To Bend with Apples

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless Conspiring Working together; literally, to conspire is “to breathe together” (OED)

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; thatch-eves Thatch-eaves, the edge of thatched roofs

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.-first stanza, To Autumn (John Keats)

I cannot help it (the Keats business). It's all Tina at the English Muse's fault because she mentioned yesterday's NYTimes Sunday travel section. I was perhaps unnaturally happy yesterday morning when I saw the Protestant Cemetery mentioned in a 36 Hours in Rome bit. But there you are. More To Autumn posts. Last night I was tossing about & thinking about Keats & his politics. His horror at the gap between rich & poor (about which he knew quite a lot first-hand). He would be agonized by today's lack of progress. So I'll leave it there & just pick up stanza by stanza. (I'm sort of kidding.) Someone else preoccupied today with autumn & poetry today is secret, fragile skies. Lovely photograph, too. (photograph via bohemea tumblr & on Julie's blog here)

PS: I've been fussing about to get the poem layout properly & Blogger is being defiant. So in it goes, unformatted. I'll try again later. Update - I hit publish on this yesterday with the wrong time on it & the feed stuck. So if you think, I saw that yesterday. Yes, you did. It's me, not you.