John Keats

"My spirit is too weak--mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship, tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky."
(Keats, pg 425, from On Seeing the Elgin Marbles

Keats. Keats. Keats. What do you say about someone that it is impossible to empathize or even sympathize with? This man's story is enough to make a person sad, but then put in his own words the pain he dealt with and the life he led and a person is left miserable. This was a remarkable man, but had he been a living man, we would not have the literary works we have today. He wrote as a dying man, giving his readers pure, raw, and charged emotion. He knew enough about medicine and TB to know that he was on his way out. The feelings he transmits due to this are painful, but beautifully so. He was a genius poet and he knew it and tried to do as much as he could with it before his untimely and foretold death.

"This is a mere matter of the moment. I think I
shall be among the English poets after my death."
(Keats, pg 423, to his brother, George.)

I can't even imagine the pain it must be knowing that you are going to die. He was younger than I am now, and that is just beyond my scope of thought. Instead of crying about it, he wrote... a lot. He knew that he was good and he seemed to want to accomplish great things despite time. He did not mask his fear though, that too was evident and made his work stronger and more compelling.

"When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain"
(pg 425, from Sonnet: When I have fears)

His writing is so emotional that you can't help but feel for him. By the time he gets to his odes in 1819, he seems to be wishing for death.

"My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-words had sunk"
(pg 438, from Ode to a Nightingale)

"No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf's-bane, tight rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine"
(pg 442, from Ode on Melancholy

These lines remind me of his letter to Fanny, "I hate the world: it batters too much the wings of my self-will, and would I could take a sweet poison from your lips to send me out of it (pg 447)." I feel horrible for finding so much pleasure in this man's pain, but he knew what he was doing when he wrote. He is echoing Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. He wants more to forget what's around him than he wants to die. He uses the word adieu repeatedly in several of the poems. It is as if he was trying to find a pretty way to say goodbye. Although it was short and not as pretty as the other poems, I liked This living hand. I think he was referring to his ability to write and the fact that he won't be doing it much longer. This is Keats saying here I am, I am doing this. I think that Bright Star is a beautiful little poem. He must have had Fanny on the brain! In his letter he referred to her as his star.

"And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite."
(pg 444)

If you knew that you were going to die, would you ever close your eyes? Not me. I would be like Keats. He saw so much beauty in the world, especially in nature. I think he was longing here to see Fanny as well, but he was able to see good in so many things, because he knew the bad side so well. I don't envy him, but I do think he was perhaps a remarkable person, not just poet. In his letter to Woodhouse he wrote, "I am ambitious of doing the world some good: if I should be spared that may be the work of maturer years--in the interval I will assay to reach to as high a summit in Poetry as the nerve bestowed upon me will suffer." He had such an imagination as well and I guess you would want that in his situation more than others. He remarked that he often found himself in character. With his fate and vision, I am not surprised by this at all. He also wrote on this to Woodhouse, "But even now I am perhaps not speaking from myself; but from some character in whose soul I now live (pg 446)." He also wrote to Shelley, "My imagination is a Monastry and I am its Monk (pg 448)." I think he felt trapped by his imagination instead of freed, but also safe in it. I think he explained the meaning of all of this when he wrote to Brown, "I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence (pg 449)." He was so profound and wise for so few years. The most beautiful thing that I think he wrote was in this same final letter to Brown, "I am so weak (in mind) that I cannot bear the sight of any hand writing of a friend I love so much as I do you (pg 449)." This leaves me pretty much speechless and without any more reason to imagine his situation.