Imagery In To Autumn By Keats

Keats “To Autumn” creates imagery through the use of sounds and alliteration in order to establish a soundscape that reflects and compliments the words fabricating the images. In this sense, the simultaneous and complementary use of a soundscape in conjunction with the imagined images produced by the literal meaning of the words utilizes sight and sound to create a more engaging experience; an example of this is the use of s sounds and m sounds that lead the reader to create the sounds of bees buzzing and humming, “And still more, later flowers for the bees, / Until they think warm days will never cease, / For summer has o’er-brimmed their clammy cells,” further enhancing the reader’s immersion through the use of soundscape (9-11). Ultimately, …show more content…
He doesn’t need to use the word yellow to invoke and project the color into the reader’s mind, instead, he uses the appearance of words similar to yellow such as “mellow” in, “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.” By making the reader see “mellow,” which mirrors the word structure of yellow, Keats alludes to the color(s) the line needs to be; essentially Keats is using a paint by numbers system in which the poem is the picture in black and white, the words are the colors, and it’s up to the reader to fill in each section with the corresponding color. Moreover, Keats uses this technique again near the end of the poem, “And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep,” and again, “Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies,” (19,29). Here, he uses the word “light” and “gleaner” which closely resemble the structure of the words green[er] and white. Breaking his own rule three times he says, “hazel,” “rosy,” and “The red-breast whistles.” Other than these exceptions, there are absolutely no other color words in the entirety of the poem; this is especially interesting because Autumn is the time of year when the world is oversaturated with …show more content…
Similarly, the same effect is attained in, “To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,” (5). Keats gives an image of moss which is a specific green color, then re-enforces the image with the long e sound from “trees” which mimics green. Additionally, this is done more frequently using fragments and alliteration-- the soft el sound of yellow like “clammy cells” (referring to a beehive’s cells), the hard e sound of green like “thatch-eves,” and the hard r of red like the alliteration used in, “Among the river sallows, borne aloft,” are the most common and applicable. By using fragments rather than words that look and sound the same as colors, the word bank of available words becomes larger and more of a versatile tool rather than a constraint of the language able to be