Just over two centuries ago John Keats was summoned to the eternal auditorium in the sky. Though he died at the age of only 25 he is among the most jubilated poets of all time. He was and is the superlative syllable stringer. John Keats was blessed with the most inappreciable literary gifts. What is it about Keats’ oeuvre that accounts for the remarkable durability of his verses? I was introduced to his astounding oeuvre as a schoolboy. My admiration and adulation for this spectacular poet has never left me. His mind teemed like a river full of migrating salmon.
For my money, Keats is the poet who symbolises the romantic movement better than any other. He died younger than the others and his all too brief life was touched by grief again and again. Though his life was maudlin, yet he never despaired. He sought solace and pleasance in even the most mundane things. John Keats had an uncanny knack of turning the unremarkable into something splendiferous. His sublime intellect has thrilled millions down the centuries. His refined sentimentality made for a teeming imagination and enabled him to compose some of the most exquisite and artful poems in any language. He composed panegyrics to nature that have seldom been equalled. That is why his name is illumined in eternal glory.
By the age of 20 John Keats’s had seen both his parents die, his younger brother die and John himself was terminally ill. It may appear to be a life swathed in deepest sable. Despite the many bitter blows from fate, John was ever upbeat and resilient. His consciousness of his mortality made him ever more productive.
Keats’ verse is a palimpsest of classical education overlaid with the tropes of the Romantic Movement. An almost childlike sincerity shines through his masterful verses. The lucidity and originality of his work has few peers. Read his poems and you shall find yourself possessed by the ‘blithe spirit’ that his limned. Dip into his verses and you shall ‘breathe serene’ as he put it.
John Keats was born at London in 1795. The family at first lived in a house near where the Barbican Tube Station now stands. The house is no longer extant. John was to spend all but the last 6 months of his life in London. His father ran a livery stables and inn. John was one of four surviving children. John’s brief life was tinged by grief again and again. When John was small his father perished from falling from his steed. The family was middle class but in straitened circumstances. An education was knocked into him. He was quick at his books and soon had the better of Latin and Ancient Greek accidence. The classics fructified in his ever-fertile mind. John drunk deep the inspiration of Ancient Mediterranean cultures. John’s schoolmasters were agog at their pupil’s uncommon gifts. Back then pupils were taught the art of scansion. He honed the craft of word weaving.
By his mid-teens Keats was composing sublime and elegant poesy. Few pieces of his juvenilia have survived. As an adolescent he was afflicted by more and deeper anxieties than usual. The familial financial situation was perennially insecure. His mother rewed but her second marriage was cataclysmic. Within weeks she and John’s stepfather separated though they never divorced. Divorced as a very lengthy, expensive and ignominious process back then for both the sinned against as well as the sinning.
When John was only 14 his mother died. He was left to care for his younger sister and two younger brothers. Despite his bereavements he did not dwell on tristful themes. His poesy is replete with vitality and buoyancy.
Another disadvantage that beset young John was that he was also decidedly lacking in stature. In an age when most men were 5’6’’ or so he was 5’2’’. He felt his smallness made most girls unapproachable. His fiscal challenges did not add to his allure as a suitor.
In his late teens Keats was apprenticed to an apothecary (pharmacist) after a few years he qualified in that profession. He considered upgrading his qualifications to become a physician. This would have assured him a handsome income. In the end he decided against it. His true talent lay in composing verses. He wanted to throw all his time and endeavour into his first love: poesy. That was to be his vocation. Little did he know how limited his time was to be.
At the age of 18 a volume entitled ‘Poems by John Keats’ was published. It sold a respectable few hundred copies. That was very creditable for a first publication especially as he had no connections. For a literary debut it is sans pareil. The literary genius was on his way to achieving immortality.
Around this age John was smitten by his neighbour, Fanny Brawne. But her family disapproved of him. He was not affluent, and they thought he had few prospects. They did not want their daughter marrying beneath her.
