Ode to Keats

Here’s one of the reasons why Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac (a daily radio show on NPR – which has an online version here) is one of my daily pit stops.

First off: you get a poem a day. This is always good.

Second of all: there’s a whole bottom section where you get “on this day” information. Some of them are birthdays of famous writers – but others are historical events of significance.

Today’s though …

First of all, the poem for today is a famous extract from John Keats’ “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 of our searching; yes, in spite of all
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.

Keats. I always kind of loved Keats – loved his sweeping romantic vision of nature, how breathless he gets about flowers, and pumpkins, and autumn mist … He seems consistently bowled over by the natural world.

Listen to this AWESOME quote from Robert Graves. I copied it down in my commonplace book when I ran across it in college, because I just loved its insight. I wished I could write my college papers in this vein:

Shelley was a volatile creature of air and fire: he seems never to have noticed what he ate or drank, except sometimes as a matter of vegetarian principle. Keats was earthy, with a sweet tooth and a relish for spices, cream and snuff, and in a letter mentions peppering his own tongue to bring out the delicious coolness of claret. When Shelley in Prometheus Unbound mentions: “The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom”, he does not conjure up, as Keats would have done, the taste of the last hot days of the dying English year, with over-ripe blackberries, ditches full of water, and the hedges grey with old man’s beard. He is not aware of the veteran bees whirring their frayed wings or sucking rank honey from the dusty yellow blossoms of the ivy.

— Robert Graves

I love that. “Over-ripe blackberries”, “peppering his own tongue to bring out the delicious coolness of claret” … the whole comparison to Shelley is fascinating.

Then there is Lucy Maud Montgomery’s words on Keats, wrote down in her diary – it presents another viewpoint:

On the whole, I do not like Keats. His poems are, in reality, too full of beauty. One feels stifled in roses … There is little in Keats’ poems except luscious beauty — so much of it that the reader is surfeited.

(Funny: there are passages in some of LM Montgomery’s books – passages so full of the beauty of the natural world – that I, too, feel surfeited. As a naturalist, an observer and lover of nature, Montgomery has few equals.)

Rudyard Kipling had this to say about Keats and Coleridge, the two poets he revered above all others:

These are the pure Magic. These are the clear vision. The rest is only poetry.

Then, of course, there is Keats’ own epitaph – which he wrote himself:

This Grave
contains all that was Mortal
of a
Young English Poet
Who
on his Death Bed
in the Bitterness of his Heart
at the Malicious Power of his Enemies
Desired
these words to be engraved on his Tomb Stone
“Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.”

Holy shite!!! Wow.

Anyway, back to Garrison Keillor’s radio program. Along with historical ‘today in history’ factoids, we get such gems as this one today:

And today is the anniversary of the end of one of the last truly happy periods of John Keats’s life. It was on this day in 1818, Keats finished a long walking tour through England. John Keats was 23 years old. He’d planned to become a surgeon, but he realized his real vocation was poetry, and in the spring of 1818, he published his first major long poem Endymion. And then he set out on a hike through the countryside with his friend Charles Brown. Wordsworth was one of Keats’s favorite poets, and he knew that Wordsworth had been inspired by walking around England, so Keats decided to do the same that summer.

Keats was a London boy. He had never seen the mountains. He had never seen a waterfall. He wrote letters back to his brother about the wonderful things that he saw, but gradually on his hike he realized he was no Wordsworth, that he did not want to write about scenery. He hated descriptions. He was more interested in the people whom he saw along the way. He was fascinated by the peasants who walked barefoot on the roads, carrying their shoes and stockings so they would look nice when they got to town. He saw an old woman being carried along the road in a kind of a cage like a dog kennel, smoking a pipe.

He came back to London and learned that the reviews of his last book of poetry, Endymion, were coming in and critics had written ferocious attacks on him. He was crushed. And his brother had come down with a serious case of tuberculosis. His brother died in December, and by the end of that year, John Keats had contracted tuberculosis himself. He would die three years later, in 1821. It was in those last three years of his life that he wrote most of his greatest poems.

My favorite John Keats poem is his “Ode to Autumn”. I put it down here as a kind of invocation. Because the summer is brutal, I cannot stand it, and I yearn for the autumn when I can feel human again and alive. COME, autumn, COME!!

But still: Keats’ words taste good in my mouth. They are delicious. His imagery is perfect, emotional, and just plain old beautiful. “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever”, indeed.

ODE TO AUTUMN
SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease;
For Summer has o’erbrimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twinèd flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river-sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.