Autumn can also be seen ‘on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,/ Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook/ Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers’. Just like the exhausted labourers, sometimes autumn needs to pause and rest. This image gives the stanza a sense of stillness and peace. A gleaner was a person who gathered up all the leftover pieces of grain from a field. Keats imagines autumn as a gleaner carrying the dregs they have gathered as they walk carefully across a stream: ‘And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep/ Steady thy laden head across a brook’. Everything happens slowly, at its own pace, just like nature. Making cider is more or less the same today as it was in Keats’ time. The apples have to be pressed down slowly to allow the maximum amount of juice to be extracted. The slow verb ‘oozing’ and the repetition of ‘hours’ emphasises how nature works in her own good time: ‘Or by a cider-press, with patient look,/ Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.’
In the third stanza Keats moves from afternoon to evening, and from mid autumn to late autumn. He begins by contrasting autumn with spring: ‘Where are the songs of Spring?’ He then shows us that autumn has its ‘music too’. You can hear this music at sunset: ‘While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,/ And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue’. The ‘barred’ clouds are clouds that are streaked with colour, while the phrase ‘rosy hue’ vividly evokes the warm pink light of an autumn sunset. It is against this backdrop that the music of autumn can be heard: the ‘wailful choir’ of gnats that hover ‘Among the river sallows’, the bleats of the ‘full-grown lambs’ on the hillside, the music of the crickets, the ‘treble soft’ song of the robin and the chirping of the ‘gathering swallows’ who ‘twitter in the skies.’ The description of this birdsong is very sensuous, but it also marks the end of autumn. The robin is a traditional symbol of winter, and the swallows are gathering in the skies because they are preparing to migrate to the warmer climes of Africa. They, like the poet, know that autumn is nearly over, so it is fitting that they should make an appearance in the last line of this radiant ode.
