The Human Seasons

John Keats (1795–1821) · 1819?

Four Seasons fill the measure of the year;
There are four seasons in the mind of man:
He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear
Takes in all beauty with an easy span:
He has his Summer, when luxuriously
Spring’s honied cud of youthful thought he loves
To ruminate, and by such dreaming high
Is nearest unto heaven: quiet coves
His soul has in its Autumn, when his wings
He furleth close; contented so to look
On mists in idleness⁠—to let fair things
Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook.
He has his Winter too of pale misfeature,
Or else he would forego his mortal nature.

Where this text comes from

First published in The Literary Pocket-Book (London, 1819), edited by Leigh Hunt. This date is uncertain. Sent to Benjamin Bailey in a letter from Teignmouth of 13 March 1818. The claim is the headnote to this poem in The Complete Poetical Works of John Keats, Cambridge Edition (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1899), which says the sonnet “was printed the next year in Leigh Hunt’s Literary Pocket-Book”; the year 1819 is read off that phrase rather than off a copy of the book, and no copy has been read here. Keats did not include the sonnet in his 1820 volume, and the two volumes of Milnes’s 1848 edition read here do not print it. [1]

Structure read from the source's markup; the words have not been compared against a page scan. Last checked 2026-08-12.

Taken from Standard Ebooks, standardebooks/john-keats_poetry, poetry.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).

Earlier sources (2)

This poem as JSON or plain text. Line anchors #L1–#L14.

Cite this poem

John Keats (1795–1821). “The Human Seasons.” First published in The Literary Pocket-Book (London, 1819), edited by Leigh Hunt. Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/john-keats/the-human-seasons/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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