1Four seasons fill the measure of the year;
2 There are four seasons in the mind of man:
3He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear
4 Takes in all beauty with an easy span:
5He has his Summer, when luxuriously
6 Spring's honied cud of youthful thought he loves
7To ruminate, and by such dreaming nigh
8 His nearest unto heaven: quiet coves
9His soul has in its Autumn, when his wings
10 He furleth close; contented so to look
11On mists in idleness—to let fair things
12 Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook.
13He has his Winter too of pale misfeature,
14Or else he would forget his mortal nature.
"The Human Seasons" is English Romantic poet John Keats's reflection on the shape of a human life. Like each year, this poem suggests, each life has four seasons: the spring of childhood, the summer of youth, the autumn of middle age, and the winter of old age. In each of these seasons, the developing mind is molded by the world's beauty—all except for elderly winter, whose sufferings bring people to a confrontation with their "mortal nature," their mortality. To live is thus to be shaped by beauty and loss in turn. Keats composed this poem when he was visiting Teignmouth (in the southwest of England) in 1818. It was first published (and likely given its title) by Leigh Hunt, one of Keats's early mentors, in the 1819 edition of the Literary Pocket-Book.
The year is measured out into four seasons. The human mind has four seasons, too. People have an energetic springtime, when their fresh imaginations easily stretch to take in beauty. They have a summertime, when they love to slowly chew over delicious thoughts, and in doing so come almost as close to heaven as they can. In its autumn, the human soul withdraws to quiet, sheltered places; it folds up its wings, and is happy to idly watch the mists rolling by—to allow beautiful things to pass, hardly noticing them, the way one might watch the stream that runs outside one's front door. People have a winter, too, a time of colorless disfigurement; if they didn't, they would forget that they're fated to die.
“The Human Seasons” imagines the growth of the “mind of man” (that is, the human mind) as the seasons of a year. “There are four seasons in the mind of man,” Keats observes: the spring of childhood, the summer of youth, the autumn of middle age, and the winter of old age. Over the course of a person's life, then, their mind follows the same rhythm that a year does: it moves from the easy contemplation of springy beauty to a harrowing reckoning with wintery death and decay. For people to earn a fully developed mind, this poem suggests, they must learn from all these seasons, letting themselves be shaped by both beauty and loss.
This process of learning starts out gently. Keats begins the poem by imagining humanity’s “Spring”: childhood, when a person can look out at the world with a “fancy clear,” a sparkling-clean imagination. With such a blank slate of “fancy” on board, people are able to “take[] in all beauty with an easy span.” The first stage of growth, in other words, is to simply absorb the world’s beauty and let it work on one’s imagination.
The “Summer” of young adulthood, meanwhile, requires a little more effort from a mind—but that effort is pretty delicious. Summer’s work is to “ruminate” the “cud of youthful thought” one gathers in spring: that is, to chew over all the beauties one absorbed as a child, transforming them into nourishing dreams, just as a cow transforms grass into milk. If the first season of life is all about soaking beauty up, the second is about making something of that beauty.
The mind’s “Autumn” and "Winter" are different matters. In the autumn of middle age, people must step back. Rather than chewing life with gusto, they must learn to watch the world's beauties "pass by unheeded," to stop grappling with existence and instead quietly accept it. This prepares them for life's grim final stage: the winter of old age, when "pale misfeature" (wan, colorless disfigurement) is the best they can expect.
This progress from delight to withdrawal to suffering might paint an upsetting picture of human life. But in fact, the poem hints, facing loss and suffering is as urgently important as delighting in beauty. If people didn't have to face their own metaphorical winter, they might "forget [their] mortal nature," Keats concludes. In other words, a complete and truthful understanding of life involves an encounter with all its seasons—and with the fact that the "measure" of the human "year" has an end.
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:
“The Human Seasons” begins by laying out a neat conceit—an extended metaphor that will shape the whole poem. “Four seasons fill the measure of the year,” the speaker begins. Likewise, “there are four seasons in the mind of man.” The year and the mind, the repetition suggests, run parallel to each other: both develop over four similar stages.
