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.

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 flower:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-presss, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of springs? 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, bourne aloft
Or sinking as a light wind lives or dies;
And full-green 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.

−John Keats

John Keats, born in October 1795 in London, was a prominent English Romantic Poet. He was a contemporary to Lord Byron and Percy Byssye Shelley. His significant works include the sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, and renowned odes such as Ode to a Nightingale, Ode to Autumn, Ode on a Grecian Urn, and Ode to Psyche. He also penned two famous poems based on Greek mythology Endemyion and Hyperion. The poet succumbed to tuberculosis at a young age of twenty five years.

1. thatch-eyes: the overhanging edges of the roof
2. kernel: the inner soft part of a nut or a fruit
3. o'er-brimm'd: overlowed
4. clammy: damp and sucky
5. granary; a storehouse for grains
6. furrow: the long, narrow trench in the field, made by a plough
7. granary: someone who gathers the leftover grains or fruits that are missed during the threshing process
8. cyder-press: a  press for extracting apple juice from apples to make cider
9. sallows: low-growing willow trees
10. bourne aloft: carried up in the wind