Further to Paul Brown’s Weatherwatch (19 September) and Austen Lynch’s letter (20 September), I believe that Keats’s To Autumn can be read as a weather poem. The late summer / early autumn of 1819 had been glorious after three years – including the year “without a summer” – of very dismal weather and lost harvests.
Keats, in a letter to his sister Frances in August had written of “The delightful Weather we have had for two Months”. He had had “two months by the seaside” – Margate – and his “greatest regret [was] I have not been well enough to bathe”.
A few weeks later he wrote to his friend JH Reynolds: “How beautiful the season is now - How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather – Dian skies – I never lik’d stubble fields so much as now … Somehow a stubble plain looks warm – in the same way some pictures look warm – this struck me so much in my Sunday’s walk that I composed upon it.”
However, typical of British weather, this wasn’t to last; back in London in October he had to withstand some early snow.
F Goodman
London
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