John Keats's Letter to Fanny Brawne, 13 October 1819
My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you. I am forgetful of everything but seeing you again—my Life seems to stop there—I see no further. You have absorb’d me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving.
—John Keats, 13 October 1819
My love for poetry had made me insufferably obsessed & selfish over the summer. I could not have existed without it, I was perpetually alone & absorbed in my own thoughts, a sort of dreamy inwardness that probably appeared more like madness for it would usually lead to quietly reciting lines to myself aloud while out in public. True to the perceived oddities of a thinking face, thinking out loud invariably aroused a brow-scrunched countenance of seemingly mental anguish—perhaps not quite as odd in appearance as Coleridge would describe Hazlitt, describing his manners as “99 in 100 singularly repulsive—: brow-hanging, shoe-contemplative, strange”, but no doubt I manifested the peculiar manners of someone a bit off.
The best kind of conversation is that which may be called thinking aloud.
Perhaps I am being a little severe in my self-criticism. Much of my selfishness was spent obsessing over a mid-length narrative poem inspired (enraged, more accurately) over the “man”-made Amazon fires of deforestation that occurred over the summer which, as I write this on 13 October 2019, are still burning & consuming life—not to mention the life potentially lost forever in this wanton & profit-driven ruination of precious forest.
Let me be clear. Fires do happen in nature, naturally, due to many factors. Often these low-intensity natural fires burn up old plant debris & dead vegetation/trees, making way for healthy new plant life and thus supporting the ecosystem & wildlife. However, this August 2019 conflagration in the Amazon was not natural. This was an intentional rape & murder of flora & fauna for the sole purpose of increasing profits, encouraged by governments such as Bolivia who passed legislation in July allowing for more deforestation, and certainly in Brazil where, according to research based on detailed satellite imagery, deforestation was up 88% in June compared to the previous year under the insatiable avarice of Bolsonaro. No, these all-consuming flames were not natural. This was ecocide.
And according to the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, as of 1 October 2019, profit-driven wildfires in Bolivia alone have murdered an estimated 2 million animals thus far—2 million animals dead because, as we are all taught since birth, we humans and our own selfish interests & happiness are far more important than anything else on this earth. The flames have consumed more than 10 million acres of forest since August, killing rainforest-creatures such as giant armadillos, pumas, llamas, anteaters, lizards, rare tree-frogs, ocelots, badgers, tapirs, and jaguars. Scientists have found the charred remains of all aforementioned animals. And, according to a big cat conservation group called Panthera, an estimated 500 adult jaguars have been killed or left without a home because of fires in Brazil and Bolivia, with around “5 million acres of critical big cat habitat lost in the Santa Cruz area alone”.
What are the age-old sayings? I am reminded of MLK Jr’s writings when he used “hate begets hate, violence begets violence”, and “returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars”; or Shakespeare’s “blood will have blood” from Macbeth; and even Sir Malcom from Penny Dreadful when he said “To save her I would murder the world”—I used a variation of the latter in a poem before the series came out, I dare say! What I am saying here is I want revenge on the human race which I consider a plague upon this beautiful Earth, but I know it is not the answer, and it would be a useless endeavor and utter waste of my precious time.
Let’s pretend for a moment, in a vision of revengeful & murderous fantasy, that I was indeed able to silence such worthless & artless human beings. What would this solve? Absolutely nothing. Because, if I were to silence the villain, in the billions of worthless & artless & vile & knavish & crooked & greedy & money-driven & good-for-nothing men & women who exist in this world, there would always, always, be someone to replace them—the next politician, the self-centered visionary, the wealthy financier, the real-estate-rich idiot. To continue more in the spirit of Hazlitt, who greatly admired Keats (Hazlitt was Keats’s first anthologist after his death in 1821), I am very much reminded of some brilliant and somewhat hilarious lines from his essay “On the Pleasure of Hating”:
“In private life do we not see hypocrisy, servility, selfishness, folly, and impudence succeed, while modesty shrinks from the encounter, and merit is trodden under foot? How often is ‘the rose plucked from the forehead of a virtuous love to plant a blister there!’ What chance is there of the success of real passion? What certainty of its continuance? Seeing all this as I do, and unravelling the web of human life into its various threads of meanness, spite, cowardice, want of feeling, and want of understanding, of indifference towards others, and ignorance of ourselves,—seeing custom prevail over all excellence, itself giving way to infamy—mistaken as I have been in my public and private hopes, calculating others from myself, and calculating wrong; always disappointed where I placed most reliance; the dupe of friendship, and the fool of love;—have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.”
