Keats creates extraordinarily rich synaesthetic imagery that blends multiple senses: we see 'mists', feel 'mellow' warmth, taste the 'sweet kernel', smell 'clammy cells' of honey, and hear the 'wailful choir' of gnats. This sensory blending immerses the reader so completely in autumn that the poem becomes an experience rather than a description. The sheer density of sensory detail creates an almost overwhelming richness — an excess of beauty that mirrors autumn's excess of fruit.

The sensory imagery shifts deliberately across the three stanzas, tracing a movement from taste and touch (stanza one: fruit, honey, warmth) to sight (stanza two: the personified figure) to sound (stanza three: gnats, lambs, crickets, robin). This progression mirrors the passage from morning to evening and from early to late autumn — as the visual world diminishes, the auditory world takes over. Keats suggests that even as beauty fades in one form, it reappears in another. The final stanza's sounds — 'the treble soft' of the robin, the 'gathering swallows' — are poignant precisely because they are the last sounds before winter's silence.