October means three things to me: my son's birthday (12!), Halloween, and Keats's birthday! John Keats was born on this day, Halloween, in 1795, 225 years ago. His life was short--he lived only to the age of 25, leaving us some of the most beautiful poems in the English language. Many days this month, I've been reading, copying out, or trying to memorize my favorites. Here is one, the beginning of Endymion:
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 cover 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.
Nor do we merely feel these essences
For one short hour; no, even as the trees
That whisper round a temple become soon
Dear as the temple's self, so does the moon,
The passion poesy, glories infinite,
Haunt us till they become a cheering light
Unto our souls, and bound to us so fast,
That, whether there be shine, or gloom o'ercast,
They alway must be with us, or we die.
My son has strict instructions to read this at my memorial. (And these instructions predated him. I think I first decided that this needed to be read at my memorial by the time I was in my early twenties, though I remember a poster of at least the first line on my wall as a teenager. The only place I cared to go when my parents took me to Rome was the Keats and Shelley memorial museum, which is where I got that poster. I'd have thought I'd outgrow this love for this poet who died so young--what could he know about life?--but I haven't.) I love this beginning of Endymion, which seems to me such a statement on the power and balm of beauty in whatever form, including poetry, in our lives. I can remember times when those words "Some shape of beauty moves away the pall / from our dark spirits" seemed to echo in my ears, when I was depressed and would see a dart of blue jay, or the sky mirrored in the pond's face, or a beautiful poem and feel at least I could endure a little longer. Beauty can be a balm. Of course, it isn't always.
And Keats's bower. Even though he was so young and it's tempting to say that no one that young could have any wisdom that would last, perhaps he was wise beyond his years, having seen his mother and brother die of tuberculosis, which, of course, would later kill him in his room near the Spanish Steps in Rome. (A collegiate me wrote a haiku about Keats in that room, but I doubt I can find that--or should.) So when he mentions "a sleep / Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing," I can't help but read the tuberculosis into that--that he knows something important about how distinctive restful sleep and breathing and health are, something that I as an insomniac and person who has had ill health appreciate. (Also, Keats was apprenticed to a surgeon for four years.) This poem--or piece of a poem--reminds me how much I love literature ("All lovely tales that we have heard or read"), and that I need to keep that in mind ("They alway must be with us, or we die."), a lesson you wouldn't think a person with an English PhD would need, and yet I do. (Holding onto poetry and literature and the other things that feed my soul are getting me through this pandemic--that and friends "as good as spring itself," as Hemingway said.)
Probably my favorite of the odes is "Ode to a Nightingale," but that is a difficult poem to copy out because of all its indentations. Also, it is for me a difficult poem to memorize. So I've been working instead on this, the third stanza of "Ode on Melancholy":
III
She dwells with Beauty--Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to Poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
Joy shows up in this poem too, this time personified, at least at first. Then Joy seems to be more of a plant that blooms a grape--a thing of the moment. Here, according to Keats, whoever really savors the joy of beauty also sees or experiences melancholy because beauty dies--or at least some beauty dies. (The beauty of Keats's work has not died for me! Some beauty does not die.) Perhaps part of why Keats's work endures is because he focuses so much on beauty and the life of the imagination. Perhaps.
Keats is a mystery indeed. How can anyone by the age of 25 create so many beautiful and wonderful enduring poems? Yes, many of us remember Keats mostly for the odes and maybe "The Eve of St. Agnes." But I'd argue that most great poets are this way: that contributing as many as five poems to the rich history and conversation of poetry in English is prodigious indeed. I would be ecstatic if I thought that out of my life of almost forty-eight years so far, I could contribute even one. I live in hope.
Here are what are thought to be Keats's last serious lines that he ever wrote, found on a blank space of the manuscript of a comic poem he was writing. The eerieness just suits Halloween, his birthday:
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm'd--see here it is--
I hold it towards you.
Have a wonderful and safe Halloween, everyone!
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