Yes, indeed I was rather selfish this past summer when consumed by writing my narrative poem, ignoring the few friends I have left, avoiding all eye contact with people and embodying the spirit of “shoe-contemplative” and strange, and even hating myself for not hating the world enough—as Keats wrote in July of 1819, “I hate the world: it batters too much the wings of my self-will”. And yet, the poem that I wrote, somewhat Shelleyan in nature, in a way quite hopeful, and very much in the spirit of a fairy tale, is a poem that I am somewhat happy with which, in my inveterate pessimism, is rare indeed. I called it A Ride Through Faerie, and it was published just a few weeks after writing it in Fairy Tale Magazine in September of 2019. For those interested, you can read it here.
And even more to the rare human quality of unselfishness, something unspeakable in my life occurred mid-July, something I have no desire to write about in detail, nor is it something I wish to even hint at in the briefest or most obscure manner, but it sent me down a path of sadness, rage, revenge, regret, and hopelessness. It changed everything. I abandoned my own plans of moving to Colorado to start over since my return from Scotland, to be nearer to mountains, closer to Nature, and even an attempt (though possibly a fruitless one) at a completely different career & livelihood. This abandonment of my own plans—something I’ve done many times in my life for similar unselfish reasons (may the plague be upon all abusive alcoholics & woman-haters)—was so I could help take care of this situation because, let me be honest, nobody else was going to. I was alone in this, and still am, without any real help from so-called family.
I am still heartbroken over what happened, and I am still sweating with rage over the possibility that this whole situation could have been prevented—perhaps I could have done more. And though I succumbed to frustrations & resentment at times, mostly from dealing with this alone and without the support of purported blood-relations & family, I never once shirked in my responsibility. As much as I wanted to escape this seemingly unchangeable reality and dissolve into my own fantasy, I stayed. Three months later I am still dealing with this situation the best that I can, and it is no less difficult or painful—in fact, I think it has become even more painful for me, especially with the slow realization of unalterable change.
Well, what a rather dismal & depressing write-up this has quickly turned into, especially considering that the sole reason for writing this today was to honor the bicentennial of Keats’s 13 October 1819 love-letter to Fanny Brawne. Perhaps themes of regret & hate combined with rage & heartbreak are not the ideal subject matter, but such is the current state of my mind. But let me see if I can end this on a more positive note. Perhaps in D-major. To give a bit of context to Keats’s beautiful letter, which I believe will help bring out a better understanding of his brilliant & emotional words, I will briefly write about Keats’s life around this time and, hopefully, shed a little light upon the shadows of selfishness & failure that were plaguing his mind this particular autumn of 1819.
I suppose, in a strange way, it is only appropriate that I return to Keats and Brawne after three months of silence in my Writings & Ramblings section. This is about the same amount of time that Keats and Brawne would be apart from one another, during the exact same months in 1819, exactly two hundred years ago. Sometime in June of 1819, before leaving Wentworth Place (now called Keats House) in Hampstead for the Isle of Wight to focus on his writing and “to try the fortune of [the] Pen once more”, Keats and his beloved would come to an “understanding” about being engaged. Keats’s finances were in such a miserable state that he could barely support himself (only through loans could he manage), so it was virtually impossible for him to be able to marry, and just as impossible for him to be officially engaged. Thus their “understanding” was to be kept secret—for now, at least.
But Keats truly loved Fanny, and, though Fanny’s letters to Keats are lost (perhaps not found yet, but perhaps destroyed—or all taken to the grave), it seems that she truly loved him as well. Keats was determined to make his fortune through writing and, characteristic of Keats’s intense, often dramatic (mostly in a good way), and enthusiastic nature, he told Fanny before leaving Hampstead in late June that he would not return unless he could make a living to support them both. In his 1st of July 1819 love-letter, and the first known letter he wrote to Fanny, Keats wrote that “however selfish I may feel, I am sure I could never act selfishly: as I told you a day or two before I left Hampstead, I will never return to London if my Fate does not turn up Pam or at least a Court-card”.
