FOUR Seasons fill the measure of the year;

There are four seasons in the mind of man:

He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear

Takes in all beauty with an easy span:

He has his Summer, when luxuriously

Spring’s honey’d cud of youthful thought he loves

To ruminate, and by such dreaming high

Is nearest unto heaven: quiet coves

His soul has in its Autumn, when his wings

He furleth close; contented so to look

On mists in idleness—to let fair things

Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook.

He has his Winter too of pale misfeature,

Or else he would forego his mortal nature.
The Human Seasons, 1820[1]

Vendler also looks at how Keats’ odes are built one upon the other, so that the imagery in an early one appears, slightly changed, in later ones, but also how, for instance, language related to the harvest and seasons occur in poetry leading up to To Autumn (10).

A portrait of John Keats painted by John Severn in 1819 (a wood print-styled version of which is on the cover of my copy of “The Selected Poetry of John Keats.”

(Many representations seem to portray Keats as sitting at a table leaning his chin on the heel of his hand. My own proclivity notwithstanding, I do wonder why nearly half of the common paintings circulated contain this same posture. Is it to strengthen the image of Keats as a Romantic, wistfully gazing out of a window at the nature outside, a bird or the changing of the seasons? Or is the artists’ simplified view of Keats, that they did not see him as much more than a Romantic poet, they couldn’t see him as doing more than that? Or maybe he was a daydreamer, and this was exactly how they often encountered him when dropping by for a visit.)

[1] From the main page of John-Keats.com. On this main page there are also links to a Keats Advent Calendar and many pictures of Keats Hampstead Home, currently unavailable because of an error with their forum.