The Wild Reed: Reading About Keats on the Spring Equinox

Here in Minneapolis, the last two Saturday mornings (March 13 and today, March 20) have been just beautiful – warm, sunny, and . . . well, spring-like!

True, we had a mid-week snowfall (right), but there’s now only the smallest remnant of that. So I think it’s safe to say that we’ve seen winter’s last hurrah, especially with today being the spring equinox, a day “both holy and magical.”

I’ve been taking advantage of the return of spring by taking a chair outside and sitting in the backyard to read a book, and the book I’ve been reading is Darkling I Listen: The Last Days and Death of John Keats by John Evangelist Walsh.

Yes, I know, some might consider it a rather odd book to be reading at the time of year understood to be all about new life, but human experience is always a profound blending of life and death, beginnings and endings, loss and promise. My work as a spiritual health provider (or chaplain) in the field of palliative care has certainly brought the mysterious gravity of this blending to my awareness, and yet I’m not unsettled by acknowledging and sitting with it.

Speaking of sitting, I should say that my sitting outside under the pear tree and reading a book about the romantic poet John Keats was very much inspired by a scene from Bright Star, when Ben Whishaw, playing Keats, similarly sits in a garden under a tree.

Oh, and trust me; if I had his outfit, I’d be wearing it. For as I’ve noted previously. I could quite happily go through each and every day dressed in the attire of a nineteenth-century gentleman. There’s just something about the style and deportment of such a figure that appeals to me – a reserved veneer masking a sea of passion! At least that’s what I project onto this particular figure, and it’s a projection prompted by a number of characters I’m drawn to in various films and TV shows – Dick Dewy (James Murray) in Under the Greenwood Tree, Alexander Hartdegen (Guy Pearce) in The Time Machine, Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman) in Les Misérables, Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe) in The Woman in Black, John Mornay (Emun Elliott) in The Paradise, Dr. Alexander Sweet (Christian Camargo) in Penny Dreadful, Ross Poldark, that “renegade of principle” (Aidan Turner) in Poldark . . . and, of course, Whishaw as Keats.

Above: Abbie Cornish as Fanny Brawne and Ben Whishaw as John Keats in Jane Campion’s 2009 film Bright Star.

Which is a good segue into my sharing of the following from John Evangelist Walsh’s excellent Darkling I Listen: The Last Days and Death of John Keats.

As April [1819] drew to a close, suddenly, stunningly, from the scribbling of casual love verse [Keats] was swept to an entirely new level of inspiration, lofty past anything he’d known before – beyond his years, beyond his knowledge and experience of life, beyond even the technical artistry he’d shown in his previous writings. In rapid succession he produced four new poems, a ballad and three odes, that have long since found a place among those very few utterances that reach to the very pinnacle of lyric poetry. All four were directly inspired, if on different levels, by his consuming love for Fanny [Brawne].

The remarkable change that overtook Keats at this time was actually signaled in January, in a lesser way, by his writing of The Eve of St. Agnes (not inspired by Fanny yet surely written as his mind was aglow with her image). A long verse-narrative telling a simple love story, it offers little thought or action but much apt description of a sort that has earned it a special place in the hearts of many readers. Some weeks later came the ballad, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” a short but haunting portrayal of a knight whose heart is mysteriously entrammeled by a beautiful, enigmatic woman he meets in the woods (Fanny again). Almost immediately there followed the first of the three odes, “On a Grecian Urn,” then within another few days came the “To a Nightingale,” then “On Melancholy,” all finished by late May.

As with all great art, the three supreme odes have prompted any number of different, even contradictory interpretations – of course, as it should be. It is the special genius of poets to say many things at once, as life itself exhibits not one or two but many interwoven strands intricately patterned. Yet in pursuing the abstruser meanings of these three poems, critics seem often to overlook what is surely their true import and original, underlying inspiration. Each of the three great odes is a muffled cry from the very depths of the the heart over what appears the cruel transience and shortness of life, and the heartbreak of its close. Here is a lover – newly minted – in mortal anguish and despair over the harrowing thought that he, and by extension the woman he loves, will sometime have to die. Momentarily he dreams of alternatives – the seeming permanence to be found in art (“Grecian Urn”), and the soothing absence of individuality among lesser creatures (“Nightingale”). But neither of these ideas, static and lifeless as they are, he finds will serve (“Melancholy”). If being human means eventually to suffer death, it is still far, far better to possess life in all its glorious complexity, freedom, and capacity to feel.

Tragically, after completing the three great odes, Keats was given only another eight months in which to write before illness put a virtual end to his career a full year before his death. In those eight months, still riding the wave of his first inspiration, he wrote many fine things, wonderfully advanced and evocative things, adding to and securing his later fame. But never again, while several times coming close indeed, was he able to attain quite to the lofty height of the three odes. Whatever happened later between him and Fanny Brawne, this must always be remembered in her favor. Keats’ love for her, when it was new and vibrant that spring of 1819, gave him the one thing he so greatly craved and in the end was sure he had lost – literary immortality.