Keats was saying that, if he could not make his living through writing, thus failing himself and Fanny, he would have to give her up to another. “I must live upon hope and Chance. In case of the worst that can happen, I shall still love you—but what hatred shall I have for another”, he writes to her in the same letter. A bit dramatic, to be sure (what proper love-letter isn’t?), but finances were weighing heavy upon Keats’s mind around this time. He was in debt, the money that he did have was quickly running out, a ridiculous family member appeared around this time to extract a share of inheritance from his brother Tom’s estate (his brother died from consumption less than a year prior on 1 December 1818 at the age of 19), his other brother George had just lost a great deal of money in America, and he was desperately in love. Keats knew he could no longer live the lifestyle that he had been living since 1816. The lifestyle of reading & writing and musing & brooding and fantasy & ecstasy. The lifestyle of a poet. He now had to grab Fate by the throat and procure a steady income.
I have no meridian to date Interests from, or measure circumstances—To-night I am all in a mist; I scarcely know what’s what—But you knowing my unsteady & vagarish disposition, will guess that all this turmoil will be settled by to-morrow morning. It strikes me to-night that I have led a very odd sort of life for the two or three last years—Here and there—no anchor—I am glad of it.
According to a letter Keats wrote to his friend Reynolds on the 11th of July, less than two weeks after arriving in Shanklin on the Isle of Wight, he had already completed the first act of his tragedy Otho the Great (the drama he hoped would be staged at Drury Lane, thus making him some money), and “about 400 lines” of Lamia, his brilliant narrative poem of Ovidian witchery—the latter being a favorite of mine. And even though I was writing my own narrative poem this past August, two hundred years to the very month as Keats was writing & finishing Lamia, also tinctured with metamorphosis, change, and witchery, my piece pales in comparison, failing to possess even the slightest brilliance of Keats’s writing:
Left to herself, the serpent now began
To change; her elfin blood in madness ran,
Her mouth foam’d, and the grass, therewith besprent,
Wither’d at dew so sweet and virulent;
Her eyes in torture fix’d, and anguish drear,
Hot, glaz’d, and wide, with lid-lashes all sear,
Flash’d phosphor and sharp sparks, without one cooling tear.
The colours all inflam’d throughout her train,
She writh’d about, convuls’d with scarlet pain:
A deep volcanian yellow took the place
Of all her milder-mooned body’s grace;
And, as the lava ravishes the mead,
Spoilt all her silver mail, and golden brede
Although hopelessly in love and burdened by the soul-crushing thought of debt & finances, Keats was still under the enchantment of poetic inspiration. He was not about to fail in the task he had set out for himself when he left Hampstead in late June, leaving his beloved behind in such uncertainties. He was there to focus, to write, and “to make one more attempt in the Press”. Could he grasp & possess success, could he handle failure? Understandably, both were on his mind. In the same letter to Reynolds on the 11th of July, Keats writes “I have great hopes of success, because I make use of my Judgement more deliberately than I have yet done; but in Case of failure with the world, I shall find my content”. If only I could look at my own failures in such a way.
Oft expectation fails, and most oft there
Where most it promises; and oft it hits
Where hope is coldest, and despair most fits
Keats would finish both Otho the Great and Lamia weeks later within the “Town quietude” of the cathedral town of Winchester. He and his good friend Charles Brown, co-collaborator of Otho (Brown’s idea, but Keats’s verse) moved there in mid-August for Keats was feeling “the want of a Library”—he was also sick of the throngs of irritating tourists, something that murdered my own creativity when I briefly lived in a certain section of Edinburgh last winter. Besides the need for a library, Keats also wanted to receive Fanny’s letters more quickly. She was, of course, still very much on his mind. But so was his writing and finding success—or finding peace of mind in failure. While still on the Isle of Wight, a week before leaving for Winchester, Keats wrote to Fanny that “I am in a train of writing now I fear to disturb it”, and, when Brown actually did indeed disturb it after being away for two days, such interruption fell upon him like a thunderbolt for he had been absorbed like a “dream among my Books, really luxuriating in a solitude and silence you alone should have disturb’d”. If Keats was to be disturbed out of his writing, only his beloved Fanny Brawne had the right to do so.
