Keats's Charactery

John Keats was notoriously young, twenty-five years old when he died of tuberculosis in Rome, and at that time he was not basking in the venerable twilight of an acknowledged poetic master. He was, to some contemporaries, an upstart, and his readers partly ridiculed him.

I think it makes sense that the work he did influenced him to foreboding and a preoccupation with death, because besides writing poetry he also worked as a surgeon. His poem "When I have Fears that I may Cease to Be" I remember from Grade 12 English Literature class as a time-overleaping twin to John Milton's earlier 17th-century sonnet "When I Consider How My Light is Spent"; and it is a prime example of the poet's foreboding strain.

"Portrait of Keats, listening to a nightingale on Hampstead Heath"
Joseph Severn (ca. 1845)
via Wikimedia Commons

"When I have Fears" is from the year 1818; Keats likely had not developed tuberculosis yet, and he died years later in 1821. That said, Keats's brother had already been ill, offering reasonable grounds for Keats to feel a semi-medieval fascination with Death.

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.-*

(I wonder what the last two-and-a-half-lines mean. Might they mean that death is so all-devouring that even we forget even the warmest desires in life, when its warning shadow overcasts our consciousness?)

* From: "When I have Fears that I may Cease to Be" on Wikipedia
further information from "John Keats" and "When I Consider How My Light is Spent"

A Toast To Winter: Part IV, Shelley Twice

After looking in the Lighthouse's archives, I find that a 2009 post here in fact expresses insights into Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ode To The West Wind" that are far better than anything I could muster today. The Ode does feel like a fall poem rather than a winter poem, too, given the impressions of movement and the falling leaves, etc. But like the graves between the spring or summer flowers in a churchyard, Winter is a dark presence that pervades the poem.

Here are excerpts of the Ode, then. I am presenting them without further commentary. In them, the poet addresses the West Wind, 'thou,' as if it were a human being.

O, thou,

Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave, until

Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth,

***

Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night

Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,

Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere

Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: O, hear!

***

Be through my lips to unawakened earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O, wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"

***

"Prometheus Unbound; a lyrical drama in four acts with other poems/Ode to the West Wind" (Wikisource)
The Ode was first published in 1820.

To A Daffodil

William Wordsworth, 1770-1850
English poet

I WANDERED lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

1804.

*

In honour of the arrival of spring, much belated this year but obviously welcome.

*

From: The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, William Michael Rossetti, Ed. (London: Ward, Lock & Co.)