A Bright Torch*
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 is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
John Keats wrote his Ode on a Grecian Urn in May of 1819. O, there is nothing like fine weather, he wrote to his sister on Mayday of that year. He was in love with Fanny Brawne and although he had been ill, the warm spring weather was making him feel better. He had two more years to live.
For someone whose subject lived for only 26 years, Nicholas Roe finds enough to write about John Keats to fill nearly 400 pages in the paperback edition. That is likely because this is not only a biography of Keats, it is also an essay on the life and times of suburban London at the turn of the 19th Century, not to mention the lives of many of those who figured largely in the poet’s life.
The poet who might not have been a poet.
He might have been a doctor.
Born in 1795, he was blessed as a child with spending school days at Clarke’s Academy in Enfield, a seeming hotbed of radicals and dissenters , a “woke” school of its time. Poetry seems to have been an early calling – while still at school, he made his own translation of The Aeneid, by Virgil.
But even though he had been writing poems likely since he first learned to put pen to paper, his family decided to ensure that he had a respectable way to make a living and eventually he registered as an apprentice at Guy’s Hospital in London to study the doctor’s trade. His knowledge of Latin made passing the required exams for an Apothecary’s License possible. Poetry remained a passion, however, and in 1816, after his friend Cowden Clarke loaned him the book , he wrote his first published poem, “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” which ends with “Silent, upon a peak in Darien …”
Keats remained at Guy’s for three years, finally advancing to the status of “dresser,” which seems analogous to our advanced interns if not a resident. In other words, he assisted the surgeons – which often meant amputations. Without so much as ether. Ether, nitrous oxide, and chloroform were not introduced until the 1840’s. In 1817, Keats resigned from Guy’s and proclaimed himself a poet.
This biography is filled out with excerpts from the many, many letters that were left behind. It details the year or so he spent nursing his brother Tom until Tom's death from consumption. The time he spent on a walking tour of Scotland with his friend Charles Brown, from which he returned with a sore throat. Many gatherings with friends, including William Wordsworth and Charles Lamb. John Keats was a man blessed with many longtime and true friends.
And many, many poems.
The book also details the end of an era. The countryside in which Keats and his brothers grew up, including paths and streams that featured in John’s poetry, had begun to disappear under a blitz of new housing projects. The first railway began operating in 1825, just 4 years after his death. It is possible that one reason his poems became so popular in those years was because they recalled the landscape the English once knew so well.
He died of consumption in 1821 in Rome, in an apartment at the foot of the Spanish Steps, where his friends, including Charles Brown, had taken him in hopes that better weather would help him to heal. It was too late for that. He died on February 23, during the Roman festival of Terminalia when he, as Nicholas Roe puts it, “stepped beyond tomorrow.”
Still he was, indeed, at the end of what we might call the Pastoral Age, a bright torch.
*From “Ode to Psyche”