Even as I leave off, it seems to me that a few more moments’ thought of you would uncrystallize and dissolve me. I must not give way to it—but turn to my writing again—if I fail I shall die hard. O my love, your lips are growing sweet again to my fancy. I must forget them.
And yet, during the entirety of this difficult summer and early autumn of 1819, Keats was continually disturbed out of his writing—I am amazed that he wrote as much as he did, and with such brilliance! Not only was he hopelessly in love with Fanny Brawne (anyone, whether he or she or them or they, knows the maddening distraction of being in love—nothing else in the world exists), desperate to make a living with his writing to support himself AND Fanny Brawne (keep in mind Keats didn’t even have a steady income at this point to pay his own bills & debts—imagine his sense of urgency here), concerned with his own failing health which he mostly avoided writing about (lingering sore throat from Scotland last summer, and possible early consumptive symptoms after nursing his brother Tom), plagued by voices of both success & failure, and the crushing pressure of making his own way (“I am fit for nothing but literature”), he still had the good heart and absolute unselfishness to worry about his brother George in America. In a letter dated 17th of September 1819, while still living in Winchester, he writes to George:
“I really have hopes of success. I have finished a Tragedy, which if it succeeds will enable me to sell what I may have in manuscript to a good advantage. I have pass’d my time in reading, writing, and fretting—the last I intend to give up, and stick to the other two. They are the only chances of benefit to us. Your wants will be a fresh spur to me. I assure you you shall more than share what I can get whilst I am still young. The time may come when age will make me more selfish. I have not been well treated by the world, and yet I have, capitally well.”
The tragedy was, of course, Otho the Great and Keats had pinned all hopes of financial success on the idea that the great Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean would play the starring role of Ludolph. Keats believed that only Kean had the fire to play the part, to bring to life the words he wrote, and to find, at last, some sort of success. Even Coleridge wrote of Kean’s dramatic brilliance, writing that “To see him act was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning”—was ever a greater compliment written? So, for Keats, it had to be Kean; no one else could play Ludolph, and no one else could make his first attempt at drama a proper success.
I had hoped to give Kean another opportunity to shine…There is not another actor of Tragedy in all London or Europe. The Covent Garden Company is execrable. Young is the best among them and he is a ranting coxcombical tasteless Actor—a Disgust, a Nausea—and yet the very best after Kean.
The report runs now more in favour of Kean stopping in England. If he should, I have confident hopes of our tragedy. If he invokes the hot-blooded character of Ludolph,—and he is the only actor that can do it,—he will add to his own fame and improve my fortune.
However, with all of Keats’s brilliant efforts, success was not to find him. He had recently read that Kean was to leave London to tour America. All was lost, writing that all his work on Otho was “labour in vain for the present”. For all his hope & chance, it was looking like he would have to find his content with failure. Weeks later he would find out that Kean had decided to remain in London, honoring his contract with Drury Lane, but it did not matter. Although Drury Lane had accepted Keats’s play for next season, Keats and Brown could not agree to the terms. Disheartened & discouraged, they sent the play to Covent Garden. It was outright rejected. Keats’s Otho would remain rejected & forgotten for over 130 years, receiving its first stage performance at St. Martin’s Theatre in 1950.
But, before the renewed & short-lived hope of Kean staying in London encouraged Keats’s spirits once more for possible literary & financial success, something no short of miraculous happened. During a lovely autumnal walk along the River Itchen near Winchester on the 19th of September, for once free from the delusions of literary fame, and no longer weighed down & burdened by the pressures & strains of writing for money, Keats allowed himself to be consumed once again by his true poetic spirit. Enraptured by the brilliant landscape, and under its influence of autumn ecstasy, he “composed upon it”.
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease;
For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
What Keats composed this September evening was his immortal “To Autumn”, a poem I brood upon every year when the air starts to get a little cooler, when the shadows lengthen a little more each afternoon under the maturing sun, when the soft leaves turn from green to shades of reddish-orange & ripening yellow, thicken with decay, become a little crunchier underfoot, and change. It is a poem that I recited to myself over and over again while walking the English countryside last October, listening to and then seeing his brilliant words come to life before my very eyes. It is a work of art, pure pastoral serenity, and a piece born from true poetic spirit that Aileen Ward, my favorite Keats biographer, called his “most perfect and untroubled poem”. It is my opinion that Keats, after months of endless stress & constant worry, heartache & self-doubt, grand illusions of literary fame & success, and very real visions of failure & worthlessness, at last allowed himself a moment of peace, allowing the whispers of his true poetic Muse to consume him once more. Keats’s “To Autumn” would be his last major poem before his death just a year and a half later.
