The Wild Reed: Under the Blossoming Pear Tree

Saturday, May 08, 2021

Under the Blossoming Pear Tree

For the last two days I’ve been off work recovering from surgery to repair both an umbilical hernia and an epigastric hernia. I was off five days before then, quarantining after a COVID-19 test. Yes, even though I’ve been vaccinated since January, I still needed to be tested and go into quarantine ahead of the day of my surgery (which was this past Wednesday).

Anyway, I’m making a good and steady recovery; obviously very sore and being very careful in moving around. One thing I’ve enjoyed doing is sitting out in the backyard under the pear tree, which is just finishing its blossoming phase.

You may recall that back in March, on the spring equinox actually (left), I also enjoyed sitting under this pear tree as I read a biography of the great Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821). Well, believe it or not, I’m still reading that same biography.

It’s Darkling I Listen: The Last Days and Death of John Keats by John Evangelist Walsh.

Like I said back in March . . . Yes, I know it’s an odd book to be reading at a time of year that’s all about new life. And yet human experience is always a profound blending of life and death, beginnings and endings, loss and promise, and, in the midst of such things, the longing and search for meaning. My work as a spiritual health provider (or chaplain) in the field of palliative care has certainly brought the mysterious gravity of both this longing and search for meaning to my awareness, and yet I’m not unsettled by acknowledging and sitting with it, even under a pear tree!

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 death approached, Keats questioned why he was] dying overcome by doubt and fear and in utter misery of spirit. Why [was] God doing this awful thing, depriving [him] of the final comfort he grants so many! (How familiar a cry that is, how much it resembles the earnest petition voiced by the father of the possessed boy to Jesus, “I believe, help thou my unbelief!”) In response, the appalled [friend and companion] Joseph Severn could only offer to read some passages from Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Dying. In [a letter to his friend Haslam] he added a fervent, obviously sincere hope “that some angel of goodness will lead [Keats] through this dark wilderness.”

The question of whether Keats – a poet at the same time both pagan and godly – on his deathbed came back to the faith he had disdained as a free-thinking teenager (becoming, if anything precisely, a Deist) cannot now be settled. The question remains, though, tantalizing as ever, still eliciting a cacaphony of opinion. One biographer will imperiously dismiss the very possibility, another will say it is unlikely or extremely improbable. Very few are willing to concede that it might have happened, that Keats in his last hours might have turned back to the faith of his youth.

Robert Gittings, one of the ablest of Keats’ chroniclers, briefly reviews the evidence, then concludes that everything said by Severn on the topic, early and late, was simply “to persuade himself that Keats had died a Christian.” The poet certainly did, Gittings agrees, become “more reconciled” to his fate at the end, but there is “no sign that he accepted any of the comforts of his friend’s Christianity.” What Gittings means to say is clear, of course, but he has not quite said it, showing how hard it can be when treating this question to keep the scales in balance. Some of the comforts of Christianty, Keats certainly did accept, and with gratitude, namely, the spiritual insights provided by Bishop Jeremy Taylor. During many weeks before his death, Keats listened attentively to Severn reading from the pages of Holy Dying, often twice a day, morning and evening. (Did Severn in answer to Keats’ unconscious prayer read the section entitled, “Of the practice of the grace of faith in time od sickness,” or another called, “Of repentence in time of sickness”? Perhaps Keats himself would have preferred to hear “Consideration of the Vanity and shortness of man’s life,” or a briefer comment on “The miseries of man’s life”).

Certainly Keats gave no definite sign of conversion, none that has entered the record. Yet there is one other small bit of evidence to be considered, one that has never been given it due weight, that is, the good example set by Severn’s tireless service on behalf of his friend during those long months in Rome. Keats knew very well that what his companion was doing for him was something out of the ordinary, knew that Severn was risking both his artistic future and his health (the interminable sleepless nights and the unrelenting daily attention, if nothing else). It puzzled him to explain why and how so young a man, with so much of his own life to live, could do so much so uncomplainingly. Then the answered dawned.

“Severn,” said Keats suddenly one day, “I now understand how you can hear all this – ’Tis your Christan faith; and here I am, with desperation in death that would disgrace the commonest fellow!” It is correct, of course, that Severn’s religious faith played its large part in enabling him to carry the strain (he said so himself), nor was it the first time that example spoke so loudly. Keats’ not only seeing the truth but putting it into words must not be lightly passed over. He’d be given, it appears, rather more than a nudge toward reconciliation.

Left: A portrait of Joseph Severn by his friend Seymour Kirkup (1822).

In later years Severn occasionally reverted to the question of Keats’ spiritual hunger in those last hours. Once in an article published in 1863 in both England and America, he recalled how he it had been with Keats during those pathetic final days at No. 26: “In all he then uttered he breathed a simple, Christian spirit; indeed I always think that he died a Christian, that 'Mercy,' was trembling on his dying lips, and that his tortured soul was received by those Blessed Hands which could alone welcome it.” In that belated statement a reader may place as much or as little credence as he wishes – taking care to note Severn’s own judicious “I always think,” which rightly does not insist on the accuracy of his opinion. But concerning one additional fact, since it was reported at the time by the man who witnessed it, there is no arguement. In his last hours when the suffering Keats felt that death was hovering only hours away, more than once he murmured a heartfelt Thank God!