The idea that human life has seasons just as the year does is a very old metaphor—readers have probably heard someone describe childhood as the “springtime of life” or middle age as the “autumn years.” In this sonnet, however, John Keats will do something unusual with this familiar idea. He’s interested, not just in the way that people grow from childhood to old age, but in how their minds grow.
The nature of a mind’s growth starts to reveal itself in lines 3-4, where the speaker describes childhood, life’s “Spring.” This is a “lusty” (or vigorous and enthusiastic) time during which children’s minds absorb their surroundings with an “easy span” (that is, an effortless ability to reach out and take things in). They encounter the world with “fancy clear”: with imaginations that are as yet spotlessly clean, ready to be filled up with “all beauty.”
That line stresses an idea that comes up often in Keats's work: that beauty has something to teach us. (This, after all, is the poet who famously wrote, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—though critics have argued for years about precisely what that might mean.) Childhood’s special power is to take in "all beauty" without even trying, to simply be open to what the world has to offer. The beauty that children's minds so readily absorb, this poem will suggest, shapes the rest of their lives.
Keats will explore the growth of the human mind in an English sonnet. That means that this poem:
Glancing at that rhyme scheme, readers might already be able to guess how the poem’s shape will reflect its themes: four seasons, four life stages, and a four-part poetic form.
Keats’s choice of the English sonnet form for this particular subject also shows his deep devotion to Shakespeare, whose sonnets are the best-known in the English language (so much so that this form is sometimes called the Shakespearean sonnet). It’s hard to write a sonnet about the stages of life without calling Shakespeare to mind—for instance, the famous “seven ages of man” speech from As You Like It or the autumnal melancholy of Sonnet 73.
He has his Summer, when luxuriously
Spring's honied cud of youthful thought he loves
To ruminate, and by such dreaming nigh
His nearest unto heaven:
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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 forget his mortal nature.
“The Human Seasons” is built around a well-worn poetic conceit: an extended metaphor in which the seasons represent the stages of human life. Keats doesn’t stray from the traditional shape of this metaphor here. Spring is childhood, summer is youth, autumn is middle age, and winter is old age, just as they have been in many, many poems before and since.
However, this poem wears these metaphors pretty lightly, and it uses them in a novel way. Rather than connecting the human body to the seasons—for instance, by depicting children as spring flowers or elderly people as leafless trees—Keats explores the growth of the mind, relating the seasons to different ways of perceiving and thinking:
The metaphor suggests that something about the way the seasons feel relates to the way people experience the seasons of their lives. Everyone might feel a little like a child again when exposed to the fresh, hopeful beauties of spring—and everyone might feel a little reflective and withdrawn when grey autumn rolls around.
It’s only in winter that Keats draws a strong connection between the physical qualities of the season and the life stage it represents. Winter, here, is marked by “pale misfeature”—that is, colorless disfigurement. The words call up two simultaneous images: the pale, withered face of a very old person, and the way a winter landscape looks drained and distorted, all its softening foliage blasted away by the cold.
It makes sense that Keats would depict an especially physical reckoning in this final stage of the extended metaphor. Facing the fact that the body won’t endure forever is exactly what life’s "Winter" is about.
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That is, measure out the year between them.
"The Human Seasons" is an English sonnet. That means that it follows this traditional shape:
This is a form indelibly associated with Shakespeare, and it makes sense that Keats chooses it here: he's riffing on some very Shakespearean themes about the ages of humankind and the relation of the mind and body to the seasons. (Shakespeare was Keats's great hero: Keats called Shakespeare his "presidor," his guardian literary spirit.)
This sonnet form also makes a lot of sense considering Keats's subject matter. The English sonnet breaks down into four parts: three quatrains and a closing couplet. Just as "four seasons fill the measure of the year," four stanzas fill the measure of the English sonnet! Keats thus hints that human life has a poetic structure as well as a seasonal one.
