A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF JOHN KEATS'S "TO AUTUMN": A GRAPHOLOGICAL AND SEMANTIC STUDY

Abstract

The poem "To Autumn" by John Keats has been praised for its thematic richness and copious sensory detail, but the visual and typographical mechanics that influence its interpretation have been neglected in conventional scholarship. The goal of this study is to conduct a detailed stylistic analysis of the ode, considering its graphological and semantic aspects, which combine to produce meaning. The research design is qualitative descriptive, in which the typographical architecture, punctuation patterns, and deliberate use of words are systematically analyzed through close textual reading. The results show that Keats makes extensive use of heavy capitalization, frequent enjambment, and visually dense stanzas to physically prescribe the slow, stumbling pace of his reading. This graphological weight completely reflects the poem's semantic lexical fields of expansion, maturation, and agricultural abundance. Moreover, the form and the image are closely related: the visual form fosters the sense of the lexical substance, and vice versa, particularly in the last stanza, where the change of theme to far-off sounds matches with the fragmented, interrogative punctuation to highlight the beginning of winter. In the final analysis, the study finds that the beauty of 'To Autumn' is not the result of its philosophical attitude towards death, but it directly flows from the masterful integration of its visual construction on the printed page and its profound semantic richness.