Poets and Poems

John Keats

The influential Romantic poet John Keats died when only twenty-five,
his genius yet unrecognised. Shortly before his untimely death, he poignantly wrote
"I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time
I would have made myself remember'd".

John Keats was born in London in October 1795, the eldest child of Thomas Keats and his wife Frances Jennings. He was house taught locally in Moorgate, and then from 1803 to 1810 boarded at the well-established John Clarke School in Enfield. It fostered in him an early and enduring love of classical literature.

In 1815 he registered as a medical student at Guy's hospital in London and progressed well, having first completed a lengthy apprenticeship with an Enfield surgeon and apothecary. In 1816, now licensed himself as an apothecary, he seemed destined to pursue a medical career. The next step would have been to study for membership of the Royal College of Surgeons. It was not to be. That same year he announced his resolve to be a poet.

It was a fraught decision and he struggled financially all his life, at times having to borrow from friends to survive. It would have been very different had he known that substantial bequeaths were in trust for him, from the estates of his mother and his maternal grandfather, but strangely he was never informed.

In May 1816 his poem 'On Solitude' was printed in 'The Examiner', a leading literary magazine, and he began to acquire influential friends. 'Poetry', his first book of verse, was published the following year, followed by 'Endymion' in 1818. His final volume, published in 1820, contained the five great odes* on which his reputation is largely based.

In April 1817 he shared a house near Hampstead Heath with his two brothers. He and George nursed their younger brother Thomas, who had contracted tuberculosis, the same disease their mother had died from in 1810. After his brother died in December 1818, Keats lodged in a friend's home nearby, Wentworth House.

In April 1819, eighteen-year-old Frances (Fanny) Brawne moved into the other half of this semi-detached house** with her mother. She and Keats fell in love and were deeply attached to each other, but his straitened financial circumstances and his poor health precluded any thought of marriage. He was displaying increasingly serious symptoms of tuberculosis. In September 1820, on the advice of his doctors, he sailed for warmer climes, knowing that he would probably never see his loved one again.

He was accompanied by a friend, Joseph Severn, who nursed him devotedly in his final months. The journey was beset with difficulties and it was two months later before they arrived in Rome. His health rapidly deteriorated and living became a torment. He was coughing up blood and was often drenched in sweat. Sometimes he would cry upon waking, finding that he was still alive. He had worshipped beauty all his life and the tranquillity of death was the beauty for which he now yearned***.

On Friday the twenty-third of February 1821, his wish was granted. After hours of agonising struggle, he gradually sank into oblivion, so quietly that Joseph Severn thought he was sleeping. John Keats was dead; yet he lives on, in the beauty of the poems he bequeathed to us all. He is buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.

* The great odes are:
To Psyche, To a Nightingale, On a Grecian Urn, On Melancholy and To Autumn. All five were written in Wentworth House, in a creative burst during the first nine months of 1819. Wentworth House is now the John Keats Museum.
** Fanny Brawne may have visited friends in Wentworth House and got to know Keats before she and her mother moved there. She loved him dearly and mourned long when he died.
*** In July 1819, while on holiday on the Isle of Wight, he had written to his beloved Fanny Brawne:
"I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute."

Lines from 'Ode to a Nightingale'

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,
That thou, light-wingèd Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
.
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
.
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.
.