Across centuries and continents, poets have turned to autumn as a mirror of human experience: a time when beauty and decay, fullness and farewell, coexist. From Shakespeare’s trembling sonnets to ...

For centuries, poets have turned to autumn as a mirror for the human condition, a season oscillating between abundance and decline, beauty and loss. In earlier traditions, from Shakespeare to Keats, ...

But quick on Shakespeare’s heels comes “To Autumn,” the last of the astonishing run of odes John Keats (1795–1821) wrote in 1819. Keats has appeared twice this year in the Sun’s Poem of the Day ...

The fall pond cheerless, the water clear, I fish from a small boat drifting here. Tiny blue ripples roll through the mist, The wind, the leaves fly past with the year. From a deep blue sky hang rows ...

Keats’s ode to autumn brims over with rich, ripe imagery - as fresh today as when it was composed in September 1819, almost two centuries ago.

The day began at 5.45am with a reading of Edward Thomas’s poem in Farming Today. Thomas started writing poetry shortly before he became a soldier in the First World War. He wrote Digging on 4th April ...