by Stanley Plumly

from Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography

5

By Christmas, Keats's pattern is set. Hemorrhages of varying intensity, cupfuls of blood mixed with expectoration, fevers, endless nights of sleeplessness and exhaustion, bloodletting, "starvation diet," then periods of calm, a sort of body sanity, a willingness and an ability to go outside and walk a bit on the upper terrace of the Steps or along the ilex- and olive-groved Pincio, the countryside alive just beyond the trees. There is a foolish moment when Severn is so deceived by what seems like a recovery that he makes Fanny Brawne's mother an impossible promise: "I said that 'the first good news I had should be for the kind Mrs. Brawne.' I am thankful and delighted to make good my promise, to be able at all to do it, for amid all the horrors hovering over poor Keats this was the most dreadful—that I could see no possible way, and but a fallacious hope for his recovery; but now, thank God, I have a real one. I most certainly think I shall bring him back to England." Severn, however, adds the qualification that "at least my anxiety for his recovery and comfort made me think this—for half the cause of his danger has arisen for the loss of England, from the dread of never seeing it more." Of course, the calms are followed by deeper, longer storms of a magnitude that to a neutral observer make it look as though the body—Keats's small body—must break apart. And if the body, the mind, too, is in jeopardy. Or is the breaking of the mind itself the cause, the real source of the "cancer"?

Whatever their different points of view, whatever their separate reasons, Brown (the now-distant friend), Severn (the now-intimate friend), and Clark (the now-present physician) have all shared the opinion that the source of Keats's physical suffering is somehow psychological—his over-finely tuned nerves attacking his oversensitive stomach. "Now he has changed to calmness and quietude, as singular as productive of good, for his mind was most certainly killing him," Severn continues in his letter to Mrs. Brawne. By early January, Clark is still clinging to the mind diagnosis, especially because Keats seems, off and on, to fall into and rise out of the depths of his consumption. But with the help of an Italian consultant, Clark also begins to recognize that whatever the source, Keats's "digestive organs are sadly deranged and his lungs are also diseased." The bleeding, Clark realizes, is coming from the lungs, though his "stomach is ruined and the state of his mind is the worst possible for one in his condition." Clark then unwittingly confesses to a remarkable judgment on a patient who happens to be a poet: "I fear he has long been governed by his imagination & feelings." Indeed! This use by a scientist of the term "imagination" is different from Severn's equation of the mind with mixed memories—"his memory presented to him everything that was dear and delightful, even to the minutiae, and with it all the persecution, and I may say villainy, practiced upon him." And it is certainly different from Keats's own comment that complexity of thought—the juxtaposition of light and shade—is now too painful to conjure and "the continued stretch of. . . imagination" is torture. Even Brown sees the connection between Keats's powerful if "diseased" mind and his capacity for grieving. "He is dying broken-hearted"—and Brown blames everyone—George, Blackwood's, Taylor, whomever—except himself. "I will have no mercy; the world will cry aloud for the cause of Keats's untimely death, and I will give it." George has left his brother penniless; the vicious reviews have poisoned the career and future of Keats; Taylor is a mere publisher and will likely try to exploit or abandon posthumous Keats.

Keats's imaginative genius, his gift for empathy, his perfect sense of otherness—these qualities and more may have written his great poetry, but they have also now placed him in a void. "I cannot see—but darkness, death and darkness." Now that his poetry is gone, Fanny Brawne gone, the long walks on the Heath gone, family gone, friends gone, England gone, "despair is forced upon me as a habit." The mind has become the mirror of the body, and death—"untimely death"—entirely timely, because the source is entirely, as it always has been, in the lungs. Tubercle bacillus. Only a year and a half earlier, "I cannot see what flowers are at my feet" is spoken out of a whole and living world, as dusk, blue dark, descends on the green space of Hampstead, Wentworth Place, "verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways." ("O! I would my unfortunate friend had never left your Wentworth Place—for the hopeless advantages of this comfortless Italy.") But now that the newness of Rome has worn off and the reality of his illness escalated, Keats has entered not only his posthumous time but a posthumous space. He is beginning to realize that memory is all he has, and that memory, too, is killing him. He has been sent into exile, in effect alone with and among images of Tom and his sister and Fanny Brawne and friends he has disappointed and who have disappointed him. And now that, more and more, the small circumference of his outside, present world is getting smaller and smaller—like his window on the Spanish Steps and the lapping boat fountain and the noise of life in motion—and now that Rome itself—looming in its timelessness and ruins—feels like the afterlife and now that the very shape of his bedroom is taking on the shape and depth of a grave, with the patterned roses on the ceiling emblemizing what he will see there, now that his confinement is nearly complete, it is his mind that is all he has, because his body, within itself, is disappearing.

