Keats’s Ode ‘To Autumn’: Touching the Stubble-Plains

Abstract

When William Butler Yeats thought of Keats, he imagined a Cockney schoolboy, ‘nose pressed to a sweet-shop window’.² In his poem, ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ (1917), Keats is the ‘coarse-bred son of a livery-stable keeper’, shut out due to his class and non-university education from ‘all the luxury of the world’, who peers longingly in at the shop window.³ Yeats’s Keats stops short, however, of smashing the glass. The situation in London was very different during a furious week in August 2011, when unrest spread through the capital and into the Midlands. The critic and restaurateur A. A. Gill dismissed the riots — some commentators prefer ‘uprising’ — as a ‘rant without reason’, a thoughtless ‘bonfire of consumer vanities’.⁴ In similar vein, Justin McGuirk labelled the disorder a ‘venting of consumer spleen’, which, he insisted, lacked ‘any articulated aims or ideology’.⁵ In a Channel 4 News interview, Paul Bagguley, researcher in the sociology of protest, remarked that ‘there used to be food riots in Britain’ — the summer’s disturbances, he added, were ‘like a consumer version of that’.⁶ Bagguley’s allusion to historical food riots, which we discussed in Chapters 1, 3 and 4, was perhaps more pertinent than he realized. It is worth pausing to remind ourselves that the first premises to be looted at the outbreak of the riots on 8 August was not a sportswear store, nor an electrical retailer, but the Clarence Convenience store in Hackney.

It is clear enough to me that this system [transplanting a crop] will finally prevail all over England. The ‘loyal,’ indeed, may be afraid to adopt it, lest it should contain something of ‘radicalism.’ Sap-headed fools! They will find something to do, I believe, soon, besides railing against radicals. We will din ‘radical’ and ‘national faith’ in their ears, till they shall dread the din as much as a dog does the sound of the bell that is tied to the whip … Radical means, belonging to the root; going to the root. And the main principle of this system (first taught by Tull) is that the root of the plant is to be fed by deep tillage while it is growing; and to do this we must have our wide distances. Our system of husbandry is happily illustrative of our system of politics. Our lines of movement are fair and straightforward. We destroy all weeds, which, like tax-eaters, do nothing but devour the sustenance that ought to feed the valuable plants. Our plants are all well fed; and our nations of Swedes and of cabbages present a happy uniformity of enjoyments and of bulk.

William Cobbett, Rural Rides (1830)¹