Lesson video

Hello, everyone.

Thank you very much for joining me.

I'm Mr. Blackburn.

Today we're going to be looking at the power of nature in John Keats poem, "To Autumn." Before we begin, you'll need to find a pen and paper.

You'll need to turn off any notifications or anything which might distract you.

And if you can, you'll need to try and find somewhere quiet to work.

And once you've done all that, let's get started.

What are we going to be doing today? Well, first off, I'm going to test your knowledge of the poem that you already have.

Then we're going to look at imagery in poetry.

After that, we'll move on to think about the power of nature before doing a brief recap, and then there'll be a writing activity at the end of the lesson.

So what do you already know about "To Autumn" by John Keats? Here is a paragraph, but unfortunately I've accidentally missed some words out.

Luckily for you, I've listed the words at the bottom of your screen.

What I'd like you to do is pause the video, copy out the paragraph, and fill in the missing words.

Once you've done that, restart the video and we'll check your answers.

Here's what your answer should look like.

"To Autumn" is an ode to the season of autumn.

The poem celebrates the beauty of nature and the way it creates an abundance of crops to harvest.

Through the use of personification, Keats imagines autumn to take the form of a woman whose appearance changes in each of the three stanzas.

Firstly, she conspires with the sun.

Then she becomes a woman who works on the land.

And finally she is old and frightened of the winter Well done if you got all of those words in the right place.

If you didn't, now is the time to fill your work in with the correct answers.

Now let's think about imagery in a poem, and before we do, we need to really understand what imagery is.

Imagery is a type of figurative language.

Figurative language is the type of language that poets use when they're expressing their feelings or their emotions.

And it's not the kind of language that you or I would use in everyday conversation.

Similes, metaphors, and personification are all examples of figurative language and imagery is just another example.

Imagery is the kind of language which makes you imagine using all five of your senses.

And let's think about what our five senses are.

There's sight, there's hearing, there's smell, there's taste, and there's touch.

And here's a couple of examples of imagery for you just to get you thinking about how poets can activate our senses.

The clouds were lit up by the sunset.

Now, I don't know about you, but in my head, when I read that short quotation, I imagined a sky filled with really fluffy clouds.

The sun is quite low on the horizon and everything is that wonderful golden orange colour.

So the poet or whoever wrote that quotation, it wasn't a poet, it was me, has made us imagine this wonderful image in our minds.

The thunder was so loud his ears were ringing.

Now that makes us imagine that we're standing in the middle of a storm.

It makes us imagine that there's a spectacular rumble of thunder that's really close.

And it's so loud that afterwards, whoever this character is, he's still trying to cope with how loud the thunder was.

So the writer in this quotation has activated our sense of hearing.

Now here's the first stanza of "To Autumn" by John Keats, and don't forget, a stanza is just the technical term for a group of lines of poetry.

You might call it a verse but its correct term is stanza.

I'll read it to you and I want you to think about what examples of imagery there might be in this stanza.

"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, "Close bosom friend of the maturing sun; "Conspiring with him how to load and bless "With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; "To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees "And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; "To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells "With a sweet kernel, to set budding more and more "to set budding more and more and still more "late flowers for the bees "until they think warm days will never cease "for summer has over brimmed their clammy cells." What examples of imagery do you think there are in this stanza? What is it that John Keats has done that activates one of your senses? Here are three examples of imagery which I've highlighted in green and on the other side of your screen, you'll see why I think they're effective.

So the first quotation which I thought was really great is the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.

And I think that mist makes the season seem mysterious, mellow fruitfulness sounds pleasant and laid back, so mellow means kind of relaxed.

So overall we have a really strange version of autumn.

There's something going on but we're not quite sure what it is, but at the same time, we're very relaxed.

So we're not really worried about what's happening in autumn.

The second example is load and bless with fruit the vines that run the thatch-eves run and thatch-eves just means a little cottage with a thatched roof and it's kind of a very idyllic version of what a farmhouse might look like.

So in my mind, that piece of imagery conjures or creates a picture of a small cottage, that's covered in ripe fruit so maybe things like blackberries, I don't know, which are ready to be eaten.

And the third example of imagery, which I thought was very effective in this stanza, was to swell the gourd and plump the hazel shells with a sweet kernel.

So this makes us imagine things which are growing to be really plump and really full and really plenteous.

And it makes us imagine that the harvest will be particularly good and all of the crops will be particularly bounteous.

That means there'll be a lot of them.

So just with those three examples of imagery, John Keats creates the idea that autumn is going to provide well for us and we can relax throughout the entire season.

Here's another example of imagery, more late flowers for the bees.

And I want you to pause the video for just a couple of seconds and note down two or three things that that line makes you imagine.