"But the fatal prospect of consumption hangs before his mind's eye," writes Severn. Then for a moment at the end of January, a slight leveling off, another calm, some hope, then again a relapse back into hemorrhaging and bloodletting. Except it is no relapse but an unremitting progress. At least the question of Keats's lungs is no longer in debate.

Dr. Clark was taken by surprise at the suddenness of the collapse, as he had a favourable opinion of his patient, and had encouraged me in thinking that Keats might recover. But now I saw that the doctor no longer had any hope, for he ordered the scanty food of a single anchovy a day, with a morsel of bread. Although he was kept down in a starving state, yet there was always the fear of his ulcerated lungs resuming their late dangerous condition. This shortly happened, and at once threw him back to the blackest despair. He had no hope for himself save a speedy death, and this now seemed denied to him, for he believed that he might be doomed to linger on all through the spring. His despair was more on my account, for, as he explained, his death might be a long and lingering one, attended with a slow delirious death-stage. This was in apprehension his greatest pain, and having been forseen had been prepared for. One day, tormented by the pangs of hunger, he broke down suddenly and demanded that this "forseen resource" should be given him. The demand was for a vial of laudanum I had bought at his request at Gravesend.

If the tone here sounds a bit distant from Severn's hyper tone in his letters, it is because this prose comes much later in the form of commentary. The content, however, is present tense. Had Keats actually been successful in his suicide, the Keats story changes considerably—how it changes is uncertain, but it changes. (Compare Henry Wallis's painting of the death of Chatterton to Severn's deathbed drawing of Keats.) The fact that Severn, at the start of their Italian journey, seems to have had no clue as to why Keats might want laudanum—particularly in some quantity—should not be surprising. Keats has managed all along to maintain his balance before losing it altogether, regardless of how exactly—in mind and body—he might be feeling. The laudanum is handed over to Clark, prompting Keats—echoing his last letter to Brown—to ask with some heat, "How long is this posthumous life of mine to last?" "Ever after the loss of the laudanum he talked of his life as posthumous," says Severn.

The abortive contemplated suicide—one wonders if Keats could have followed through with taking his life, no matter how "wrecked" that life—kicks off a new phase of anger in Keats. "He grew more and more violent against me," says Severn. "I was afraid he might die in the midst of his despairing rage. . . We contended—he for his death, and I for his life." (We are reminded that a month before departure, Keats twice characterizes his unhappy journey to Italy as "the sensation of marching up against a Battery" [to Taylor] and "as a soldier marches up to a battery" [to Shelley].) "I made him some coffee, and he threw it away. I then made some more coffee, and he threw it away also. But when I cheerfully made it a third time, he was deeply affected. . . he at last became sensible of his own want of dignity, such as he said 'every man should have in his dying moments.' " But even in Keats's calm, Severn is "harrowed" by his "recounting the minutest details of his approaching death." Two of those signature details involve the expectoration of thicker mucus with darker blood and constant diarrhea. "Keats sees all this—his knowledge of anatomy makes every change tenfold worse." It is not, of course, Keats's medical knowledge alone or even his medical experience at Guy's that forces this perspective on himself—as if he were doctor and patient at once—but his long nursing of Tom, shut up as in a tomb of two brothers, the one handing an inheritance to the other. On the best of Keats's bad, last days, he lives on milk—"sometimes a pint and a half a day"—like a child regressing. On the worst of these days, "his very nature" is "torn to pieces."

Severn's remarkable stamina and commitment to Keats in this terrible time are well established. In the final weeks these virtues are tested again and again, particularly during the night watches, when cleaning up and companionship are the most difficult. Fatigue and worry become Severn's chief enemies, though some nights he can read Keats to sleep, and one night, the accidental way these things happen, he produces what is probably his best work of art. Dated January 28, 3:00 a.m., under which is written, "Drawn to keep me awake—a deadly sweat was on him," Severn, in a matter of minutes, with pencil, pen, and ink, evokes the dying poet in beautiful, vital, accurate terms, as if to make meaning of what he unwillingly comprehends. Among Severn's various choices of reading matter (ranging, with Keats's consent, from Dacier's Plato to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress) is Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Holy Dying, a text that must have seemed utterly pointless to Keats except to fall asleep to. Severn himself does doze off on more than one occasion, which means that if Keats wakes first, the candle will be seen to have disappeared into darkness. "To remedy this, one night I tried the experiment of fixing a thread from the bottom of a lighted candle to the wick of an unlighted one, that the flame might be conducted, all of which I did without telling Keats. When he awoke and found the first candle nearly out, he was reluctant to wake me, and while doubting, suddenly cried out, 'Severn, Severn! here's a little fairy lamplighter actually lit up the other candle.'"

