The Long and Short of John Keats
Near
his end, John Keats took a line from his hero Shakespeare: “Nothing in his life
became him like the leaving it.”
Just
as he was winding down one of literature’s greatest too-brief careers, Keats
put pen to paper and wrote a poem about exactly that, not in anger or grief but
rapt serenity. Considered one of the greatest poems in English, “To Autumn” is
impossible to top as a swan-song:
