[Daily Poetry Readings #176_ To Autumn by John Keats read by Dr Iain McGilchrist]-[fR4ukZw1K9

With luck this may turn out to be a seasonal poem, It keeps his famous ode to autumn. 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 eaves run, To bend with apples the mossy cottage trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core, To swell the gourd and plump the haze or 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'erbrimmed 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-reaped furrow sound asleep, Drowsed 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 cider-press, with patient look, Thou watch'st the last oozings hour by hour. 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, born aloft or sinking As the light wind lives or dies, And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly-borne, Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft, And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.