"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness." Keats's ode moves through one autumn from ripening fruit to the harvest to the last sounds of a fading day, and asks us to love the season for what it is. This free worksheet has the full poem with numbered lines, vocabulary, five discussion questions, a writing prompt and an answer key. No signup needed.
Grades 9–12 · Common Core RL.9-10.4, RL.9-10.2, RL.9-10.5 · US Letter PDF, with an answer key on the last page
What’s on the worksheet
Keats wrote "To Autumn" on September 19, 1819, after an evening walk near Winchester, England, and it was published in 1820. It was his last great ode; he died of tuberculosis in Rome in 1821, aged 25. The poem has three eleven-line stanzas: the first is about ripeness, the second about the harvest, and the third about the sounds of autumn at the end of the day.
Vocabulary
- mellow: soft, ripe and rich
- conspiring: secretly planning together
- thatch-eves: the edges of a straw roof
- granary: a storehouse for grain
- winnowing: blowing the light husks away from grain
- swath: a row of cut grain or grass
- gleaner: a person who gathers leftover grain after a harvest
- sallows: willow trees
- bourn: a boundary or region (here, hilly land)
- croft: a small enclosed field or garden
Discussion questions
- In stanza 1, who is Autumn "Conspiring" with, and what are they planning to do?
- How do the bees misunderstand the season at the end of stanza 1?
- In stanza 2, Autumn becomes a person. Name two things this person is doing. What do they have in common?
- Stanza 3 begins "Where are the songs of Spring?" How does the speaker answer his own question?
- The poem moves from morning ripeness to "the soft-dying day." How does this movement hint at endings without making the poem sad?
Writing prompt
Write a three-stanza poem about your favorite season. Stanza 1: what you see. Stanza 2: the season as a person doing something. Stanza 3: the sounds of the season at the end of a day.
The answer key is included in the PDF, on its own page for teachers.