As a member of the Romantic movement, Keats rejoiced in the most ordinary ordinary things: in plants, in trees, valleys, the wind and wine. Others would pass these things by without a second glance. Keats took more than solace from the natural world and unremarkable occurrences. He gleaned gladness and inspiration from the seemingly quotidian. Though his life was grief-laden and lovelorn he did not dwell on heartrending themes. His work is astonishingly free of plaintive verses. The epistolary evidence of John Keats’ is of a vivacious and buoyant character. He was no tragedian.
The world was in turmoil as Keats rose to manhood. The Napoleonic Wars were fought all across Europe and back again. France clubbed small nations insensible. From New Orleans to Nepal, the British were fighting. The Royal Navy battled the French upon the seas and oceans. Battles, sieges, spoliations and revolutions raged. In the British Isles there was radicalism in the air. Some preached revolution. The reaction was hellbent on crushing the life out of radicals. Some were vindicators of abolition of servitude. Britain was ruled by a lunatic monarch and his comically corpulent son. All this seems to have passed Keats’ by. When it came to politics he glazed over. He reacted to the upheaval with complete indifference.
By the age of 20 Keats was making waves in literary London. He moved in the same circles as Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey and Leigh Hunt. He even more William Wordsworth once though Wordsworth was a generation older than him. Wordsworth was impressed with Keats’s work. Wordsworth was a trailblazer for the romantic movement in the British Isles. He was almost a father figure for the junior members of the movement. But he was an 18th century father: distant and cold.
Though John Keats knew these other romantic poets, he was not as wealthy as them. He was not afflicted with the same guilt that they were. He was also indifferent to their political opinions.
Greece was Keats muse. Alas and alack, he never visited Hellas. The Napoleonic Wars and his chronic impecuniosity precluded a trip the cradle of European civilisation.
In 1818 Keats had his annus mirabilis. This fruitful year built his reputation. What spurred him to be so productive? It might have been his increasing cognizance of mortality. That year his brother died of tuberculosis at the age of 19. It was a shot across Keats’ bows. John himself coughed up dark blood that year. With his education in materia medica he wrote that he knew it to be arterial blood. His days were numbered. Knowing a cold and silent grave was not far off he set to the task of offering something to posterity. From that moment on his feathered quill was seldom still.
Residing by Hampstead Heath, John composed five of his six odes. The house was owned by an Old Etonian barrister named Richard Woodhouse. Woodhouse was in bewildered awe of Keats’ unequalled verses.
Some of Keats’ work is about classical themes. Endymion is a reworking of an Ancient Greek work about a shepherd who has had a spell cast on him causing him to sleep for centuries. ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever/ It will never pass away into nothingness…’ is it overture.
Some of Keats’s verse delight in simplicity. For instance, Faery song is a charmingly spare, lyrical and almost infantile ditty:
Shed no tear. Oh shed no tear!/ The flower will bloom another year/ Overheard/ Look overhead!/ Amongst the flowers/ White and red./ Weep no more/ Oh weep no more/ The young bud sleeps in the root’s white core/ Dry your eyes/ Oh dry your eyes!/ For I was taught in paradise/ to ease the breast of melodies.
The poem goes on to be a valediction. Perhaps it was prospective of his own impending demise. ‘Adieu, adieu/ I fly adieu/ I vanish in the heaven’s blue/ Adieu. Adieu.’
The verses that Keats wrote are unfailingly blithe, charming and splendiferous. He was ever mindful, as poets seemed not to be, that the chief distinction between poesy and prose is that the former is made to be declaimed.
Keats composed some magnificent and challenging pieces. His reputation is built largely on his resplendent odes. Many consider ‘Ode on a Grecian urn’ to be his masterwork. He addresses this praise poem to an ancient artefact and lauds it as being more expressive of past glories than anything a poet could write:
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
Think of these lines being whispered by a mortally ill 23 year old, and you will catch their cadences.
Bear in mind that Keats was writing in an epoch when ’ye’, ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ were still in common usage. His verses were flawlessly constructed in terms of meter and rhyme scheme. Yet there was never any strained wording.
For my money ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is his most stupendous accomplishment: In the first stanza he writes;
…light-wingèd Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
The reversal of the adjective noun order gets the attention of readers though this was not unusual at the time. He accented the ‘e’ of winged for the sake of meter. A dryad is a living spirt of the trees in Ancient Greek theogony.