Warbling sirens of moon-mellowed offspring
Trill the witch-visions of an afterlife
Full of spectral-enchantment and Icelandic mares:
To my ruined flesh I must bid adieu,
So that I may be born anew
Into the quiet heart of pastoral affairs.
What was Keats to do? In his mind he had failed in his task, he believed himself a failure—could he find content in his failures with the world? Weeks later, on the 10th of November, Keats would write to his friend Joseph Severn that he had been “so very lax, unemployed, unmeridian’d, and objectless”. Just two days later he would once again write to his brother George:
“I have been endeavouring to write lately, but with little success as I require a little encouragement, [and] little better fortune to befall you and happier news from you before I can write with an untrammell’d mind. Nothing could have in all its circumstances fallen out worse for me than the last year has done, or could be more damping to my poetical talent.”
And even though Keats believed he had failed in his last “attempt in the Press”, failing to find even a hint of financial success, and thus failing both himself and his beloved Fanny Brawne, he just could not stay away from her—how could he? Before his acknowledgement of failure to his brother George in November, he would leave Winchester and return to London, moving into an apartment at 25 College Street near Westminster Abbey on the 8th of October. Just two days later, on the 10th of October, he would see Fanny at Wentworth Place for the first time since leaving Hampstead almost four months prior in late June. He was still madly in love with her, and his seeming failure changed nothing—she was still his beloved, and he was hers. He wrote to her the very next day on the 11th of October:
“My sweet Girl, I am living today in yesterday: I was in a complete fascination all day. I feel myself at your mercy. Write me ever so few lines and tell me you will never forever be less kind to me than yesterday.—You dazzled me. There is nothing in the world so bright and delicate…When shall we pass a day alone? I have had a thousand kisses, for which with my whole soul I thank love—but if you should deny me the thousand and first—‘twould put me to the proof how great a misery I could live through.”
Seeing her again dissolved him, consumed him, vanquished him. If writing was a struggle over the summer while under the crushing pressures of making his fortune, it was now almost a hopeless impossibility without being absorbed & overwhelmed by the very thought of her—even the simple task of making a fair copy of his poetry was just too unbearable. He could think of nothing else but Fanny Brawne. He could “see no further” than seeing her again. Nothing else mattered. For so long he could suppress these passionate emotions, both selfishly with the idea of keeping his “liberty” & poetic independence, and unselfishly with the thought of his beloved being tied down to a penniless poet who lived in contradictions and the “unpromise” of a hopeful & healthful future. No longer could he resist her “Power”. His love had now become selfish. He was nothing without her. He could not live without her. After the emotional strains of being apart from her since June, and the anguish of a tortured mind over both success & failure, Keats would write another immortal love-letter to Fanny Brawne. Just three days after seeing her again, on the 13th of October 1819, exactly two hundred years ago as I write this, Keats wrote to his beloved:
My dearest Girl,
This moment I have set myself to copy some verses out fair. I cannot proceed with any degree of content. I must write you a line or two and see if that will assist in dismissing you from my Mind for ever so short a time. Upon my Soul I can think of nothing else. The time is passed when I had power to advise and warn you against the unpromising morning of my Life. My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you. I am forgetful of everything but seeing you again—my Life seems to stop there—I see no further. You have absorb’d me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving—I should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of soon seeing you. I should be afraid to separate myself far from you. My sweet Fanny, will your heart never change? My love, will it? I have no limit now to my love…..Your note came in just here. I cannot be happier away from you. ‘Tis richer than an Argosy of Pearles. Do not threat me even in jest. I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion—I have shudder’d at it—I shudder no more—I could be martyr’d for my Religion—Love is my religion—I could die for that—I could die for you. My Creed is Love and you are its only tenet. You have ravish’d me away by a Power I cannot resist; and yet I could resist till I saw you; and even since I have seen you I have endeavoured often “to reason against the reasons of my Love.” I can do that no more—the pain would be too great—My Love is selfish—I cannot breathe without you.
