The epitaph on his grave reads, “Here lies one whose name was writ on water.”
Life tells us to seize the day but Practicality whimpers otherwise.
Keats had few restraints. Or time. Perhaps that best brought out this gifted poet.
Few will ever have the money, time, or blithe disregard to carry out the romantic and sexual impulses that all of us have. Keats did.
Keats didn’t die for his art but rather he lived out his art.
We allow rogues when they are this talented. And this doomed.
Rest in Peace, John Keats.
Over the Hill and Over the Dale
by John Keats (1795 – 1821)
Over the hill and over the dale,
And over the bourn to Dawlish —
Where gingerbread wives have a scanty sale
And gingerbread nuts are smallish.
Rantipole Betty she ran down a hill
And kicked up her petticoats fairly;
Says I I’ll be Jack if you will be Gill —
So she sat on the grass debonairly.
“Here’s somebody coming, here’s somebody coming!”
Says I “Tis the wind at a parley.”
So without any fuss any hawing and humming
She lay on the grass debonairly.
Here’s somebody here and here’s somebody there!
Says I hold your tongue you young gipsy;
So she held her tongue and lay plump and fair
And dead as a Venus tipsy.
O who wouldn’t hie to Dawlish fair,
O who wouldn’t stop in a Meadow,
O [who] would not rumple the daisies there
And make the wild fern for a bed do!
Keats again. This diseased young poet died of tuberculosis at 25. He wrote La Belle Dame sans Merci (internal link) and Ode on a Grecian Urn among hundreds of other pieces.
This poem was published after his death. He was naturally afraid of death with his condition which was incurable and of course mightily feared. As a medical student he full well knew he was doomed.
He wrote lighter poems such as Where ye be going, you Devon maid? which showed Keats had some fun before he died. I’ve included that poem at the bottom of this page after When I Have Fears.
Keats represents an unapproachable gap between those gentleman and women schooled in the classics and those of us today who were taught in academically impoverished public schools.
They knew Latin and Greek and most certainly French. References to “an amarous Zephyr” or “Porphyro” or “silken Samarkand” weren’t meant to show off a poet’s education but were the common currency among the upper classes for whom most of these poets wrote.
That gulf continues to this day. Read any of Aldous Huxley’s essays like those in Beyond the Mexique Bay and be embarrassed in finding how little you know. You intuitively sense that he is making great and profound points yet every paragraph means looking up things that a contemporary of his would already know.
I knew a Cambridge educated newspaper editor named Michael Duffet. He was warm and humorous and never condescending. Still, I knew he was disappointed with how few classics I had read. “Tom, you haven’t read that? You absolutely must!”
For my part I could not understand how he had managed to read all of those works in just a few years at university. But schooling in Latin and Greek and the classics begun years before in lower grades.
Michael’s desk was covered in books in Japanese and Arabic because he often translated one into another. And into German. Probably others. He had lived for five years with the Bedouins after Cambridge and then worked his way through India and then onto Japan.
The gap in our education was oceans’ wide and I am sad to this day over not completely benefitting from his scholarship. And so it is, too, for all of us with so many of the great English poets.
When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be
by John Keats (1795-1821)
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink
Read by Frank James
Where Be Ye Going, You Devon Maid?
by John Keats by John Keats (1795-1821)
Where be ye going, you Devon maid?
And what have ye there i’ the basket?
Ye tight little fairy, just fresh from the dairy,
Will ye give me some cream if I ask it?
I love your meads, and I love your flowers,
And I love your junkets mainly,
But ‘hind the door, I love kissing more,
O look not so disdainly!
I love your hills, and I love your dales,
And I love your flocks a-bleating;
But O, on the heather to lie together,
With both our hearts a-beating!
I’ll put your basket all safe in a nook,
Your shawl I’ll hang up on this willow,
And we will sigh in the daisy’s eye,
And kiss on a grass-green pillow.
This poem, this prose, and this song, all remind me of each other.
Ben Whishaw beautifully reads Keats.
La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad by John Keats (1795 -1821)
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.
I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
‘I love thee true’.
She took me to her Elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.
And there she lullèd me asleep,
And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Thee hath in thrall!’
I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.
And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
The Sweet Cheat Gone
by Albert Proust (1871 -1922)
Book Six of Six in the series Remembrances of Things Past. Alternatively, In Quest of Lost Time.
“Mademoiselle Albertine has gone!” How much farther does anguish penetrate in psychology than psychology itself! A moment ago, as I lay analysing my feelings, I had supposed that this separation without a final meeting was precisely what I wished, and, as I compared the mediocrity of the pleasures that Albertine afforded me with the richness of the desires which she prevented me from realising, had felt that I was being subtle, had concluded that I did not wish to see her again, that I no longer loved her. But now these words: “Mademoiselle Albertine has gone!” had expressed themselves in my heart in the form of an anguish so keen that I would not be able to endure it for any length of time. And so what I had supposed to mean nothing to me was the only thing in my whole life. How ignorant we are of ourselves.
Norwegian Wood (This Bird has Flown) by Lennon-McCartney (19660
I once had a girl
Or should I say she once had me
She showed me her room
Isn’t it good, Norwegian wood?
