Summary
In the first stanza of “Autumn,” the speaker begins describing the fall landscape in a fairly objective manner. Although there is no wind, the “thistledown,” or thistle seeds (akin to dandelion seeds), fly through the air. Some rest on the grass, while others float up the hill. A hot spring boils up through stones to emerge to the surface. The poet compares the steaming water to the contents of a boiling pot.
In the second stanza, the poem emphasizes the harshness of the autumnal landscape. The ground appears dry and cracked, like the surface of an overbaked loaf of bread. The “greensward,” or grass-covered ground, is all dried up, and the grass is dead. The “fallow fields,” or fields left without crops to allow the soil to recover, “glitter like water,” but really they are as dry as everything else. Cobwebs, or gossamers, blow between the weeds.
Yet in the third stanza, the poem finds the beauty of autumn. The hilltops and the rivers shine bright in the sunlight. The sun heats the ground and fills the air with warm light like liquid gold. In this shining landscape, the narrator concludes that anyone could see “Eternity.”
Analysis
In “Autumn,” John Clare presents a multi-faceted exploration of the fall landscape, at once emphasizing the everyday nature of the end of summer, the harshness and melancholy of the season, and its otherworldly beauty.
The first stanza employs the most direct and emotionally distant perspective. The narrator notes that the thistledown, or the fluffy seeds of the thistles, are flying despite a lack of wind. The line makes an objective observation rather than celebrating the appearance of the cottony down filling the air. Similarly, when it comes to a boiling hot-spring, the poem employs everyday metaphor to tone down the unusual spring. Clare compares it to “a pot,” situating it alongside a completely everyday part of country life. The repetition of hard consonants in “boils,” “bubbles,” “pot,” and “red-hot” makes the lines feel playful, like a child’s rhyme.
The first stanza’s simplicity makes us expect a whimsical poem about the sites of autumn, one that closely attends to the landscape but is not especially interested in the emotional impact of that landscape. The second line is a bit of an exception. The line describes the movement of the flying thistledown, “on the green grass now lying, now mounting the hill.” Like the previous line, this description does not give us a vivid image of how the thistledown looks. However, it does blur the lines between the thistledown and the narrator. The verbs “lying” and “mounting” are more suggestive of a person’s movement than the movement of the thistledown, and it even makes sense to read the narrator as the subject here, as he lies down in the grass to watch the thistledown and then climbs up to see the spring. The ambiguity stresses that despite the seemingly objective description of the autumnal landscape, and the lack of a singular first-person perspective in the poem, it is impossible to completely separate the landscape from the one seeing it.
The first stanza also introduces several elements which appear later in the poem. The heat of the spring, in the first stanza merely a curious attribute of the landscape, foreshadows the emphasis on heat at the end of the poem. Similarly, the flying thistledown parallels the gossamers, or cobwebs, that fly between the weeds at the end of the second stanza. However, Clare’s description of the gossamers is far more unusual and evocative. The verb “twitter” usually conveys the bright, rapid calls of birds. Here, Clare uses it to describe movement rather than sound, to stress the rapid, unpredictable flight of the gossamers. The verb “flung” instills energy and drama in the scene, in contrast to the restrained “lying” and “mounting” in the previous stanza.
Oddly, this active and vivid image follows a stanza principally concerned with the melancholy of the autumnal landscape. In the first line, Clare compares the ground to an overbaked loaf of bread. The simile recalls the comparison between a hot spring and a boiling pot in the previous stanza, because it once again compares the landscape to the familiar objects of a country kitchen. However, rather than focusing a single unusual feature of the natural world, here the poem’s perspective zooms out to describe the wide ground, and finds it a victim of the harshness of the dry end of summer.
The harshness of that image extends to the next line, where Clare writes, “the greensward all wracked is, bents dried up and dead.” The verb “wracked” means “ruined” or “destroyed.” Although the grass will return in the spring, Clare describes it as “dead,” lending an air of tragedy and finality to the autumnal countryside. The reference to empty “fallow fields” in the third line of the second stanza further reinforces the melancholy mood, along with the cobwebs and the weeds.
The second stanza thus moves beyond the appearance of the autumn to emphasize the impact of the end of summer on the landscape itself. The hard fields look like glittering expanses of water, but in reality the ground is dried up, the fields of grass “dried up and dead.” Poets often describe autumn as a melancholy season, but Clare distinguishes himself by stressing not the narrator’s sadness at the end of summer, but rather the difficult transformation of the landscape itself as the days get colder, shorter, and drier.
In the first two stanzas, then, Clare employs the attitudes and awareness of a country poet to paint a compelling picture of the autumnal landscape. He draws on ordinary things, like the boiling pot and the overbaked bread, to incorporate the natural world into the narrator’s everyday experiences. However, he also proves himself remarkably attentive to the material reality of the autumn. Rather than merely emphasizing what the landscape looks like to the narrator, the poem stresses what the change of seasons does to the ground and the grass.
In the third and final stanza, the poem shifts, finding a glimpse of “Eternity” in this everyday material world. We saw the power of the light in the previous stanza, where the sunlight made the dry and empty fields glitter like water. There, the effect seemed merely like an illusion, but here the light becomes all we can see. Clare compares the hilltops to “hot iron.” It’s another comparison rooted in the countryside—here, we might imagine the smelter’s workshop—but it's no longer domestic, and the image of hot iron glittering in the sun also suggests associations with warfare. Clare doesn’t develop that association, so we’re probably not supposed to think about violence specifically here, but we do shift towards a more “epic” sense of the world.
After that simile, Clare switches to metaphor. No longer using the comparison words “like” or “as,” he writes that the rivers “burn to gold as they run” and “liquid gold is the air.” These metaphors more fully abandon the everyday reference points Clare employs earlier in the poem. They also make the gold of the light feel more real than a mere comparison would be.
In this final stanza, Clare also employs a first-person perspective for the only time in the poem, writing “the river’s we’re eying.” The plural pronoun doesn’t refer to a particular group of people, but rather a general, featureless onlooker, akin to the word “one” in sentences like “one goes to the store.” Still, the reference tells us about the place of the human in this poem. As we noted at the beginning of this analysis section, the first few lines of the poem blurred the lines between the thistledown and the human observer. Here, the verb “eying” emphasizes the active side of looking, with “eying” being a direct action the people do to the rivers. The sunlight exists in relationship to the rivers and the human observer: only when all three are present do the rivers miraculously turn to gold.
The final line brings those themes home. “Eternity” connotes the sublime, or an experience on a scale that expands beyond the bounds of human perception. There are some religious overtones—the Christian God is often associated with the eternal—but that religion is pretty abstract; rather than God as a specific being, the divine here is more the presence of something that survives beyond the mortality of the world. “Autumn” situates the impossibly large experience of divinity in the ordinary world of pots and pans, bread and ovens. It stresses that autumn is a time of dry ground and dead grass. Yet the sublime is latent within that landscape for whoever takes the time to look. The poem thus conveys that one need not abandon the ordinary world to experience awe and eternity; rather, the magic of the countryside is that there, the ordinary and the sublime coexist.