Like many sonnets, this poem uses a volta (Italian for "turn"), a sudden change in tone or direction. Here, that volta appears with the final couplet. The three quatrains that make up the first part of the poem all feel either joyful or gentle: there's the thrill of spring, the "luxurious[]" pleasure of summer, the peaceful "content[ment]" of autumn. The tone changes dramatically when winter comes along. This season of life, by contrast, is marked only by "pale misfeature"—faded disfigurement.
"The Human Seasons" is written in the classic meter of the sonnet: iambic pentameter. That means it uses lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here's how that sounds in line 1:
Four sea- | sons fill | the mea- | sure of | the year
Keats uses this traditional rhythm in a pretty subtle way here, so the poem sounds quiet and reflective. Some of his stressed syllables are very soft indeed. For instance, take line 11:
On mists | in i- | dleness—| to let | fair things
The stress on the "-ness" of "idleness" is barely there, fading away—a suitable effect for a line describing the gentle mists of life's autumn.
In the couplet at the end of the poem, Keats also introduces a pair of what are known as feminine endings: extra unstressed syllables on the ends of lines, like so:
He has | his Win- | ter too | of pale | misfeature,
Or else | he would | forget | his mor- | tal nature.
These endings give the poem's darker closing lines a hushed, falling-away sound that, again, matches what Keats describes. The lines descend into that last unstressed syllable as humanity descends into wintery decay.
"The Human Seasons" uses the traditional rhyme scheme of the English sonnet. The pattern runs like this:
ABAB CDCD EFEF GG
This pattern breaks the poem down into four parts: three quatrains (four-line stanzas) and a closing couplet. Keats assigns each of these groupings to a season, more or less:
Keats also uses a smattering of slant rhyme: he pairs "luxuriously" and "nigh," "loves" and "coves," "misfeature" and "nature." (There's some chance that this final rhyme was perfect in Keats's 19th-century London accent, however—an accent that modern-day Londoners would hardly recognize!) This effect softens the poem slightly, fuzzing out the lines' edges.
The poem's speaker is an omniscient voice here, an observer describing the way that human life runs parallel to the seasons. This speaker notes (as many poets have) that people have a spring, summer, autumn, and winter just as the year does.
What makes this speaker distinct is their very Keatsian focus on beauty (and the perception of beauty) as the essential work of a life. This poem is all about people's relationship to "fair things," their capacity to "take[] in all beauty" across a lifetime. Childhood and youth, in this speaker's view, are the times to absorb and relish beauty, while middle age means peacefully letting beauty wash past. But old age cuts this process off pretty sharply. An elderly season of "pale misfeature" (colorless ugliness or disfigurement) is necessary, in this vision, to keep humanity aware of its "mortal nature," the inevitability of death.
There's something rather poignant about this notion of a human lifespan, coming as it does from the pen of a poet who wouldn't live past the summer of his life. Keats died at only 25—though he had the time and the wisdom to recognize the beauties of autumn before he went.
If there's a setting for this poem, it's the whole world. Using the seasons as a conceit for the span of a human life, Keats draws on images that transcend any one time or place.
Some of the specific metaphors Keats chooses, however, might evoke either the English countryside or a more archetypal rural paradise. The image of thought as a delicious "honied cud" that youths "ruminate" casts those youths as sheep or cows, peaceful grazing animals of the sort one might find in an English field—or in Arcadia.
In the ancient Greek myths that fascinated Keats (and that inflected much of his poetry), Arcadia was an imaginary pastoral paradise where shepherds peacefully tended their flocks in an eternal summer. Casting young people as blissed-out sheep, Keats quietly suggests that youth feels like living among green fields and constant sunshine—and might feel as if it will never end, too.
Similarly, the "quiet coves" and "threshold brook[s]" in the lines on life's autumn feel grounded in landscapes Keats knew, and perhaps in the very landscape Keats was in when he wrote this poem. He composed "The Human Seasons" while visiting England's West Country in 1818, a place where one can't move for seaside coves and trickling brooks.
