Spent some time with Keats's "To Autumn" yesterday. I've copied it out before, but I decided to do it again and, as I did, found myself thinking about his left-margin indents. Clearly they're intended to support the rhyme scheme, but do they also serve other functions? I found them rather difficult to type: I kept making mistakes, which leads me to believe that the pattern is more than merely a rhyme mirror. But what?

In any case, I adore this poem. 

To Autumn

 John Keats

  I.

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 still more, later flowers for the bees,

            Until they think warm days will never cease,

                        For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

 

  II.

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.

 

  III.

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.

 

Dessert last night: angel cake, sugared blueberries and peaches, whipped cream. (I made the angel cake using the leftover egg whites I'd accrued in the freezer. They whip up quite well, even after several cryogenic months.)