21 October: Boreham on John Keats

The Broken Lyre
How are we to account for the perennial fascination of John Keats, whose birthday we mark today? His very name stands invested with a subtle glamour; but why? Dying at 25, he won for himself, both by his personality and by his pen, an abiding place in the hearts of all English-speaking peoples. A man's personal magnetism is an elusive quantity; once he is dead it is difficult to describe its power or explain its charm; but the personality of Keats must have been extraordinarily engaging. He completely captivated all who met him. Men whom nobody would regard as emotional were swept off their feet by his attractions. Such descriptions as we have of him are couched in a vein which a sentimental novelist might employ in describing his heroine.

If we had met the poet on the street, one of his friends tells us, we should certainly have turned to enjoy a second glance at a figure so striking and beautiful. He was petite, it is true, being scarcely five feet in height; but his frame was well-knit and excellently proportioned. Beautiful himself, he worshipped beauty. His love of loveliness was a perfect passion. All the superb silences of the open air, as he himself tells us, seemed to be crying mutely for a voice—his voice—by means of which they could express themselves. He aspired to be the articulation of the dumb beauty of the universe.

The Spirit Of Poesy Imprisoned In Severest Prose
That John Keats was a born poet, nobody has ever questioned. As a child he felt that he had been sent into the world to sing some deathless songs, and never once, to the day of his death, did he doubt his inspiration. When his mother died, his guardian apprenticed him, at the age of 15 to an Edmonton surgeon. But he had no heart in the business, and after assisting at one operation, he gladly laid aside his lancet for ever. He felt that he would rather starve at poetry than thrive at anything else. Even when he tried to break the spell of destiny by flinging himself into the fun and frolic of life, the muses called him back.

No sooner had I stepped into these pleasures
Than I began to think of rhymes
and measures.
The air that floated by me seemed to say:
"Write; thou wilt
never have a better day!"
And so I did.

The pity of it is that in Keats we have an example of a man whose circumstances were perpetually at war with his tastes, with his nature and with his aspirations. He was essentially an aesthetic. Every nerve in his body thrilled at a vision of beauty, whether that beauty was the beauty of a lovely sight or of a lovely sound, the beauty of nature or of art. His soul seemed made for song. Yet, by some impish freak of unpropitious fortune, everything conspired to render his life prosaic, uncongenial, even sordid. A born artist, he awoke with a shock to the uninspiring fact that he was the son of an ostler, destined to spend the most formative years of his life in the atmosphere of a stable. Instinctively knightly, he was fated to move among women who—to put the case as politely as possible—were in no way calculated to inflame the ardour of his chivalry. Naturally clinging and of an affectionate temperament, he fell violently in love with a girl, Fanny Brawne by name, who worshipped the very ground he trod. But what hope had he of marrying? Adoring life and colour and beauty, he was, nevertheless racked through all his maturer days by a pitiless disease that almost drove him to suicide. And, devotedly attached to his native country, he had tearfully to leave it in quest of health, and, failing to find it, to lay his bones to rest upon a foreign shore. During the last weeks of his brief life, several letters arrived from England addressed to him in a feminine hand that he worshipped; but he could not brace himself to the tantalising torture of reading them, and they were placed unopened in his coffin.

The Dawn That Hints Of The Splendour of Noon
Yet, in spite of all this—his uncongenial environment, his frail frame, his hopeless love affair and his early death—Keats wrote poetry. Let it be admitted that he perpetrated reams of twaddle that should never have been printed—"marshy and sandy flats of sterile and futile verse," as Swinburne cruelly called them. Let it be admitted, too, that much of the remainder is marked by immaturity and mediocrity. Two wonders yet remain. The first is that in all the circumstances, we should be able to find among those marshy flats any "purple patches of floral primrose." And the second, and by far the greater, wonder is that, situated as he was, Keats should have given us a few immortal lyrics whose richness and lustre have never been surpassed. Nobody understood better than Keats the melody of phrasing, the poet's magic art of setting words to music.

Tennyson used to say that, if he had lived, Keats would have taken his place among the very greatest of our English poets. If he had lived! That is as far as one can go. Nobody knew better than he did that death had robbed him of his triumph. He felt that the music that he had actually created merely represented the scraping of the violin strings before the real performance begins. Oppressed by this cruel fact he asked, in dying, that his only epitaph should be: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water!" and, on a plain white stone above his head, those words, surmounted by a broken lyre, were duly carved. On the morning of Feb. 26, 1821, a slow and melancholy cortege, made up of British residents in Rome and of British tourists who chanced to be visiting the city, made its way to the old Protestant cemetery on the hill, and amidst the ivy-covered and crumbling ruins of the Honorian walls, close to the stately tomb of Caius Cestius, they reverently laid the remains of this singularly captivating and remarkably brilliant young Englishman. In fact or in fancy, we have all paid pilgrimage to that Italian tomb, have pondered its pathetic epitaph, and have wistfully speculated with Tennyson on what might have been.

F W Boreham

Image: John Keats