John Keats (1795–1821) is often seen as an archetypal Romantic poet: a dreamy, sensuous soul who died tragically young. But Keats was also a vigorous, funny writer, a working-class kid making inroads into a literary scene dominated by aristocratic figures like Lord Byron. He died obscure and poor. But he had a quiet faith in his own genius. In an early letter, he once declared, "I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death."
Keats was also among a notable crowd of English poets during his lifetime: he met or corresponded with most of his fellow Romantics. However, he never got too close to any of them. As a young writer, he was inspired by William Wordsworth, who helped set English Romanticism in motion—but was dismayed to find him pompous and conservative in person. ("Mr. Wordsworth," Wordsworth's wife Mary reprimanded the enthusiastic young Keats, "is never interrupted.") Keats had just one conversation with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (which seems to have felt more like a whirlwind than a friendly chat). And while Percy Shelley admired Keats's work, Keats never quite fell in with him and his elite clique; Byron, Shelley's close friend, was actively contemptuous of Keats. Keats's real circle was instead built from earthier London artists like Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and Benjamin Haydon.
Much of Keats's early poetry, in fact, was markedly social: he wrote poems in conversation (or competition) with friends and often integrated his poetry into letters. He enclosed this poem, for instance, in a letter to his friend Benjamin Bailey, prefacing it with these words:
[P]robably every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth form the ardour of the pursuer—being in itself a nothing—Ethereal thing[s] may at least be thus real, divided under three heads—Things real—things semireal—and no things—Things real—such as existences of Sun Moon & Stars and passages of Shakespeare—Things semireal such as Love, the Clouds &c which require a greeting of the Spirit to make them wholly exist—and Nothings which are made great and Dignified by an ardent pursuit [...] I have written a Sonnet here of a somewhat collateral nature.
In spite of being something of an outsider in his time, Keats has indeed landed "among the English Poets" since his death. Ever since later Victorian writers like Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning resurrected his reputation, he's been one of the most beloved and influential of poets.
Over the 25 years of his short life, John Keats saw more than his share of loss and pain. His mother and father both died while he was only a child, leaving Keats and his siblings in the care of their grandparents, who shortly also died. Thereafter, the four surviving Keats kids—one further brother died in infancy—grew up under the guardianship of the grasping Richard Abbey, a prosaic businessman with no sympathy for Keats's literary ambitions.
This was only the beginning of Keats's troubles. When he wrote this poem in 1818, his beloved youngest brother Tom was showing the signs of what would be a fatal case of tuberculosis (then known as "consumption," and incurable). Keats, who trained as a doctor, nursed Tom through this dreadful final illness, only to contract tuberculosis himself. He died in 1821—a cruelly short time after he became engaged to his neighbor Fanny Brawne, a young woman he had fallen deeply in love with.
In a biographical light, there's something specially poignant about this poem's visions of a long, complete human life. While Keats only barely lived to see his summer, he fit more than a lifetime's worth of insight and beauty into the few years granted to him. In an 1819 letter to his brother George, he described life and all its pains as a "Vale of Soul-Making":
I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read— I will call the human heart the horn Book used in that School— and I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that School and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!
In this poem as elsewhere, then, Keats reads grief and loss as a "necessary" part of life, an experience that gives the soul itself its form and identity. More than that, he felt, art that engaged truthfully with suffering had the power to transform pain into beauty.
Keats's Legacy — Admire a statue recently raised to mark Keats's birthplace in London.
Portraits of Keats — See some images of Keats at London's National Portrait Gallery.
The Keats Letters Project — Visit the Keats Letters Project to learn more about Keats's letters—some of the liveliest and most profound correspondence in English literature.
Mapping Keats's Progress — Visit this website for a comprehensive overview of Keats's miraculously swift poetic development. The site traces the events of Keats's life and records how and when his poems were composed.
A Brief Biography — Read the Poetry Foundation's short biography of Keats.
An Appreciation of Keats — Read an article from the Paris Review reflecting on Keats's literary afterlife.