John Keats's Last Letter to Fanny Brawne, August 1820

I wish you could invent some means to make me at all happy without you. Every hour I am more and more concentrated in you…the fact is I cannot leave you, and shall never taste one minute’s content until it pleases chance to let me live with you for good…I am glad there is such a thing as the grave—I am sure I shall never have any rest till I get there…I wish I was either in your arms full of faith or that a Thunder bolt would strike me.

—John Keats, August 1820

John Keats’s last known letter to his beloved Fanny Brawne was written in August of 1820.  To think that this was perhaps the last letter he ever wrote to her is utterly heartbreaking.  It is so heartbreaking that I cannot even write about it—not at this present moment, at least.  Keats’s letters, especially his love-letters to his “dearest Girl”, are of profound importance to me so I shall return to this essay later in the year when, or if, I am in a better state of mind.  Currently I am full of miseries and can think of nothing else but poison and discovering the truth through a profound sleep of self-eclipse.

Although I have never been one to relate to or associate with the living, I know that I am not alone when I write that this year has been devastating.  Like millions of others, my income has been ravaged and I am teetering on the brink of financial ruin.  And because I am not part of the fortunate class who manipulate the system for their own personal benefit and profit from the suffering of others, the economy is only going to get worse for me and all future decent-paying job prospects look bleak at best.

I am sickened at the brute world…I see nothing but thorns for the future…I see no prospect of any rest.

To make matters worse, a heart-rending family situation that began last July has significantly deteriorated in recent months and I fear it will only continue to progress in the wrong direction.  And though I am no social creature, I have made profound sacrifices (more than others that I know) to avoid all social settings—even the few friends I have managed to keep after university have become strangers.  The gym has been unknown to me since March, even though it has been open since June.  The same fate has become of my dear café which now feels like some odd curiosity of my own ghostly past.  Only one single grocery store has remained a constant, although my visits, now rushed and stressful, are far less frequent.

And even during this strange social outing of grocery shopping a new sort of existential dread has formed within me.  All fellow humans, both masked incognitos and maskless red-hats, appear to me as mortal enemies, potential covid-carriers one must avoid like the plague, quite literally.  When I see aisles full of people—even a single solitary death-breather—I flee and only return when it is empty.  When groups of babbling fools appear to be walking towards me, I walk the other way.  And when people get a bit too close for comfort, I sweat with rage.

Though I breathe death with them it will be life
To see them sprawl before me into graves.

When this inconsiderate and, oftentimes, blatant disrespect of personal space occurs, three outcomes usually follow: I simply walk away; I politely ask the offending party for a wee bit of personal space; or I unlovingly gaze into their eyes like one whose wrongs in life have gone unrevenged for far too long until they back away from me.  I may look pretty to some, but madness exists unhinged within my eyes, and the gaze of a man who’s ruined himself on poetry and literature who feels the sting of having nothing left to lose is recognizable even to those who think deeply about nothing.  Such a look, often in the throes of hunger pains when I am most hangry while lingering in the pastry section, is certainly not as mad or intense a gaze that Daniel Day-Lewis wore in There Will Be Blood, a brilliant film I re-watched recently, but mad enough for the inconsiderate party to realize that if they do not retreat from my sight there just might be blood.

And if this year of plague, this year without happiness, could not get any worse, then I am here to reassure my fellow miserable creatures that it most certainly did.  The only bit of joy that echoed in my heart, and sustained what little hope remained within me throughout this rather hopeless summer, was the news I received in late May that my first collection of poems was accepted for publication from a small, but international, startup publisher.  Much sparkling rosé was consumed in celebratory fashion all throughout June and July, as well as many drunken and inspired viewings of Mary Shelley with a new votary of true and proper poetry whom I incurably infected with the spirit of Romanticism, and, even though the world was on fire and burning alive, I held onto hope.  But, literally days before my birthday, this poetic publication endeavor irrevocably and rather unexpectedly unraveled.  I have been left empty and uninspired ever since.

How does one find inspiration in such times?  How does one find hope?  How does one find a reason to go on?  To those who do not understand how exhausting it is to search for an appropriate poetry publisher in today’s prosaic world of half-assed mediocrity, work a full-time job that pays well but requires 80+ hours a week, and still stay up all night to write down the poetic musings of a tortured mind, let me explain it in three words: it is exhausting.  Sure, I can self-publish my work, and I may end up doing this, but I prefer the way of “traditional” publishing, the idea of someone else (not a friend or MFA buddy) falling so hopelessly in love with my writing that their only recourse is to raise the capital and bring it to life.  Yes, I am exhausted and, like Keats, “sickened at the brute world”.

As I mentioned in the very first paragraph above, Keats’s letters are of profound importance to me and have been both a comfort and a misery to my despairing spirit since 2016 when I first began my faithful reading of them on each bicentennial anniversary, and I shall without a doubt return to this essay later in the year to write properly on Keats’s last surviving letter to his beloved Fanny Brawne.  In the meantime, please see my essay written on the bicentennial of Keats’s 13 October 1819 letter where I wrote briefly about his life in the summer and autumn of 1819 as well as important events and writings from 1820.  You can read it here:

https://www.clayfjohnson.com/writings/john-keats-letter-to-fanny-brawne-13-october-1819

As has become tradition within my Keats-inspired ramblings, I will end this temporary essay with the most beautiful and heartbreaking lines from Keats’s August 1820 letter to Fanny Brawne.


My dearest Girl,

I wish you could invent some means to make me at all happy without you.  Every hour I am more and more concentrated in you; every thing else tastes like chaff in my Mouth.  I feel it almost impossible to go to Italy—the fact is I cannot leave you, and shall never taste one minute’s content until it pleases chance to let me live with you for good…

If I cannot live with you I will live alone.  I do not think my health will improve much while I am separated from you.  For all this I am averse to seeing you—I cannot bear flashes of light and return into my glooms again.  I am not so unhappy now as I should be if I had seen you yesterday.  To be happy with you seems such an impossibility!  It requires a luckier Star than mine!  It will never be…

Indeed I should like to give up the matter at once—I should like to die.  I am sickened at the brute world…I see nothing but thorns for the future…I see no prospect of any rest.

I wish you could infuse a little confidence of human nature into my heart.  I cannot muster any—the world is too brutal for me—I am glad there is such a thing as the grave—I am sure I shall never have any rest till I get there…I wish I was either in your arms full of faith or that a Thunder bolt would strike me.

God bless you,
J.K—