In the often golden Roman winter daylight hours, Severn reads from those letters from England that Keats can bear to hear—nothing, though, from Fanny Brawne. Her letters are saved to be placed "on his heart within his winding sheet." Her presence is acknowledged by silence and "a polished, oval, white cornelian, the gift of his widowing love" that he keeps "continually in his hand." The day before Keats's death, Severn writes their "oak friend" Haslam:

O! how anxious 1 am to hear from you—none of yours has come—but in answer to mine ftom Naples—I have nothing to break this dreadful solitude—but Letters day after day—night after night—here I am by our poor dying friend—my spirits—my intellect and my health are breaking down—I can get no one to change me—no one will relieve me—they all run away—and even if they did not poor Keats could not do without me—I prepare everything he eats—

Last night I thought he was going—I could hear the Phlegm in his throat—he bade me lift him up in the bed—or he would die with pain—I watched him all night—at every cough I expected he would suffocate—death is very fast approaching for this Morning by the pale daylight—the change to him frightened me—he has sunk in the last three days to a most ghastly look—I have these three nights sat up with him from the apprehension of his dying—Dr Clark has prepared me for it—but I shall be but little able to bear it—
 

6

On February 12, with the end nearing, Severn writes to Fanny Brawne's mother that had "he come here alone he would have plunged into the grave in secret—we should never have known one syllable about him." Severn closes this part of the letter by adding (which is its first mention) that "among the many things he requested of me to-night, this is the principal, that on his grave shall be this—'Here lies one whose name was writ in water.'" This suggests that, in cold reflection, had Keats traveled to Rome by himself, such an exit—assuming he would have survived the sea voyage and/or thoughts of suicide—would have itself written his name in water. And he almost did have to make the journey alone; given that option, he might have stayed and died in Hampstead. This possibility echoes James Clark's opinion on the day of Keats's death, as reported by Severn: "he says Keats should never have left England—the disorder had made too great a progress to receive benefit from this Climate—he says nothing in the world could ever cure him even when he left England—by this journey his life has been shortened—and rendered more painful—" Thus in this city built on ruins, by water, by fire, by earth, Keats does, piece by part, disappear: no name on the Protestant tombstone; everything in and of his sickroom burned in the street outside 26 Piazza di Spagna; and under fresh violets the deep, eternal Roman ground turning his body back to bone. And by air, too, he disappears, or at the least is transformed. If the idea of the imagined bower defines Keats's secret, recurrent, intimate, and contemplative space, images of the air represent his means of erasure, chameleon adaptation, anonymity, mystery, spirit, the veil, the mist, himself absorbed. Posthumous in all four elements comes to mean, for Keats, disappearance. But air, for him, returns a special provenance.

In Book I of Endymion, air is not only weightless but the very substance of dreams—"how light / Must dreams themselves be, seeing they're more slight / Than the mere nothing that engenders them." A few lines later, "light" takes on other senses—"at the tip-top, / There hangs by unseen film, an orbed drop / Of light, and that is love"; "in the end, / Melting into its radiance, we blend, / Mingle, and so become party of it"; and "that moment have we stepped / Into a sort of oneness, and our state / Is like a floating spirit." Air, then, becomes us as we become spirit, the way breath itself is spirit, to aspire and be inspired. And air is the element that bears voices, especially the voice of birdsong, as in Book IV—"there's not a breath / Will mingle kindly with the meadow air, / Till it has parted round, and stolen a share / Of passion from the heart!" By the time of The Fall of Hyperion, air is less vocal than visual, and less reassuring. Moneta's image is "huge of feature like a cloud"; her altar is "clouded. . . with soft smoke"; she herself is veiled and to be revealed, and what is revealed compounds the mystery of her "wan face," white air. Of all the aspects of air that speak most to Keats, the veil that is the mist—the mist that conceals in order to reveal—holds the most power in the imagination. "To Autumn" is the obvious example here of a "darkness" and richness "made visible," and "To Autumn" is the great lyric written in phase with The Fall. The entire accumulating, working landscape of its harvest scene is "wrapped" and observed through a veil—morning mist succeeding to the afternoon autumnal "drowsy" angle of the light followed by the smoky gold refraction of the "soft-dying" end of the day. "To Autumn" is, in sum, in its thirty-three measured lines, the exalted example of the season of mists—a vision of the air transformed into transforming air.

