Parallels of Acceptance in "To Autumn" and "Tintern Abbey"

A frustrated futility permeates most of John Keats’s Odes, as the speaker struggles desperately to transcend his mortality and realize the eternality of the beauty around him — both in art and in nature. The hopeless questions of “Grecian Urn” and the “draughts of vintage” in “Nightingale” exemplify a refusal to accept human transience. Yet the final ode, “To Autumn,” replaces this refusal with a calm acceptance — or, more accurately, a rejection of the entire quest.

This rejection echoes the “suspension” of human blood in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.” As time elapses and the speaker leaves behind the “hour of thoughtless youth,” he is troubled by the “lofty” questions his old age poses. Yet, as Keats’s speaker did in “Autumn,” he finds “abundant recompence” for his lost innocence and forced confrontation with human temporality not in any answers to those questions but to a cessation of them.

In “Autumn” the passage of time and the agency of nature is suspended, allowing the speaker to find joy and transcendence in the swelling of the beauty around him in the present. Similarly, the elder speaker of “Tintern Abbey” feels the “burden of the mystery…of all this unintelligible world…lighten’d” as the “affectations” of the natural splendor around him “quiets” the burning questions of human mortality. He is “laid asleep/In body, and becomes a living soul,” just as Keats’s deified autumn is portrayed as lying lazily asleep, allowing him to revel in the swelling life and beauty of swallows gathering and sheep bleating.

Both poems center on speakers who are facing the twilight of their lives who are “disturbed” with the “elevated thoughts” encapsulated by the grandeur of the world around them. While Keats’s odes allow us to see the anguished process that leads to eventual acceptance, we see parallels to that acceptance in an elder Wordsworth’s reaction to nature.