During periods of illness in Hampstead in 1819 – precursor symptoms of tuberculosis – he was reluctant to venture out, isolating himself. The vignette is a moving image of isolation and enervation that speaks to us today:Īs for lockdown, Keats was no stranger to its pressures and deprivations. For instance, in Hyperion, his medical knowledge helps him to inhabit the catatonic state of “gray-hair’d Saturn”, who sits in solitude, “deep in the shady sadness of a vale”, despairing after being deposed by the Olympian gods. His experiences at Guy’s, though, and the empathy he developed there, found their way into his writing. Traumatised by the misery and pain he felt he could do little to alleviate, in 1816 he threw medicine in for the pen. Before he turned to poetry, Keats trained at Guy’s hospital, London, where he not only witnessed first-hand the horrors of surgery in a pre-anaesthetic age but also tended to patients on what was called the lunatic ward. He grew up in Moorgate, just across from Bethlem Hospital, which was known to London and the world as Bedlam. Of all the Romantics, Keats perhaps knew most about mental suffering. How many of us are experiencing similar thoughts at the moment? Illness and isolation In his last surviving letter, written two years after the sonnet while dying in Rome, Keats records a “feeling of my real life having past”, a conviction that he was “leading a posthumous existence”. The sonnet’s fears of a future laid to waste are shared by whole generations whose collective mental health is under siege. John Keats by Joseph Severn, painted posthumously (1821-1823). This poem has made me almost painfully empathetic towards their plight. It’s a poem that will resonate with the youth who are cooped up indoors, physically isolated, unable to meet and mingle, agonisingly aware of weeks slipping by, opportunities missed, disappointments mounting. Lensed through long months of lockdown, the sonnet’s existential anxieties seem less abstract, grand and performative, and more, well, human. Lately, in the pandemic, I’ve begun to read this poem rather differently. That’s what I used to think, at any rate. Who can read those final lines without themselves feeling a pull to swooning death, half in love with it, as Keats professed to be? The poem is romantic with a small “r” – wide-eyed, dramatic, sentimental – its vision of finality, of nothingness, gorgeous in its desolation, and all-importantly painless. In it, Keats is anxious that he won’t have time to achieve poetic fame or fall in “unreflecting love”, and these fears and self-doubts take him to the brink.īut as brinks go, this one doesn’t seem all that bad. When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be is a poem of personal worry, according to biographer Nicholas Roe. These two very different energies coalesce in one of his best loved poems, written in January 1818 when the poet was in the bloom of health: He was a young man in a hurry, eager to make a mark on the literary world even if – as a trained doctor – he was all too conscious of the body’s vulnerability to mortal shocks. In life, Keats was vivacious, funny, bawdy, pugnacious, poetically experimental, politically active, and above all forward-looking. His preoccupation with death doesn’t tell the whole story, however. And then, aged just 25, on February 23 1821, Keats himself died of tuberculosis in Rome. In 1818, he nursed his younger brother Tom as he lay dying of the same disease.Īfter such experiences, when Ludolph, the hero of Keats’ tragedy, Otho the Great, imagines succumbing to “a bitter death, a suffocating death”, Keats knew what he was writing about. At the age of 14, he lost his mother to tuberculosis. This might seem appropriate on the 200th anniversary of the death of Keats, who was popularly viewed as the young Romantic poet “ half in love with easeful death”.ĭeath certainly touched Keats and his family. In John Keats’ poems, death crops up 100 times more than the future, a word that appears just once in the entirety of his work.
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