Ronald A. Sharp offers the following approach to teaching Keats:
Sharp uses the theme of mortality to help his students understand Keats' poems. "To Autumn" is a great starting point because so much of the poem surrounds the idea of death and the inevitable end it brings. Because of Keats' declining heath, and the loss of many of those close to him, he "had a renewed sense of the wonders of the world--a feeling heightened by the prospect of an ending" (Sharp). Since it is difficult for many students to empathize with Keats, Sharp asks them to consider more current issues--prisoners in POW camps, highjack victims, or those diagnosed with terminal illnesses; he uses these conjured up feelings to explain the "profound paradox that a sense of mortality increases one's sense of beauty, that life accrues value precisely to the extent that one intensely experiences its fragility and transience" (Sharp). A student cannot understand Keats without knowing the situation that he was writing during.
"To Autumn" does not specifically reference human death, but the allusions are vivid. Sharp suggests that this was because Keats had already accepted his inevitable death; he didn't see the need to point it out. Keats does, however, attempt to make death less frightening by pointing out that death makes life beautiful. Mortality must be embraced as a natural cycle of life as basic and non-threatening as the change of seasons. Of course this conjures up questions about what Keats was trying to say about rebirth, since the cycle of seasons is neverending. I do not know that Keats had a definite answer to this idea, but was offering it as part of the poem as his own way of questioning it. This is a poem about death, but really it shows us why life is so beautiful--that we can find beauty in death, as we find beauty in autumn.