때 같이 높게 또는 낮게 불며.
그리고 다 자란 양들이 언덕 언저리에서 요란히 매애매애 울고,
여치들은 노래한다. 이제 또한 부드러운 고음으로
방울새가 채소밭에서 휘파람 불고
모여든 제비들은 하늘에서 지저귄다.





"To Autumn"은 키츠가 24세 때에 1819년 9월 19일에 쓴 시로 지금까지 출판된 영시집에 가장 자주 실릴 정도로 널리 알려지고 꾸준히 사랑받는 가을 영시이다.

 

이 시는 자연의 모든 생물이 원숙의 경지가 최고에 달한 초가을을 칭송하며, 가을을 인격화해서 활발하게 다양한 일을 하는 사람/도구로 그려내고 있다.

시의 첫 연에서 가을은 친절한 태양의 동조자로 각종 과일과 채소를 속까지 완전하게 풍성하게 무르익게 한다고 묘사한다.

 

두번째 연에서는 가을을 곡간에 있는 탈곡기로, 밀밭에서 열심히 수확을 하다가 잠시 쉬는 수확기로, 햇곡식알을 주워서 머리에 무겁게 이고 개울을 건너는 이로, 마지막으로 사이더 제조기로 다양하게 묘사하고 있다.

세번째이자 마지막 연에서는 가을을 음악가로 등장하며, 그 가을 음악가는 작은 벌레의 합창, 통통하게 잘 튼실한 양들,로빈새, 제비, 귀뚜라미소리로 그득한 봄의 음악만큼 아름답고 기분좋은 음악을 제공한다고 칭송을 한다.

키츠는 첫 연에서 무르익은 포도와 사과, 그리고 풍만해지는 박과 개암나무 열매, 만발한 꽃들 등 눈으로 감지한 가을의 정경에 중점을 두었다.

두번째 연에서는 탈곡, 수확, 이삭줍기, 사이더 제조처럼 가을절기의 해야 하는 작업들에 치중하고, 마지막 연에서는 벌레들, 동물, 새들이 만드는 가을의 소리에 초점을 맞추었다.

Ode(송시)라고도 불리는데, 키츠 자신은 송시라고 하지 않았다. 하지만 시의 구조와 운율(rhyme)은 키츠가 1819년 봄에 쓴 송시와 비슷하며, 풍요하고 아름다운 가을의 이미지와 소리의 향연을 노래한 걸작 영시이다.