So it's highlighted in pink on your screen, flowers for the bees.

What does it make you imagine? Well, here's what it makes me imagine.

Firstly, lots and lots of flowers and lots and lots of bees collecting the pollen from those flowers.

But I don't think that bees are something to be scared of.

I think that it's great.

I think it shows that nature is very active even in autumn.

And I think Keats wants us to realise that whilst we're harvesting our crops, the bees are harvesting their crops as well.

And again, he goes on to tell us about the nectar they're collecting.

So I imagine bees being overwhelmed by just how many flowers and how much nectar there is to collect.

And they have to do it quickly because autumn won't last long.

But I also imagine from the late flowers, part of that quotation, a field, which is filled with kind of wild flowers and the grass is a bit too long and things are starting to look a bit unkempt, but everybody's really relaxed about that because it's autumn.

So this picture is quite similar to what I imagined in my mind when I read that part of the quotation, because I think it reminds me of one of these warm late days in autumn, when we just go out into fields and we sit down and we don't really worry about the world as it passes us by.

Here is your task.

I would like you to answer these two questions in full sentences on your piece of paper.

What is imagery? And what does the imagery of plump ripe fruit make a reader imagine in Keats' descriptions of autumn? Pause the video and come back once you're finished and we'll check your answers.

Good, I hope you're enjoying this little look at imagery and the poem.

So here are my answers and yours might look a little bit different, that's okay, but you might want to add some of the information from my answers into your own.

The first question was what is imagery? And my answer is imagery is a type of figurative language which appeals to any five of our senses.

If you've written something similar, great.

If you haven't, now is the time to change your answer.

The second question was what does the imagery of plump, ripe fruit make a reader imagine in Keats' description of autumn? My answer is Keats' description of plump, ripe fruit makes the reader imagine that autumn has made the crops grow and that they are ready to harvest.

Keats' use of imagery makes our mouths water imagining all of the fruit ready to be eaten.

Now, again, your answer might look slightly different.

You might not have explained what effect that imagery has on us.

So maybe now is the time to add that in.

Now we're going to consider the power of nature.

So we've looked at imagery of nature, natural imagery in Keats' poem.

Now we're going to try and think about what Keats thinks nature's power really is.

The romantics were concerned in most of their writing with the power of nature and we need to try and understand Keats' viewpoint on the power of nature, too.

Now, Keats presents autumn as gentle and kind-natured.

It's there to help us.

It's relaxed.

It's not hurrying us.

It's not making us freeze like the winter would.

It's not making us uncomfortably hot like the summer might.

Instead, it's there to help us and provide food for us and it lets us relax.

But knowing what you know about the poem, do you think he makes autumn sound powerful? What does it mean to be powerful? Maybe you just want to write a note down of whether yes or no, you think that Keats presents autumn as powerful.

I think it's quite important for us to think about what it means to be powerful.

Do you have to be destructive to be powerful? Do you have to be strong to be powerful? Well, we can certainly argue that nature can be destructive.

This picture of Niagara Falls shows that the water's cut its way through the rock and now it's a waterfall.

And people often think that the strongest people in society must be the most powerful people as well.

But I think that Keats argues something different in his poem.

I think Keats' argument is that nature's power lies in its beauty.

The fact that nature's beauty affects us on a fundamental level, it changes the way we think about the world in a way that perhaps destruction or strength doesn't is, in Keats' mind, what makes nature powerful.

So Keats says the power of nature is in its beauty.

And as Keats looks around and looks at this beautiful nature in front of him, he starts to appreciate everything that nature provides for us.

However, Keats also recognises that the power of nature is momentary and fleeting.

The power of autumn won't last forever.

Soon, winter will come and replace it and overpower the season of autumn.

So Keats recognises that nature is beautiful and that's what makes it powerful, but also that its power doesn't necessarily last very long.

Here's what I want you to do.

I want you to pause the video momentarily and fill in the missing words on this sentence.

Keats sees the something of nature as its something.

Pause the video, come back when you're finished and we'll see if you've got it correct.

Here's what you should have written.

Keats sees the beauty of nature as its power.

And I think that's a really important sentence to have written down because it reminds us what Keats' view of the natural world was.

Okay, the first stanza again, stanza's the correct term for a verse, we've already looked through this and I think we should look closely at some of the power which Keats presents in the poem.

For instance, this line, "Conspiring with him "how to load and bless with fruit." Now I think this is Keats acknowledging that autumn is powerful because it's responsible for providing our food and our crops and our fruit, which will have to last us the entire winter.

What about on this line then? How does this show that autumn is powerful? "And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core." Well, I think that Keats sees the power of autumn is in the abundance of food and crops that it provides.