She asked me to stay
And she told me to sit anywhere
So I looked around
And I noticed there wasn’t a chair
I sat on a rug biding my time
Drinking her wine
We talked until two and then she said
“It’s time for bed”
She told me she worked
In the morning and started to laugh
I told her I didn’t
And crawled off to sleep in the bath
And when I awoke I was alone
This bird had flown
So I lit a fire
Isn’t it good, Norwegian wood?
“We passionately long for there to be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years, we are unfaithful to what we once were, to what we wished to remain immortally. Even without supposing that death is to alter us more completely than the changes that occur in the course of our lives, if in that other life we were to encounter the self that we have been, we should turn away from ourselves as from those people with whom we were once on friendly terms but whom we have not seen for years . . . We dream much of a paradise, or rather of a number of successive paradises, but each of them is, long before we die, a paradise lost, in which we should feel ourselves lost too.”
Marcel Proust
How do you prefer your sleeping bag?
‘On the outside grows the furside, on the inside grows the skinside; So the furside is the outside, and the skinside is the inside.”
Herbert Ponting, The Sleeping Bag
Or put another way
HE killed the noble Mudjokivis.
Of the skin he made him mittens,
Made them with the fur side inside,
Made them with the skin side outside.
He, to get the warm side inside,
Put the inside skin side outside;
He, to get the cold side outside,
Put the warm side fur side inside.
That ’s why he put the fur side inside,
Why he put the skin side outside,
Why he turned them inside outside.
Anonymous, The Modern Hiawatha
And from the Master
By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them;
Bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.
Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha III
Well Said
“A smile is the chosen vehicle for all ambiguities.”
Pierre, Melville
Like Keats, all poets seek to reason out beauty
For beauty being the best of all we know
Sums up the unsearchable and secret aims
Of nature
The Growth of Love, Robert Bridges
A Moment Lasting Forever
Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms
which I gaze on so fondly today
were to change by tomorrow and fleet in my arms
like fairy gifts fading away
Thou wouldst still be adored
as this moment thou art
let thy lovliness fade as it will
and around the dear ruin each wish of my heart
would entwine itself verdantly still
Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms, Thomas Moore
Does some writing remind you of others? To me, these three seem linked.
La Belle Dame sans Merci:
A Ballad by John Keats
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.
I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
‘I love thee true’.
She took me to her Elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.
And there she lullèd me asleep,
And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Thee hath in thrall!’
I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.
And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
The Sweet Cheat Gone
by Albert Proust.
Book Six of Six in the series Remembrances of Things Past. Alternatively, In Quest of Lost Time.
“Mademoiselle Albertine has gone!” How much farther does anguish penetrate in psychology than psychology itself! A moment ago, as I lay analysing my feelings, I had supposed that this separation without a final meeting was precisely what I wished, and, as I compared the mediocrity of the pleasures that Albertine afforded me with the richness of the desires which she prevented me from realising, had felt that I was being subtle, had concluded that I did not wish to see her again, that I no longer loved her. But now these words: “Mademoiselle Albertine has gone!” had expressed themselves in my heart in the form of an anguish so keen that I would not be able to endure it for any length of time. And so what I had supposed to mean nothing to me was the only thing in my whole life. How ignorant we are of ourselves.
Norwegian Wood by The Beatles
I once had a girl
Or should I say she once had me
She showed me her room
Isn’t it good Norwegian wood?
She asked me to stay
And she told me to sit anywhere
So I looked around
And I noticed there wasn’t a chair
I sat on a rug biding my time
Drinking her wine
We talked until two and then she said
“It’s time for bed”
She told me she worked
In the morning and started to laugh
I told her I didn’t
And crawled off to sleep in the bath
And when I awoke I was alone
This bird had flown
So I lit a fire
Isn’t it good Norwegian wood?
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever” is an exceptional line by Keats. He then gets better. “Some shape of beauty moves away the pall” easily reasons why beauty is joyous, why it counters our dark spirits.
Besides keeping a quiet bower for us and a sleep full of sweet dreams.
Endymion by John Keats
(an excerpt)
A Poetic Romance
BOOK I
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
‘Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven’s brink.
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,— that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
Has always seemed arresting to me but a bit incomprehensible. Perhaps it is the symmetry of that couplet that makes it tantalizing approachable and yet unreachable.
H.W. Fowler was the consumnate English grammarian. His Dictionary of Modern English Usage was for decades the record book that settled all linguistic bets. See if Keats’ writing becomes clearer upon reading Fowler on the word inevitable.
“What the critic means by inevitable is perhaps this: surveying a work of art, we feel sometimes that the whole and all the parts are sufficiently consistent and harmonious to produce on us the effect of truth; we then call it, for short, convincing: thus and thus, we mean, it surely may have been or may be; nothing inclines us to doubt.
To be convincing is but a step short of inevitable; when the whole and the parts are so admirably integrated that instead of Thus and thus it may have been we find ourselves forced to Thus and thus it must have been or was or is, when the change of a jot or tittle would be plain desecration, when we know we are looking at the Platonic idea itself and no mere copy, then the tale or the picture or the music attains to inevitableness.
Hmm. Admirably integrated. I am closer to understanding Keats. And I get closer and closer with each rereading of Fowler’s discussion.
His complete entry on inevitable spans six or seven lengthy paragraphs. His Dictionary was revised in 1965 by Sir Ernest Gowers and you can find a copy at most large used bookstores. I prefer Gower’s second edition.
