byronic :: mad bad and dangerous to know

John Keats’ death mask, 23 February 1821

Keats died of tuberculosis one hundred and ninety years ago today, at the age of twenty-five.

He asked that upon his burial in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery near