Autumn Poems – Keats, MacNeice, Frost – with Pip Torrens and Andrew Crean reading

As the exceptional summer of 2026 fades into memory, we look at three autumn poems. John Keats’ To Autumn is the finest of his Odes and one of the greatest poems written in English. At the moment of fruition, decay begins; from the high point of life, comes death; and in that moment of equipoise there is an ecstasy as well as a melancholy at the passing of life and of beauty, beautifully captured in Pip Torrens’ wonderful, understated reading. Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal is a sprawling, journalistic account of the autumn of 1938, and he describes the changing of the seasons and the transience of his own emotional life and relationships, against the background of London as it comes to terms with the advent of war and the rise of Nazi Germany. Andrew Crean reads with clarity and sensitivity. And Robert Frost’s short verse Nothing Gold can Stay – just eight lines of three or four words each – is an extraordinarily powerful poem whose apparent simplicity is cratered by one devasting line. Join Rupert and Charlie – and their outstanding guest readers – as they look at these three seasonal poems.