So abundance means having a lot of something.

I mean, what would happen if the harvests were bad? At this point, you couldn't pop down the supermarket to buy food.

We were reliant on what we could get in the harvest.

So Keats recognises that autumn is powerful because if that harvest failed or that harvest was bad, then people would soon suffer.

Instead, autumn provides all of these nice things for us and we're spared from that suffering.

What about this third quotation? "Until they think warm days will never cease." How does that show autumn's power? Well, I think this is Keats saying that there's power in the pleasure which autumn brings to people and autumn brings to wildlife because he's talking about bees in this part of the stanza.

Endless warm days sound wonderful.

Who wouldn't want to spend all day outside in the warm? Keats presents us with the short-lived opportunity to do that in his poem.

But as I said earlier, he realises that this power of autumn won't last forever.

Okay.

I want you to use this sheet to keep a track of autumn's power as it changes throughout the poem.

So I've given you a sentence starter for stanza one.

Keats makes autumn seem powerful by.

I want you to fill in the rest of that box with an explanation of what it is that Keats does which makes autumn seem powerful.

Pause the video while you do it and then come back and we'll see if your answers match mine.

And here's my answer.

Keats makes autumn seem powerful by making the reader imagine the image of autumn providing lots of food and an abundance of crops.

Yours might look slightly different.

That's probably okay, but you might want to just update your answers with some information from mine.

Here's the second stanza.

"Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? "Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find "Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, "Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; "Or 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; "And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep "Steady thy laden head across a brook; "Or by a cyder-press, with patient look, "Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours." Where can we see examples of power in this part of the poem? Well, here's the first one.

"Who hath not seen thee?" This is personification.

So Keats turns autumn into a person and that in itself makes autumn seem powerful.

The beauty of autumn is there for everyone to see.

"Who hath not seen thee," says Keats, who hasn't seen you? Says Keats, because everybody can witness the beauty of autumn.

So imagine the leaves are changing into that golden rust colour.

The sun starts to set earlier.

So we get to see a really colourful sunset, the beauty of nature, the power of nature.

Here's another example.

"May find thee sitting on careless on a granary floor." Now I think that this is Keats saying that autumn is so powerful and has produced so much food that it can be a little bit careless and nobody minds, so it can be laid back, it can take things slowly.

We can be a little bit lazier in autumn than we might be in the rest of the year and that's okay.

Autumn's power lies in its kindness, not in its rush to get us to do things.

"And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep steady "thy laden head across a brook." Now a gleaner picks grain and then carries large amount of grains in bags.

And usually they carried it on their heads.

And here I think this is Keats saying that autumn is both beautiful and relentless, unstoppable.

It's beautiful, but it isn't going to stop until all of that harvest has been collected and that's an awe-inspiring kind of power, something we look up to.

Okay, now you can add to stanza two.

So I've given you a sentence starter again.

Additionally, Keats presents autumn as powerful when he, so the he there is Keats.

What does he do that shows autumn is powerful? Pause the video for a couple of minutes while you fill that box out.

Come back and we'll see if our answers match.

And here's what I've written.

Additionally, Keats presents autumn as powerful when he uses personification and makes autumn visible.

He shows how autumn is so powerful she produces too much and is careless.

Your answer might look a little bit different.

If there's something in my answer which you like, now is the time to add it to your own.

And here is the third stanza.

"Where are the songs of spring? "Ay, where are they? "Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, "While barred clouds bloom the soft dying day "And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; "Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn "Among the river sallows, borne aloft "Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; "And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; "Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft "The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; "And gathering swallows twitter in the skies." Now let's see where we can find examples of power in this stanza.

"Think not of them," Keats says to autumn, "Thou hast thy music too." This is autumn beginning to lose its power.

Keats is comforting it as a friend and saying that we understand that soon, autumn won't be around and will have been replaced by winter, but we shouldn't focus on that sad eventuality.

We should focus on how kind autumn has been to us so far.

Now I'd like you to update your final box.

Autumn's power diminishes, gets smaller, as.

Pause the video, take a couple of minutes, and then we'll come back and see if our answers match.

So this is what I've written.

Yours might look slightly different.

Autumn's power diminishes as the reader becomes aware that soon it will be winter.

Keats offers words of comfort to autumn as it slowly fades away.

Yours might look slightly different and that's all right, but if you notice we've written how autumn's power changes in each stanza.

Excellent work so far.

Let's see what you know about autumn's power in the poem.

Now here is a grid and you can copy this out onto your piece of paper.

Stanza one, stanza two, and stanza three each have their own row.

Firstly, I want you to roughly summarise what happens in each of those stanzas.

