On Reading Keats’s Letters
Sanatan Chatterjee
Keats’s brief life was a continuous process of becoming, a journey from this world of pain, sorrow, misery and heartbreak to a world beyond the realm of time where the epistemological absolute of Truth and the aesthetic absolute of Beauty converged and become identical. While wholeheartedly following the call of longing, Keats’s self never entirely succumbed to it. The intense longing ran parallel to and was reinforced by the realistic acceptance of the finite world at his feet. Life was not a ‘having and resting’, but a continual process of ‘growing and becoming’. His letters show the development of his poetic career where he put much emphasis on ‘enduring the baffles of the world’. Life and its adversities constituted for him a ‘vale of soul-making’. In his letters the thought of transience and evanescence of Beauty and Joy is poignant, but there is also the realisation that the concepts of reality and the illusion of permanence and mutability, of fulfilment and decay belongs to the discursive human intellect. Like a pure poet, he always submitted to life ‘steadily, persistently and unflinchingly’; he had the capacity to see and to feel what life is. In the letters we can trace the development of a poetic mind from sensation to thought, from the temporal world to eternity, and the turning of his vain striving to transcend the mundane ‘sphere of sorrow’ and to the calm acceptance of emptiness and natural condition and conform to ‘a new knowledge of reality’.
Young John Keats was never a bookworm. He received from nature the talents of an excellent poet. His family wanted him to take up a career in medicine. However, all efforts in that direction were foiled by his frenzy for poetry. Keats wrote to J. H. Reynolds:
I find I cannot exist without poetry ... half the day will not do — the whole of it. [April 17, 1817]
The poetic ventures started to find refuge in a world beyond flux, the ardent lover of beauty started desperately to hold it firmly like a solid object cupped in hand. ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’ — this was his life-long creed. But did his love and pursuit of beauty make him ignore the realities of life? In one of his early poems — ‘Sleep and Poetry’ — he says that he will plunge into the ‘realm of Flora and Pan’ and then he puts the question ‘Can I ever bid these joys farewell?’ and instant comes the answer: ‘Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life’. These are not the words of an escapist, but of an explorer. He was taking a path chalked out early in his poetic career.
The mystery of life continued to challenge his spirit:
... the world is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and Oppression ... We are in a Mist. [May 3, 1818]
The bewilderment that a finite mortal must face confronting a glimpse of eternity and contrasting with it the life bounded by spatial and temporal limits persists, but there is always a striving after the ultimate knowledge of truth: ‘We too shall explore them.’ There was a pugnacious attitude in him to surpass the limitations of life. Keats never tried to use nature as a vehicle for propagating thought or ideas: ‘We hate poetry that has a palpable design on us’. He was clear in his abhorrence of didacticism. Poetry, he said, should surprise by a ‘fine excess’ and the poet is the most unpoetical of God’s creatures. He wrote:
It has no self — It enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated — What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. [October 27, 1818]
Reading Keats’s letters, half-punctuated, as they flow spontaneously and gets lost in parenthesis, the records of personal pain and suffering, attachment to sister and brother, kinship with friends, love for the beloved, we are in intimate contact with a mind wholly absorbed in poetry: ‘The genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man.’
Keats conceived the function of poetry and the role of a poet in terms of the calling to which he was first appointed — medicine. The great end of poetry, he says, is to be
... a friend
To sooth the cares and lift the thoughts of man.
Increasingly he experienced a world that was both ‘sweet and bitter’; increasingly he came to understand how necessary a ‘world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul, that the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways.’
In a letter to J. H. Reynolds [March 3, 1818], Keats spoke of the balance between good and evil. He tries in his poetry to reflect this balance and to reconcile life’s contraries. The tension between life and decay, permanence and impermanence, joy and sorrow was necessary to him.
At an earlier stage, Keats desired a ‘life of sensations rather than thought’. Yet, as soon as he longed to escape the ‘weariness, the fever and the fret’ of life, thoughts of the evanescence of beauty suffused his perception and he understood that no permanent escape is possible.
In a sonnet Keats wrote:
How fevered that man who cannot look
Upon his mortal days with temperate blood.
He desperately tried to attain serenity of mood in the midst of all suffering, to leap beyond the disjunction of ‘warm love’, the ‘cold pastoral’ or the awareness of all that is ‘forlorn’. Keats had resigned himself from the urgency of ‘Eagle flight’ and accepted the mundane world. In a letter he wrote:
I have of late been moulting, not for fresh feathers and wings: They are gone, and in their stead I hope to have a pair of patient sublunary legs.
Hence passivity, diligent indolence, submission, recognition of selflessness come together; above all is evident a determination to be faithful to his ‘true voice of feeling’. His words thus ‘contain deep wisdom purchased at the full price of deep suffering’. Keats’s letters reveal his personal experiences, his relationship with Fanny and his attitude regarding this. He had written that his ‘love’ was as ‘true as truth’s simplicity and simpler than the infancy of truth’. In letters to Fanny, he offered his life to her.
His health was deteriorating. In a letter to Brown (September 30, 1820), he wrote:
I wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these pains, and then I wish death away, for death would destroy even those pains which are better than nothing.
He went on:
... the sense of darkness coming over me — I eternally see her figure eternally vanishing.
What a poignant picture of death engulfing life! When he wishes to ‘swoon to death’ in the last line of the ‘Bright Star’ sonnet — even though it is not his last poem — Keats seems to bid farewell to England, to Poetry, to Fanny and to life. The cry in the letter to Mrs. Brawne, Fanny’s mother, written on October 24(?), 1820, is unbearable:
O what a misery it is to have an intellect in splints! ... Goodbye Fanny, God bless you.
It is what he called a ‘short calm letter’; a note of resignation, not in utter disgust but with a heroic indifference. Fanny Brawne later wrote to Fanny Keats:
He has given up all thoughts, hopes, even wishes for recovery. His mind is in a state of peace.
She wrote:
Your brother had been very calm, he had resigned himself to die, to be murdered by the very malignity of the world.