Early on, in his reading of Milton, Keats comments on lines 318 to 321 of Paradise Lost—lines that go "or have ye chosen in its place / After the toil of battle to repose / Your wearied virtue, for the ease you find / To slumber here, as in the vales of Heaven?"—that there "is a cool pleasure in the very sound of vale. The English word is of the happiest chance. Milton has put vales in heaven and hell with the every utter affection and yearning of a great Poet. It is a sort of Delphic Abstraction—a beautiful thing made more beautiful by being reflected and put in a Mist." A vale in a veil, if you will, or, in terms of a "Delphic Abstraction," a rich ambiguity. Autumn is finally a paradise lost—the grain harvested, the leaf fallen. "How beautiful the season is now—How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather—Dian skies—I never liked stubble fields so much as now—Aye better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow a stubble plain looks warm—in the same way that some pictures look warm—" So Keats has written to Reynolds at the beginning of his last autumn in England. Then moments later he adds, "To night I am all in a mist; I scarcely know what's what."

The transforming medium of the air that he sees through, that balances "light and shade," that creates distance, that separates detail from detritus, that values the "temperate sharpness," that makes possible a certain negative capability is the autumnal, mature vision that writes the best and last of the great poems, poems that scarcely know what is what, and that thrive in that "scarcely." In this same year, in the middle of a long letter to George, Keats says that even "here though I myself am pursueing the same instinctive course as the veriest human animal you can think of—I am however young writing at random—straining at particles of light in the midst of darkness." And the year before this, even younger, in the midst of his famous "Chamber of Maiden Thought" letter to Reynolds, with "dark passages. . . on all sides," he says that "We see not the ballance of good and evil. We are in a Mist—We are now in that state—We feel the 'burden of the Mystery.' " Much of Keats's maturation as a person and as a poet is the coming to terms with the ambiguities and accepting the "burden" of the bending of the light written on water in the air.

"To Autumn," the perfection of Keats's mode of disappearance into the text, is not only his last great lyric, it is what we could call the "apotheosis" of elemental conversion—of the earth harvest, yes; of the ending fire of the sun; of the arcing anticipation of spring rain; but mostly of the separating veil, the mist, the angular vision, the airy archetype, the symbolist voice. But be careful of what you wish for. Disappearance as a figure is one thing; disappearance as a fact is another. Keats's true disappearance as a poet and a man begins here, a full year and a half before he dies. It is a death by increments, of course, and it will test the community around him. Disappearance will come to mean posthumous, a slow wearing away, the wasting of body and, at times, it seems, of soul, a true consumption, a conversion into air, into breath, in the nothing that is poetry. No wonder the doctors were confused as to what was ailing Keats: in a way it was neither this nor that but everything, manna as well as matter. And it starts with his most perfect poem, as if an open circle had been drawn to close. That is to say, the recognition of what has been true and fated for years arrives like a vision, and that vision is "To Autumn," whose emotional and spiritual realities represent both a full cup and exhaustion, their sequence and consequence. It is as if Keats's only choice after "To Autumn" is to die, to fail, to disappear completely, perfectly, and leave "no immortal work behind." It is as if, having more or less perfected the meditative lyric form, having become at one with its text and texture, he confuses what is great in his art with what is going from his life. The "Delphic Abstraction" of the air, the "beautiful thing made more beautiful by being reflected and put in a Mist," becomes the immortal life of the poem, yet also the abstract substance and fleeting "mist" of the life of the poet. Keats, at the end, is unable to separate, in the worst way, himself from his art—a skill, if he could but see it, he has already won. His mortality becomes, in his last mind, less the mortality in than the mortality of his poetry. As he says to Fanny Brawne a year before he dies, "If I had had time I would have made myself remember'd"—a prediction that at once misunderstands what is valuable already in his work and assumes what value will be found in a wished-for future of work still unwritten. At one level, Keats's final ode recapitulates the pastoral daylight hours: the "ripeness to the core" of "mellow fruitfulness," the languor after the harvesting and storing of the grain, and the rich melancholy of the "stubble-plains" in the warm light of the "soft-dying" sun. At another level, it is a poem of farewells, full to the core, weighted with endings yet lifted, suspended in air, "reflected and put in a Mist." The voice of its absences seems to be preparing for and anticipating what follows the failing, autumnal light—the dusk, then the real sleep of night.

About the Author
Stanley Plumly's most recent book of poems, Old Heart, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2007. He is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography
W.W. Norton & Company