Yours for ever
John Keats
Keats returned to Hampstead to see Fanny just two days later on the 15th, and just a few days after that decided to leave his cheap lodgings on College Street in London to move back into Wentworth Place. He wanted to be under the same roof as Fanny once again, no matter how difficult it would be to the both of them—she, too, lived in a separate section of Wentworth Place with her mother and siblings. “I have several things to speak to you of tomorrow morning”, he writes to her on the 19th. He loved her deeply, and he wanted to make their June “understanding” official—as official as it could be, at least, for his now even worse financial situation (and perhaps even changed health) made setting a wedding date impossible.
In the same 19th of October letter, a few lines down, he writes that he “should like to cast the die for Love or death. I have no Patience with anything else…My mind is in a tremble, I cannot tell what I am writing”. Again, he admits that his poetic spirit has been consumed by her, and that he can think of nothing else—only she matters to him now. The very next day, on the 20th of October 1819, it is believed that Fanny’s mother finally “consented” to the engagement, even though she still disapproved. It is around this time, and probably on the very day, that Fanny would start wearing the purpled garnet ring that Keats gave her when he proposed. The very ring she would wear for years after his death, and perhaps her entire life until her own death in 1865. In a strange twist of fate & coincidence, I would see this engagement ring—mourning ring, more appropriately—when I visited Keats House in Hampstead for the very first time on the 13th of October 2018, exactly one year ago today as I write this.
[I took this picture of Keats House in Hampstead exactly one year ago today, 13 October 2018. No, there are no coincidences.]
To cast the die for Love or death. I have often wondered, especially while writing this today, that if Keats already knew he was dying during that difficult summer & autumn of 1819. Although he had already shown symptoms of consumption (the “family disease”) as early as 1817, “got a sore throat” during his Scottish walking tour & mountain adventures of 1818 while he “walked up to [his] knees in Bog”, and especially exposing himself to the disease immediately after his return while breathing in the poisonous air of his brother Tom’s sick-room when he nursed him through his last months in 1818, he would not hemorrhage the blood of his “death warrant” until February of 1820. Keats’s letters are mostly silent about his health around this time, but friends who saw him in late 1819 reported that he did not look well. In the autumn of 1819, when he could no longer breathe without Franny Brawne, when he could no longer exist without her, and when his love became “selfish”, and when he finally proposed to her making their engagement “official”, did he already know that he was destined for an early grave? Did he believe it? Did he know?
Perhaps it is just the current state of my disturbed & troubled mind, but I cannot help but wonder & brood over this. If Keats did indeed know, then the selfishness of his love that he mentions in his 13th of October letter to Fanny, just days before proposing to her, was most profound and reaches a completely different intensity. This might explain some of his mania around this time and maybe, just maybe, he truly believed love, passionate love, could cure him of the poison deep within his lungs and save him from an early grave—this is not as extreme as it might read for consumption was not yet considered an infectious disease, but rather a sort of weakness that one withered away to nothingness from due to heartbreak or even repressed sexual passion (it was even called the “romantic disease”).
Even his brother Tom, who had died from consumption less than a year earlier, was the victim of a hoax & “cruel deception” that Keats believed exacerbated his brother’s ill-health and led to his early death. One of Tom’s schoolfellows, pretending to be a lady named Amena Bellefila, sent him fake love-letters which Tom believed to be real. Poor Tom was deceived, and Keats believed this deception stirred within him unrequited love and a repressed passion that, eventually, led to Tom’s demise—nothing at all romantic about this “romantic disease”.