The second verse of the poem is surely the most splendidly evocative description of wine of all time:
O for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delvèd earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country-green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South!
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stainèd mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
Though the work is packed with classical allusions he bears his erudition lightly. These were widely recognised at the time. In fact, his references to mythology were relatively few and not abstruse for the era. He succeeded in putting into verse the seemingly inexpressible mental sensation of imbibing alcohol.
It was an inestimable privilege for me to stand under a tree outside the house in Hampstead where he wrote this poem. The tree that stands now is probably a descendant of the original.
John Keats was capable of composing a poem on a well-worn theme without ever being trite. He avoided the weary cliché. His use of imagery was extraordinarily inventive. His poesy had verve and bounciness.
In Ode to a Nightingale, Keats wrote ‘tender is the night.’ This gave F Scott FitzGerald the title of his novel.
Later in Ode to a Nightingale, Keats writes of how it is not worth living to a sorrowful and troubled old age:
the weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
He composed this in May 1819. He was 23 and already had tuberculosis. He was growing ever more conscious of his impending demise. That is why it was worth persuading himself that living long was not to be sought after. As he sputtered up blood, he was redoubled in his conviction that he would not become a doctor. He must through all his passion and his little remaining life into his poetical works. It would take another three years to become a doctor. As we now know he had only two years left to live. The fatally stricken poet wisely chose not to squander his remaining years studying for a profession that he could not live to join.
Towards the end of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ he wrote ‘adieu, adieu!’ He was preparing to take leave of this mortal coil.
In his ‘Ode to sleep’ Keats encapsulates the wonderment of slumber in lines which must be susurrated; ‘Oh soft embalmer of the midnight still!’
There is a freshness and a vitality to Keats’ work that is seldom surpassed. Though he addressed some well-worn themes he did so with exceptional insight and was never hackneyed.
The poesy of John Keats did not meet universal approbation. The Irish Tory MP John Wilson Croker reviewed Keats poems in the Quarterly Review. Croker panned Keats’ work as jejune. He scorned the young poet as half-educated. Keats was contemptuously said to be part of the Cockney School: a circle of poets who had not attended Varsity. John Wilson Croker later coined the term ‘the Conservative Party’.
John Keats composed some light-hearted verses. Perhaps his most unserious is a playful poem entitled ‘A song about myself’,
There was a naughty boy,
A naughty boy was he,
He would not stop at home,
He could not quiet be-
He took
In his knapsack
A book
Full of vowels
And a shirt …
So he followed his nose
To the north
To the north
He followed his nose
To the north…
The cheeky little poem showed he was capable of writing playful pieces for children. Plain though this poem is there is a certain sparkle to it. He never married and had no children. Therefore, it was the wains of others who were reared on a wholesome diet of Keats.
Keats composed many more awestriking lines. They are too numerous to cite then all here. I can offer but a small sample of his splendid work. He was incapable of mediocrity. He addressed himself to common themes but always found an original angle. John studied famous poets closely but did not imitate them. He had found his own voice as a schoolboy.
The poems of Keats are fabulously evocative. His use of imagery and other literary devices is unequalled. The lines’ enjambment succeeds so splendidly. The themes are gorgeously enmeshed. You may find your mind aswim with wonderment at his ineffable and peerless brilliancy. The work is magnificently memorable and the marvellous musicality is enchanting. His euphonious and felicitous verses are a rare delight. Keats cared deeply not just for the signification of his words but for their sound. Read his work and you shall be entranced and spellbound by his heavenly poems. Dull would he be of soul who could read his poesy and not find himself carried on ‘the viewless wings of poesy’ as Keats himself put it. A freshness and an audacity pervades his poems. His lines shall fill you with an unexampled rapture. The heavenly lyricism and unimprovable diction of his verse’s accounts for his exceptional popularity.
The complete works of John Keats consists of a couple of hundred poems. By the standards of the day none of his poems were unusually long. Endymion is but a couple of thousand lines, but many poets composed poems of several thousand lines back then. He did not write prose. However, there are many letters by him that are extant. This epistolary evidence is the basis for biographies of the stricken young writer.
As his medical condition disimproved he decided to take ship to Italy. There was no hope of beating consumption. However, in a more clement climate his life might at least be extended, with luck, for a couple of years. In September 1820 Keats took ship for the Mediterranean. It was his only ever trip out of England. As the ship rolled and pitched upon the foaming deep it was torment for John in his condition. He wrote, ‘Now more than ever seems it rich to die/ To cease upon a midnight without pain.’ Accompanied by a doctor friend he landed in Italy a few weeks later.
There they travelled overland to Rome. Because of Keats increasing frailty they had to travel gingerly. Why did he choose to go to the Eternal City? Further south the warmer and even drier climate would have agreed more with his far from robust constitution. Perhaps John elected to go to Rome as he had spent his childhood days reading Latin and learning of the city’s former glories.
At school John had learnt a little Italian. He probably never thought he would have a chance to use it. It was taught as a literary not a conversational language. To his chagrin he was so frail that he could scarcely leave the house. His last few letters are scarcely lachrymose. His fortitude in the face of death unmanned even his doctor friend. Only in the final hours did Keats’ mood grow tenebrous.
Not being a religious man, John did not have the consolations of faith. He does not seem to have believed that he was going to an afterlife. He fantasised in a last letter, ‘I think I shall be remembered among the English poets after my death.’ However, he gave strict instructions on what to inscribe on his headstone. His name was not to appear. Was his modesty or even self-effacement? His gravestone reads:
‘This grave /contains /all that was mortal of a /young English poet /who on his deathbed/ in the bitterness of his heart/ at the maliciousness of his enemies /desired these words to be engraven on his tombstone:/ ‘’Here lies one whose name was writ in water.’’/ 24 February 1821.
The headstone was to be adorned with the image of lyre. That is because in Greece poems were declaimed to the accompaniment of a lyre. Keats’ works were lyrical.
The mention of Keats’ foes reminds us how he triumphed over them a thousand-fold. Who now remembers the name of any of his enemies?
John and his friend took a house by the Spanish Steps. His condition worsened drastically. Sooner than anyone had foreseen the angel of death hovered over him. John Keats faced his doom with rare stoicism. Such was his agony that he welcomed death as a blissful deliverance. His last utterance was ‘Thank God it has come!’
On 24 February 1821 John Keats drew his last breath. His death mask was made. This is now in the possession of Eton College. A small funeral cortege bore his body to Il Cimiterio Acattolica just inside the southern walls of Rome. There he has lain ever since. He is endowed with eternal youth. Think of his surpassing verses as literary elixir.
News travelled slowly in those days. It took a few weeks before Shelley, who was also in Italy, was informed of his friend’s death. P B Shelley found it a very bitter blow. Shelley mourned his friend by composing the most stupendous elegy of all time: Adonais. It opens ‘I weep for Adonais; he is dead.’ He was calling his friend an Adonis but for the sake of scansion added a vowel.
By the time of John Keats’ death his poems had sold but 200 copies. He is now one of the most widely read poets in any language. A stave of Keats is just the tonic you need when in a melancholy mood.
When Oscar Wilde was in self-imposed exile after his release from Reading Gaol he journeyed to La Citta Eterna. There he visited Keats’ final resting place. He was moved to compose a poem at the grave of a fellow literary martyr.
John Keats’ speaks to every succeeding generation. His message of the joy of the natural world is universal. His vivacity and mind-boggling verbal intelligence shall always be appreciated. Though he was diminutive he is a colossus.
I planned to visit his grave again this year on the bicentenary of his death. Beneath my feet there would have been a richer dust concealed. I wished to declaim his verses to him. As though he could reach out to me from centuries ago and commune with me. His short and magnific life was tragically short. He accomplished more in his lease of years than a million men do in an ordinary lifespan.
John Keats has achieved literary apotheosis. His place in literature is assured. The glee he has brought to untold millions of many generations has won him a seat on Mount Olympus.