John Keats (1795-1821)
Father was a head stableman at a London stable
Educated at private school – good at sports/reading
Father dies from a fall from a horse when he is eight, at 14, his mother dies of tuberculosis
Children’s guardian takes John out of school, apprentices him to a surgeon and apothecary – John studies and qualifies to practice as an apothecary-surgeon – but almost immediately abandons medicine for poetry.
Becomes friends with Leigh Hunt, editor and leading political radical, poet and prolific writer of criticism and periodical essays.
Financial distress of one brother, death of another by tuberculosis, gets sick himself in 1818 after a strenuous walking tour in the Lake District. Falls in love, becomes engaged to a young woman – marriage impossible because of his growing illness.
In this period of acute distress and emotional turmoil, produces his best poetry
Night of Feb. 30, 1820, coughed up blood, knows he will die – spends spring and summer in Italy, but dies in Rome, February 23, 1821
Source: http://occonline.occ.cccd.edu/online/ldanzige/Keats.doc
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John Keats (1795 – 1823), one of the world’s greatest poets, born in London on the 31st October, 1795. He was orphaned in 1809 at just fourteen years old. However he was spared pauper apprenticeship by virtue of having been educated. Instead, he was apprenticed to an apothecary-surgeon (a precursor for today’s chemist). However, in 1816 Keats abandoned his medical apprenticeship: for poetry.
His first poetry volume was published a year later. Early reviews were good, but then came repeated harsh attacks from the literary establishment (e.g. Blackwood’s Magazine). Keats didn’t flinch and his epic poem ‘Endymion’ was published the following spring of 1818. However, Keats spent the second half of 1818 nursing his brother Tom through terminal illness (until Tom’s death in December). Soon after, Keats met a young neighbour, Fanny Brawne, and fell deeply in love her (British Library, 2009).
It was during the following year, 1819, that Keats was to write arguably the greatest of his (and, indeed, all) poetry. The tragic circumstances of his family, his love for Miss Brawne and, perhaps above all, the knowledge that he too was dying as his brother had, were to greatly influence him. These events allied with Keats’s genius to provide arguably three of the greatest poems ever written: ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘To Autumn’.
‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ is a ballad on desire: intense, emotional desire. Its opening three stanzas tell of an anonymous figure questioning a disconsolate Knight (‘O, what can ail thee…’). They cast a shadow over the next five stanzas in which the Knight narrates his tale of how he came to be infatuated with ‘La Belle Dame’. However, the remaining stanzas tell of the how she became ‘sans Merci’ as the Knight has been abandoned to lonely despair (in which he is found at the poem’s beginning).
That the poem is a ballad can be seen by how its lines alternate between four beats and three beats. That is, except for the last line of each stanza which, at two beats, is a foot short. Such innovation is characteristic of Keats’s poetry. Its effect is to create a sense of longing throughout the poem. This is consistent with the nature of the Knight’s tale, the emotional tension between both his bliss and his despair: the intensity of desire and the intensity of rejection.
The poem’s last three lines echo the last three lines of the first stanza. The effect is cyclical – the Knight seems back where he started. This is suggestive of the idea that desire and rejection follow a natural sequence such as that of the seasons. Maybe the Knight is doomed to follow such a sequence until he successfully ‘harvests’ love. Perhaps then this is why Keats has chosen the courageous figure of a Knight to personify the poem’s message: that the world must be dealt with as it is – that desire and rejection are, as love, both natural and real.
Like ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is filled with sensuous language that creates a beautiful illusion. However, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ differs in that it creates a series of such illusions: illusions of escape from life’s harsh realities. It tells of the need to escape them, the joy of escaping them and, ultimately, the impossibility of such escape.
The need for escape is set out in the third stanza: ‘the weariness, the fever and the fret’ of a world ‘where but to think is to be full of sorrow’. Life as seen through the eyes of a dying youth. Different fantasies of escape are described throughout. Some artificial (the first stanza’s: ‘dull opiate’), some joyous (the second stanza’s: ‘O, for a draught of vintage’), some natural imagination (the fourth stanza’s: ‘wings of poesy’), one is ultimate: the death of the sixth stanza (suggestive of Keats’s realization that he was dying).
The nightingale of the poem is symbolic of escape (NB. Keats has not used personification). The Ode celebrates the nightingale’s qualities: first its happiness (it sings of summer ‘in full throated ease’), second its ignorance of man (‘what thou among the leaves has never known’), third its immortality, its unchanging nature (‘thou wast not born for death immortal bird’). Thus it seems the poem is suggesting that there is no escape for man for he, unlike the nightingale, has forsaken nature and doomed himself to inescapable, man-made despair.
‘To Autumn’ uses seasonal change as a metaphor for social change. It conveys the notion that growth, decline and change are natural. Vital in the England of 1819 with its ‘Peterloo’ and ‘Six Acts’. The poem counsels not to despair of such social climate (for every Winter is followed by a Spring). Keats shows great courage in writing such a poem. His daring use of metaphor and personification (of ‘Autumn’) to convey the truth of his feelings about such events while avoiding imprisonment (likely under the aforementioned ‘Six Acts’ were such criticism literal) is heroic.
The first stanza describes an abundant harvest (‘For summer has o’er-brimm’d’). In the second, Autumn is personified and seems relaxed (‘…sitting careless on a granary floor’). The final stanza tells of death and sorrow (‘Where are the songs of Spring?’). The ‘mellow fruitfulness’ of the poem’s opening line now a ‘soft-dying day’. However, times – as seasons – change: the ‘gathering swallows’ that ‘twitter in the skies’ will return.
Such sequence of events is analogous with the England of 1819: the abundance from her Empire, the relaxation from her defeat of France, the death and sorrow from her government (i.e. ‘Peterloo’ and the ‘Six Acts’). Therefore, unlike ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, and unlike ‘Ode on a Nightingale’, ‘To Autumn’ is set in the real world. Keats is confronting the inescapable despair of both preceding poems. That he does so, with such sensuous and beautiful language, while he, like England, is in a state of decay is an intense statement of bravery.
These three masterpieces were published, together with many others, in July 1820. Soon afterwards, and now very ill, Keats and a friend left England for Italy. By November they had arrived in Rome. Keats fought against his illness and was able to walk and ride. But he was confined to bed by Christmas. Keats died on 23rd February 1821.
Reference List:
British Library. (2009). John Keats (1795 – 1821).
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/keats/keats.html (accessed: 01/05/09)
Keats, J. (1819). La Belle Dame Sans Merci.
http://www.bartleby.com/126/55.html (accessed: 01/05/09)
Keats, J. (1819). Ode on a Nightingale.
http://www.bartleby.com/101/624.html (accessed: 01/05/09)
Keats, J. (1819). To Autumn.
http://www.bartleby.com/126/47.html (accessed: 01/05/09)
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