KEATS'S PERSONAL LOVE POEMS
I
Stress has never been laid on the real unconscious origins of some of
Keats's best poems. We know that his sad love affair with Fanny Brawne,
who coquetted with him, inspired a few poems directly addressed to her;
it is also indisputable that Keats had her in mind when he wrote _La
Belle Dame Sans Merci_, he was telling of his own fate in the account
of the knight's mishap. But it is rarely recognised that emotions
connected with Fanny Brawne inspired his two most famous odes, the one
to the Nightingale and the other to the Grecian urn; that the tale of
_Lamia_, which ranks among his best poems, is a symbolic description
of his attitude towards Miss Brawne, and that her presence is felt in
other poems and sonnets by Keats. He thought of her constantly, and he
could scarcely write a love poem but she somehow or other stepped into
the pages. When we compare these and other poems to the letters that
he had written to her about the same time, we will find that often the
same emotions inspired both.
Keats met Miss Brawne in the fall of 1818, when he was twenty-three
years old. He quarrelled with her in February, 1819, but, nevertheless,
was her declared lover in the spring. His first love letter that we
have to her is dated July 1, 1819, and the last about May, 1820. In
the spring and summer of 1819 he wrote some of his best poems, and
he showed most emphatically the repression of his emotions by the
coquetries of Fanny. He took a walk among the marbles of the British
Museum, in February, 1819, and three months later penned his _Ode to a
Grecian Urn_. In the latter part of April he heard the nightingale in
Brown's garden, and he wrote the famous ode. In the same month he also
wrote _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_. In August and September of 1819 he
worked on _Lamia_. He had his first hemorrhage in February, 1820, left
England in September, and died in Italy February, 1821.
Those who have read the letters to Fanny will remember with what
anxiety the poet wrote, how he showed his jealousy and complained and
pleaded without pride. In one letter dated June 19, 1819, he said he
would resent having his heart made a football, that Brown, with whom
she flirted, was doing him to death by inches, and that the air of a
room from which Fanny was absent was unhealthy to him. "I appeal to
you by the blood of that Christ you believe in.... Do not write to me
if you have done anything this month which it would have pained me to
have seen." In October he writes, "Love is my religion--I could die for
that; I could die for you." The letters are the record of the agony of
a man who is being played with and who cries out in helplessness. He
cannot bear seeing her smiling with others or dancing with them. Miss
Brawne asserted after his death that she did not regard him as a great
poet, and thought it advisable for people to let his reputation die. It
is also said she referred to him as the foolish poet who loved her.
Let us see how this sad affair influenced his work.
The Keats of the first volume, _Poems_, 1817, is a much different
person from the Keats of the _Lamia_ volume, in 1820. The three
intervening years had brought a maddening love affair, a fatal disease
and the famous, though not as once thought fatal review, attacking
_Endymion_. His art principles remained much the same. With growing
sorrow he worshipped beauty more and sought in it a refuge from grief.
His attitude towards women and life was now somewhat different. He paid
woman a tribute in the poem in the first volume, beginning with the
lines, "Woman! I behold thee," etc. But he had not yet suffered from a
Fanny Brawne; here he spoke of woman's being "like a milk-white lamb
that bleats for man's protection." And yet before he was twenty he may
have had a foreboding that his fate in love might not be a happy one.
In the poem, _To Hope_, he wrote:
"Should e'er unhappy love my bosom pain,
From cruel parents or relentless fair;
O let me not think it is quite in vain
To sigh out sonnets to the midnight air."
Alas for himself, but perhaps (it may be cruel to say) fortunately for
the lovers of literature, those sonnets and other poems were sighed out
later!
Before we can, however, quite understand his sad life and the nature
of his work and philosophy, something must be said about his relations
to his mother. She died from consumption when he was past fourteen.
Keats, who was her favourite child, sat up nights, mourning her, and
was inconsolable; he would hide for days under his master's desk. Once,
at the age of five, he guarded her sick room with a sword. His mother
re-married a year after her husband's death, when the poet was in his
tenth year. She separated from her second husband and went to live with
her mother. Keats then had a guardian. The poet was the oldest of five
children, and was a seven months' child. All this is significant. The
Œdipus Complex was strong in the poet. He was not only deprived of his
mother early, but witnessed her marry a second time. This event revived
the babyish jealousy he felt of his father, and made him unconsciously
hate the new husband. He looked for a substitute for the lost mother
and thought he found her in Fanny Brawne, and then he learned what
grief was. He loved beauty so much because of unrequited love. Some
poets, like Wordsworth, seek consolation in nature for lack of love,
others like Byron simply voice their woe in a personal note, others
like Shelley find it a spur to spread views of reform in connection
with the marriage institution. Keats's love of beauty has a strong
sexual component. His unfulfilled physical desires were sublimated into
poems worshipping beauty. Art was his refuge.