So I've done the first stanza for you.

Keats shows autumn, to be conspiring with the sun, shows images of ripe fruit.

You need to fill in the next two rows for stanzas two and three.

Once you've done that, I want you to think about where autumn is shown as most powerful, where autumn is shown as least powerful, and where autumn is shown as just powerful.

And you can write those in the final boxes of your grid.

So pause the video whilst you complete this grid, come back, and we'll see if you've put things in the right order.

Here's my example.

So stanza two, autumn is a hard worker who's trying to get as many of the crops harvested as possible.

In stanza three, autumn is shown to be weak, as she slowly feeds into winter.

And I think that autumn is most powerful in the second stanza, least powerful in the third stanza, and just powerful in the first stanza.

If your grid doesn't look like this, then take a minute to make sure that it does.

It will come in handy because now we're going to be writing about the power of nature, which is good because everything we've done in the lesson so far has led up to this point.

So all of your note-taking and all of your grid filling-in will serve you well as we start to write about the power of nature.

Here's what we're going to do.

Here's another grid.

I obviously love grids today.

And we're going to plan out a three-paragraph essay and we're going to structure our essay using what, how, and why.

Stanza one will give you an idea of how we're going to do this.

So what happens in stanza one, well, Keats shows autumn's power as he suggests that it can choose whether to be generous or not.

How does Keats do this? Well, I'm going to use a quotation here.

"Conspiring with him "how to load and bless with fruit the vines." Why does Keats do this? Keats does this to show how changeable the seasons can be and to reinforce how much power nature has over humankind.

You'll notice I've already filled out parts of stanza two and part of stanza three for you as well.

Now, when we put it together into a paragraph, this is how it might look.

In his ode "To Autumn," Keats shows Autumn's power over everyone as he suggests that it is capable of choosing whether to be generous or not.

Through the use of personification, Keats imagines that the sun is a man and that autumn is a woman who is "conspiring with him "how to load and bless with fruit the vines." Keats reveals how much the generosity of the season is down to chance as the sun and autumn could choose not to be generous one year.

Perhaps Keats is trying to express how much power the seasons have over humankind as if autumn is not generous, harvests will fail and people might starve.

So I've taken all of the information from my grid here and I've put it into this paragraph.

And what I have made certain to do is use things like subject terminology, personification.

It shows that I understand what personification is and why Keats might have used it.

In pink on your screen, I've used an embedded quotation.

That means the quotation is just part of a sentence rather than having words like we see this in their quotation.

It shows that I've really carefully thought about what I was going to write and I've really carefully structured my writing so that the quotation fits right in there.

Finally, in purple, you'll see I've used the word perhaps.

This is called tentative language.

So things like perhaps or maybe because we don't really know what Keats was trying to express.

He isn't around to ask, he didn't write a diary telling us.

This is our interpretation.

So perhaps Keats is trying to express.

Maybe Keats is expressing.

What I'd like you to do is pause the video, fill out the rest of the grid so that you have a plan for stanzas two and three, and then write up your answers into two paragraphs.

Make sure that you include subject terminology, make sure that you include embedded quotations, and make sure that you include tentative language.

Great, now this is my answer.

So yours will probably look different, but these are my second and third paragraphs.

Additionally, Keats portrays nature as a powerful woman who works to make sure the harvest is successful.

Keats says to autumn that "sometimes like a gleaner "thou dost keep steady thy laden head across a brook." A gleaner carries heavy loads of grain and this portrayal of autumn shows a different kind of power, power of strength and determination as autumn puts in a lot of effort to ensure that the harvest is as plentiful and abundant as possible.

So I've used an embedded quotation and I've explained what that quotation might show you.

And you might notice that in between keep and steady there's two forward slashes.

That just means that it's the break in a line of poetry.

So there are different lines.

Finally, Keats shows that autumn's power is short-lived and quickly diminishes as the poet comforts the season by saying "Think not of them, thou hast thy music too." He encourages the season to consider the joy that it has brought people before it is ultimately replaced by winter.

Maybe Keats was suggesting that humans are unable to stop the power of nature and so should remain in awe of it while being thankful for all that it provides.

Your answers will probably look different to that.

If there's something in my answer that you really like the look of, then now is the time to borrow it and add it to your own answer.

Super work today, well done.

You've worked really hard at identifying how Keats presents nature as powerful.

We've looked at how different quotations show different kinds of power.

And you've thought about how the power of autumn changes throughout the poem.

Finally, you've managed to write a really good three-paragraph essay about how autumn's power changes.

So you've done an amazing job.

The last thing I want you to do is have a go at the quiz at the end of this lesson to prove how much you know.

Well done for all of your hard work today.

Goodbye.