The 'Furrow* in Keats' Ode to Autumn 591 The copy in the British Museum supplies a variant for the two lines immediately following the one especially in question: Doz6d with a fume of poppies, while thy hook Spares the next sheath and all its honied flowers. 'Sheath' is evidently a mistake for sheaf. This reading has no necessary effect on the preceding line; yet, if it had stood, 'furrow' could have been thought a mistake for swath', but, in the time of Keats, grain, when cut with the hook, was not left lying in the swath. And while it may be possible to sleep on a swath, in the sense of a line or ridge of cut grain, the word 'half-reaped' shows that the substituted swath must mean the path cleared by the reaper in one course along the field. This, again, would be slept in and not on. u In addition, one sleeping in a half-reaped swath would spare the remainder of that swath rather than the next one. 'Swath' in the finished version more probably means the breadth of grain cut by a single stroke of the reaping-hook. But the word is better fitted to describe the long sweep of a scythe. However, one style of reaping- hook, the scythe-hook, somewhat used in the time of Keats, did make a true swath about two feet wide. In using the sickle- hook, the common style of reaping instrument, the reaper seized stalks of grain in his left hand, cut them off, and laid them on the ground on the band to be used in binding them, until he had enough for a sheaf. He then either bound it himself, or left it for the bandster, who followed him. 15 The poem depends in part, at least, on actual observation. Keats tells of its composition in a letter dated September 22, 1819: I never liked stubble-fields so much as now aye, better than the chilly green of the Spring. Somehow, a stubble field looks warm, in the same way that some pictures look warm. This struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it. 16 14 It perhaps should be mentioned that there is a slight possibility of some confusion with the ridge, or space between two dead-furrows (inter-furrows) left in the field for the sake of drainage. This ridge is often mentioned in writers on agriculture. The dead-furrows, of course, remain until after harvest. 16 J. C. Loudon, Encyclopedia of Agriculture, London, 1883 (preface dated 1831) p. 515. I have never seen grain cut with anything simpler than a cradle. 1(J The Works of John Keats, ed. H. Buxton Forman, London, 1883, Vol. 3,
p. 329.
