
Three Evil Minds and Two Evil Eyes
It's nearly Halloween, which makes it the perfect time for Parker Lancaster to look at the film
...
Oct
30
Oct
31
It is always
exciting to sit down to read John Keats’s poems. Keats:
born in 1795, dead in 1821 at twenty-six, of tuberculosis. He published
one book of poems in 1817, another in 1820.
And he left behind, at his death, nearly a hundred more poems.
Life is
short—Keats’s life much shorter than most.
So I want to talk—write—briefly about just a few things in a few poems,
and let you get busy reading those poems.
Keats was twenty-one the evening when, visiting a friend, he first encountered Homer, in John Chapman’s translation. He ran home that night with a poem—a sonnet—in his head:
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
Much have I travell’d in the realms
of gold,
And many goodly sweets and
kingdoms seen. . . .
The first eight lines are as formal (and properly empty) as an eighteenth century dance. But then he hears Chapman—an early seventeenth century translator of Homer—“speak out loud and bold.” And the poem explodes into a big blossom of awe:
Then felt I like some
watcher of the skies
When a new planet
swims into his kin;
Or like stout Cortez
when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other
with a wild surmise—
Silent, on a peak in Darien.
This
is the first great Keats poem. It is
followed in the next two years by the four great odes—the “Nightingale,” the
“Grecian Urn,” “Autumn,” and “Melancholy.”
Everybody has read the “Ode on a
Grecian Urn.” It is usually read as an
almost piously honorific or even worshipful poem. I don’t think it is—and I want to propose a
very different reading.
The third word should make us
pause: “unravished.” Does Keats mean
simply that the urn has survived unbroken all these centuries? Or does the young man on the urn want to rape
one of the “maidens loth”? Whether the
figures on the urn are gods or men, they are in “mad pursuit” of those “maidens loth,” who “struggle to
escape” their “wild ecstacy.”
The second stanza is more
restrained. Pipers are playing “ditties of no tone.” Isn’t that odd? Toneless music? Or is he simply noting that they are figures
on the urn, not actual pipers. The “fair
youth, beneath the trees” can never quit playing—and “never, never canst thou
kiss,” Keats says. The “happy melodist,
unwearied,” will remain, “For ever piping songs for ever new.” And this, Keats says, is “More happy
love! More happy, happy love!”
In the third stanza, he leaves the “happy” scene of immortally unrequited love, and turns the urn around. A garlanded heifer is being led “to the sacrifice.” Poor cow! And everybody is out to see the fun—which means that the
little
town by river or sea shore
Or
mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn.
And—forgetting
about the scene upon the urn and the coming “sacrifice”—Keats laments the
the fate which he is imagining for that “little town”:
And, little town, thy
streets for evermore
Will
silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why
thou art desolate, can e’er return.
The final stanza is full of unpleasant language, unpleasant images, as Keats address the urn:
O Attic
shape! Fair attitude, with brede
Of marble
men and maidens overwrought,
With forest
branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent
form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth
eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age
shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt
remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours,
a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is
truth, truth beauty.”
That’s
a truism—where a lie is meant. And Keats
answers the urn, that “Cold Pastoral”
work of art:
--that is all
Ye know on
earth, and all ye need to know.
Keats has a wonderful sense of
humor, but we don’t see it very often. The
urn’s “brede / Of marble men and maidens overwrought” is an example, if we read
the pun in
“overwrought.” Here, however, is a funny doggerel poem that
is also a serious one. You may
appreciate it more if you think of the great American poet Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself. Keats’s poem is entitled
A Song About Myself
I
There was a naughty boy,
A naughty boy was he,
He
would not stop at home,
He could not quiet be—
He took
In his knapsack
A book
Full of vowels
And a shirt
With some towels—
A slight cap
For a night cap—
A hair brush,
Comb ditto.
New stockings
For old ones
Would split O!
This knapsack
Tight at ’s back
He riveted close
And follow’d his nose
To the north,
To the north,
And followed his nose
To the north.
II
There was a naughty boy
And a naughty boy was he,
For
nothing would he do
But scribble poetry—
He took
An ink stand
In his hand
And a pen
Big as ten
And away
In a pother
He ran
To the mountains
And fountains
And ghostes
And postes
And witches
And ditches
And wrote
In his coat
When the weather
Was cool,
Fear of gout,
And without
When the weather
Was warm—
Och the charm
When we
choose
To follow one’s nose
To the north,
To the north
To follow
one’s nose
To the north
IV
There
was a naughty boy,
And a naughty boy was he,
He ran away to Scotland
The people for to see—
There
he found
That the ground
Was as hard,
That a yard
Was as
long,
That a song
Was as merry,
That a cherry
Was as red—
That lead was as weighty,
That fourscore
Was as eighty,
That a door was as wooden
As in England—
So he stood in his shoes
And he wondered,
He wondered,
He stood in his shoes
And he wondered.
That’s Keats playing with the idea that he called, famously, “Negative Capability.”
“Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
His
walking trip in Scotland also gave him a more poetic version of the idea: not doggerel
verse, but a sonnet:
Sonnet Written upon the Top of Ben Nevis
Read me a
lesson, Muse, and speak it loud
Upon
the top of Nevis, blind in mist!
I look into the chasms, and a
shroud
Vapourous doth hide them,—just so much I wist
Mankind do
know of hell; I look o’erhead,
And
there is s sullen mist,—even so much
Mankind can
tell can tell of heaven; mist is spread
Before
the earth, beneath me,—even such,
Even so
vague is man’s sight of himself!
Here
are the craggy stones benearth my feet,—
Thus much I
know that, a poor witless elf,
I tread
on them,—that all my eye doth meet
Is mist and
crag, not only on this height,
But in the
world of thought and mental might!
But Keats’s best expression of
“Negative Capability” is in what, to me, is his finest poem, the very late
sonnet
When I Have Fears
When I have
fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charct’ry,
Hold
like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I
behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high
romance,
And think
that I may never live to trace
Their
shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I
feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I
shall never look upon thee more,
Never have
relish in the faery power
Of
unreflecting love!—then on the shore
Of the
wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
If I could only have one poem to
keep with me, I would choose “When I Have Fears.” It is
not a poem about Keats’s “fears” of imminent death, but rather a poem
about how he must—will—live, in spite of his fears. And what—or how—he will think when he has
those fears.
Looking at “the wide world” before
him he will quit worrying about “Love and Fame:
he will let them “sink” to “nothingness.” And what he will have before him, then, is “the
wide world.” Do “Love and Fame”
matter? No. When Keats faces death, life is what matters: life
in “the wide world.”
This is what “Negative Capability”
is about. And yes, Keats had that
capability.