We are now prepared to trace the origins of some of his work. Most
critics saw the unconscious allusions in the _La Belle Dame_ poem.
It is symbolic of himself in the snares of a coquette. There is an
allusion to an old song entitled _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_ in Keats's
_The Eve of St. Agnes_ which Porphyro played to Madeline while she
slept; it was a poem composed in Provence; and we all know that most
of the love poems of the Provençal Troubadours were complaints about
unrequited love. Keats's poem has a simple plot. A knight tells the
poet, in response to a question as to why he was so woe-begone, that
he met a fairy child and set her on his pacing steed. She claimed to
love him, and she lulled him to sleep and he dreamed that pale kings
and princes and warriors told him that he was in the thrall of a girl
without mercy. They were evidently also her victims. He wakes and
loiters on the cold hill side, realising that he was her victim.
This poem was written within a few months before the letter to Fanny
was penned, in which he said he resented having his heart made a
football. The poem corresponds to an anxiety dream. Freud tells us that
the contents of the anxiety dream is of a sexual nature; the libido has
been turned away from its object, and, not having succeeded in being
applied, has been transformed into fear. This poem is a good proof of
this one of the least-understood theories of Freud. Keats then is the
knight and Fanny is the fairy child.
The nature of his day dreams and jealousy appears in the _Ode to
Fanny_, a posthumous poem, probably not meant for publication. It
contains some of the substance of his letters to Fanny. He imagines he
is watching Fanny at a dance, and jealous thoughts come to him. "Who
now with greedy looks eats up my feast?" he asks. His only remedy is to
write poetry to ease his pain. He says to Physician Nature, "O, ease my
heart of verse and let me rest." He loves her so much he cannot bear
that any one profane her with looks. He wants her wholly, her thoughts
and emotions. The poem was probably written about the time of the
quarrel, in February, 1819.
Another posthumous poem addressed to Fanny is the one beginning with
the lines, "What can I do to drive away remembrance from my eyes?"
He is now wishing he were free from love, and that he had his old
liberty. He wants to devote himself to his muse as freely as he once
did. He thinks of wine as he did in the nightingale poem, and asks:
"Shall I gulp wine? No, that is vulgarism." He is in hell, he realises,
but he concludes with a wish to satisfy his physical love for Fanny.
He wants to rest his soul on her dazzling breast, to place his arm
about her waist, and feel her warm breath spread a rapture in his
hair. In a posthumously published sonnet he pleads, "I cry to you for
mercy"; he wants her entirely, including "that warm, white, lucent,
million-pleasured breast." In the sonnet he wrote (not before his
death, as usually thought but as Colvin says, in February, 1819), in
a blank page in a volume of Shakespeare facing "A Lover's Complaint,"
"Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art," he concludes most
sensuously. He longs to be:
"Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel forever its soft fall and swell,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live forever--or else swoon to death."
All this shows that Keats's love was not one where the reason or
moral sense played a great part; it was not tender or kindly, but a
madness, and more than usually physical. There can be no doubt, from
the evidence given by Keats, that he indulged in reveries of physical
satisfaction with Fanny in day dreams.
Keats has himself written that he had sensuous night dreams. He
wrote in April, 1819, apropos the sonnet, _A Dream_, after reading
Dante's Episode of Paolo and Francesca: "The dream was one of the most
delightful enjoyments I had in my life. I floated about the wheeling
atmosphere, as it is described, with a beautiful figure, to whose lips
mine were joined, it seemed for an age; and in the midst of all this
cold and darkness I was warm." A flying dream always has a sexual
significance, even without any female figure to accompany the dreamer.
Of course this figure was Fanny Brawne to whom he had just been or was
about to be betrothed.
II
We now come to his two greatest odes, the one to the Grecian Urn and
the other to the Nightingale. Both were written in the spring of 1819.
In both Fanny Brawne is with the poet though there is no direct mention
of his love for her or his troubles with her. The lines in the _Ode to
a Grecian Urn_ that particularly were written with Fanny in mind are
those addressed to the lover of the Grecian Urn.
"Bold Lover, never, never, canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal--yet do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love and she be fair."
Keats saw a resemblance between himself and that youth. He, too, was
winning and near the goal, and he no more had her love than did the
youth on the urn. He himself knew the passion
"That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead and a parching tongue."
