Keats’s Music of Reciprocity: Friendship, Peterloo, and ‘To Autumn’

Abstract

This article explores the implications of the sunset music in the third stanza of ‘To Autumn’ in terms of John Keats’s ethics of friendship and his response to contemporary politics. The letters he wrote in the summer of 1819, when his financial situation was more alarming than ever, show a preoccupation with the exchange of duties as the foundation of friendship. This moral commitment is suggested by the harmony of the animals’ intermingling voices in ‘To Autumn’, which draws on the antiphonal hymnody of Milton’s earth-walking angels in Paradise Lost. On the other hand, as an art form of harmonious mutual obligation, Keats’s polyphonic music echoes broader reformist claims for national unity in the immediate aftermath of the Peterloo massacre, and reflects Keats’s identification of his poetic vocation with the public career of radical leaders such as Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt.