News & Diary - 19.09.2025
Keats: To Autumn
John Keats arrived in Winchester in August 1819 and stayed in the city for just under two months. During this time, his health was deteriorating, but his writing was prolific and he walked for an hour a day before dinner.
He described his daily walk in a letter: “I go out at the back gate […] pass the beautiful front of the Cathedral […]. Then I pass through one of the old city gates and then you are in one College-Street through which I pass and at the end thereof crossing some meadows and at last a country alley of gardens I arrive, that is, my worship arrives at the foundation of St Cross, […] then I pass across St Cross meadows till you come to the most beautifully clear river.”
On 22 September 1819, Keats also wrote of the beauty of the early Autumn season in Winchester and how it inspired To Autumn: “How beautiful the season is now – How fine the air. […] this struck me so much in my Sunday’s walk that I composed upon it.”
TO AUTUMN
John Keats, 19 September 1819
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.
The Fellows’ Library at Winchester College includes a first edition of To Autumn, published in Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St.Agnes and Other Poems (1820). This was Keats’ third and final volume of poetry, containing some of his greatest works including his six famous odes.
Winchester College’s collections have many other items relating to Winchester at the time of Keats’ visit. These include early guidebooks to the city and many watercolour views by two local artists: George Sidney Shepherd (1784-1862) and Richard Baigent (1799-1881). The watercolour featured at the top of this blog is Baigent’s watercolour of St Cross from the water meadows, dated 1840.
More broadly, the holdings of the Fellows’ Library are of considerable importance for understanding the development of literary Romanticism.