He had to accept his lot and pretend to see some advantage in it as he
did in that of the youth on the urn:
"More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoyed,
For ever panting, and for ever young."
The poem is the song of unsatisfied desires. Keats, frustrated in his
love, had one resource, to make poetry and create beauty out of his
sorrow. To the future he too would be like that lover created by an
ancient artist, panting for love ever young. The poem has such great
appeal because it strikes a note in us all.
In the _Ode to the Nightingale_ we also see evidence of his love
sadness because of Fanny. He expresses a wish to go away with the bird
from scenes
"Where youth grows pale, and spectre thin, and dies;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new love pine at them beyond to-morrow."
The nightingale has not known like him
"The weariness, the fever and the fret
Here where men sit and hear each other groan."
Miss Brawne had embittered his life and hence he must fly at least in
fancy through poetry with the bird. Again he finds consolation for his
unhappy love in poetry.
He has been half in love with death, he has thought of taking to drink;
he expressed both these ideas in previous poems. He is reminded that
the nightingale's song was heard by Ruth, because love is uppermost
in his mind. But he knows his fancied flight with the bird must end
shortly. He will soon come back to his real self with the vexing
thoughts of Fanny.
"Adieu the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf."
Then the music ceased, and he is back on earth again.
The unconscious sex symbolism in the wish to fly with the nightingale
is a further proof of his unsatisfied love.
The motive of both these great poems was then supplied by his
unsatisfactory love affair, but critics have not openly asserted the
fact. It wasn't a mere walk in the British Museum or in Brown's garden
that gave birth to the poems. These events merely incited him to put on
paper the poems which had already for some time past fermented in his
unconscious and were really produced by his repressed love for Fanny.
Had he been happy in love, it is very likely we would never have had
these poems. They are as personal as the poems previously mentioned
addressed directly to Fanny, as _La Belle Dame_, and the sonnet written
in the fly leaf of Shakespeare. The same unhappy longings gave rise to
them all, and they were all written within a few months of each other,
though I have no evidence as to the date of the sonnet and the lines to
Fanny.
But it is in a long poem where Fanny is chiefly present unconsciously,
in _Lamia_. We have here the tale of Lamia, a beautiful woman, who is a
metamorphosed serpent ensnaring Lycius of Corinth by her beauty. Fanny
is Lamia the serpent woman, Lycius of Corinth is Keats himself. Lycius
is about to marry Lamia, as Keats was also thinking of marrying Fanny.
It should, by the way, be borne in mind that the period of the writing
of _Lamia_ corresponds with the date of the first published despairing
letters of Keats to Fanny, the summer and fall of 1819. It would be a
rare miracle if during this time he could have kept thoughts of his
sweetheart out of his work. Unconsciously he felt she acted like a
serpent, and hence he drew her as such.
Lycius did not want his teacher Apollonius, the philosopher, at the
feast. But the preceptor did come, an unbidden guest, and told Lycius
who this beautiful woman really was. Lycius died of disappointment.
Keats did not wish to be told the truth about Fanny's lack of
character, and thus be disillusioned. He felt that he too would die,
hence he fears facts and asks: "Do not all charms fly at the touch
of cold philosophy?" In this question we see already he suspects the
nature of Fanny. But he will not believe his uncertain suspicions nor
investigate them. It is the voice of his own unconscious that he hears
in these words of his preceptor:
"'Fool! Fool!' repeated he, while his eyes still
Relented not, nor moved; 'from every ill
In life have I preserved thee to this day,
And shall I see thee made a serpent's prey?'"
He attacks Fanny in his description of Lamia's pleading, whose beauty
smote while it guaranteed to save. He tells of the meshes in which
he struggled. That he published the poem in his lifetime is evidence
that he himself was not altogether aware he was analysing his own love
affair and was abusing his fiancée. When he resolved to make a poem of
the little tale he read in Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_ it was his
unconscious that chose the theme for him, recognising that he had many
affinities in his life with that of the unfortunate Corinthian youth.
The poem contains more of himself than any of his long poems.
There are many other poems of Keats where the personal element enters
and where he tells us of his unconscious. The affair with Fanny
coloured his entire work after he met her. He also knew and admired
another girl about the time he met Fanny, whom he calls a Charmian; she
was a Miss Cox, but she did not greatly influence him. It is to the
intense affection Keats had for his mother, of whom he was deprived in
boyhood, and the unfortunate affair with Fanny, that we owe some of his
best literary work.