Thus, it is quite possible that this is what Keats meant by “cast[ing] the die for Love or death”, and, by landing on Love, he would be able to save himself from heartbreak and the grave—even months later, after his first hemorrhage, his doctors would say that his sickness was not of the lungs but all within “his mind”. However, and I am only speculating here from my own readings of Keats’s letters & writings, I do not believe Keats and Fanny consummated their love in that way. But he did indeed allude to this sort of idea in correspondence, and two letters in particular stand out to me above all others. These are letters that I have only been able to look upon just a few times over the years for they break my heart beyond repair. The very thought of them tears me apart. The first passage that came to my mind is from one of the last letters Keats ever wrote, written to his good friend Brown from Italy on the 1st of November 1820, the day after being “let out of Quarantine” from his “stifled cabin” that was held in isolation for ten miserable days in the Bay of Naples. The second passage that I am reminded of comes from a letter written just a month earlier while still on board the Maria Crowther that was, perhaps not surprisingly, also written to his dear friend Brown—I had first thought both passages were from the same heartbreaking letter. Given the current state of my own tormented mind, I feel particularly obliged to copy out a significant portion from both, beginning with the letter from Naples dated 1 November 1820:
“The persuasion that I shall see her [Fanny Brawne] no more will kill me. My dear Brown, I should have had her when I was in health, and I should have remained well. I can bear to die—I cannot bear to leave her. Oh, God! God! God! Every thing I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear. The silk lining she put in my travelling cap scalds my head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her—I see her—I hear her. There is nothing in the world of sufficient interest to divert me from her a moment. This was the case when I was in England; I cannot recollect, without shuddering, the time that I was a prisoner at Hunt’s, and used to keep my eyes fixed on Hampstead all day. Then there was a good hope of seeing her again—Now!—O that I could be buried near where she lives! I am afraid to write to her—to receive a letter from her—to see her handwriting would break my heart—even to hear of her anyhow, to see her name written, would be more than I can bear. My dear Brown, what am I to do? Where can I look for consolation or ease? If I had any chance of recovery, this passion would kill me.”
And a passage from Keats’s letter written just a month prior on the 30th of September 1820, just thirteen days into his journey to Italy:
“The time has not yet come for a pleasant Letter from me. I have delayed writing to you from time to time because I felt how impossible it was to enliven you with one heartening hope of my recovery…Even if my body would recover of itself, this would prevent it. The very thing which I want to live most for will be a great occasion of my death. I cannot help it. Who can help it? Were I in health it would make me ill, and how can I bear it in my state? I daresay you will be able to guess on what subject I am harping—you know what was my greatest pain during the first part of my illness at your house. I wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these pains, and then I wish death away, for death would destroy even those pains which are better than nothing. Land and sea, weakness and decline, are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever…I think without my mentioning it for my sake you would be a friend to Miss Brawne when I am dead…The thought of leaving Miss Brawne is beyond everything horrible—the sense of darkness coming over me—I eternally see her figure eternally vanishing. Some of the phrases she was in the habit of using during my last nursing at Wentworth Place ring in my ears. Is there another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.”
These autumn letters of 1820 are excruciatingly heartbreaking and I must turn from them before I find my own despair.
Turning away, and returning once more to Keats’s difficult autumn of 1819, he was weighed down by crushing debt, he believed himself a worthless & talentless failure, not only failing himself and his dreams & ambitions of poetical success, but also failing his beloved, and combined with his fluctuating bouts of ill-health would drive just about anyone to the verge of madness. But how would the belief that death, no longer a possibility, but an unchangeable certainty, play into this and affect Keats’s state of mind around this time?
Now I have had opportunities of passing nights anxious and awake I have found other thoughts intrude upon me. “If I should die,” said I to myself, “I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d.”
There is a rather mysterious & haunting fragment that Keats wrote during this tormented autumn of 1819, perhaps written with an idea for a dramatic poem and quickly abandoned, perhaps written in a moment of macabre inspiration, or perhaps even written to Fanny herself. I first came across this fragment by accident some years ago, during a tormented autumn of my own and while under an October spell of Gothic enchantment (Keats would have perhaps disapproved of my reading habits of “popular” writers that year), and dark images materialized like ghosts within my mind. However, now, as I write this little piece today and brood upon Keats’s life up to this point, I look upon this fragment with changed eyes and I am haunted by new and even darker images. Keats had recently proposed to Fanny, and she had happily accepted giving him her hand. And, in a way, Keats, too, was giving Fanny his own “living hand”, currently “warm” with life, but soon to be “cold” with death, no longer able to write poetry or “capable of earnest grasping”, but buried within the “icy silence of the tomb” and forever lost to her.
“This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.”
We will never truly know what Keats knew & suffered during the summer & autumn of 1819, if he really knew or believed he was dying, nor if his “living hand” fragment was written with Fanny in mind, nor will we ever know exactly what he meant by his selfishness for Love in his 13th of October letter to Fanny, when his religion had become Love and she the only tenet. “Love is my religion”, he wrote to her, “I could die for that—I could die for you”. But, perhaps, what we do know with a high degree of certainty is that Keats was deeply & madly in love with Fanny Brawne, and she with him. He was “dissolving”, she had “absorb’d” him, and to live, to truly live, he had to be near to her. “I should be afraid to separate myself far from you”, he wrote.
God alone knows whether I am destined to taste happiness with you: at all events I myself know thus much, that I consider it no mean Happiness to have lov’d you thus far—if it is to be no further I shall not be unthankful—if I am to recover, the day of my recovery shall see me by your side from which nothing shall separate me.
I am tormented day and night. They talk of my going to Italy. ‘Tis certain I shall never recover if I am to be so long separate from you…the air I breathe in a room empty of you is unhealthy.
But he did indeed separate himself far, far away from her when he left for Rome less than a year later with the hopes of making a recovery in the Italian climate—or was his journey hopeless, believing & knowing in his heart that he was never to return, that he was separating himself from his beloved forever? If Keats did indeed know, or at least strongly believe, that he had caught his death as early as autumn 1819, then, when he boarded the Maria Crowther bound for Italy on the 17th of September 1820, did he know that he would never again see Fanny Brawne? I believe that he knew.
Keats and Fanny would last see each other on the 13th of September 1820, four days before sailing upon hopeless & perilous seas. They would say their final good-byes this day and exchange gifts. Besides locks of hair from each, Keats would give her a small portrait of himself to remember him by, and Fanny had lovingly lined his travel-cap with silk to keep him warm when she herself no longer could. As they parted, she gave him her cooling sewing-stone of polished white carnelian. This was a semi-precious jewel that she used to cool her fingers while working her needlecraft, but it was also an enchanted love-charm that she had hoped would consume the fires of his inconsumable fever. His friend & travel-companion Severn, some forty years later when he would “behold Keats’s dear image again in memory”, would write of this oval of white carnelian including a heartbreaking reminiscence of love-letters:
“He kept continually in his hand a polished, oval, white carnelian, the gift of his widowing love, and at times it seemed his only consolation, the only thing left him in this world clearly tangible. Many letters which he was unable to read came for him. Some he allowed me to read to him; others were too worldly,—for, as he said, he had ‘already journeyed far beyond them.’ There were two letters, I remember, for which he had no words, but he made me understand that I was to place them on his heart within his winding-sheet.”
This day of gifts & good-byes would be the last time Keats and Fanny would ever communicate with one another. She wrote to him while he was in Rome, but, as previously mentioned, he found it too unbearable to read her letters and he certainly could not bear writing to her. I cannot exist without you…I cannot breathe without you. And like the “icy silence” & secrets of the grave, with all the singular mysteries possessed & kept solely by the illustrious dead, Fanny Brawne’s last love-letters to her Keats would be buried with him in Rome. Unopened. Unread.
NOTES & REFERENCES
I apologize for the rather gloomy & heartbroken characteristic of this post. It was written exactly on the bicentennial of Keats’s brilliant love letter, on a Sunday which means I had more time to write & brood, and this was indeed the current state of my mind that day: crushing thoughts of failure & regret, both Poetical & professional; loss of friends & fake-friends; and the hope of new love turned hopeless. And speaking of failure, I utterly failed in turning this post around and writing in D Major—though perhaps a D Major more characteristic of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis.
Also, this piece was never meant to be academic, and nor is it for that that matter, for I am offering no new insights except the melancholy musings of my own thoughts based on Keats’s own letters. Besides Keats’s letters, I also related some circumstances of his life during the years of 1819-1820 through my own research over the years and from using a few biographies that I own. However, since the Keatsian section was much longer than planned, and since a couple of friends asked me about sources used, I will list them below:
The Letters of John Keats: 1814-1821 (1958) in 2 volumes, Hyder Edward Rollins
John Keats: The Making of a Poet (1963), Aileen Ward
Keats: A Biography (1997), Andrew Motion
John Keats: A New Life (2012), Nicholas Roe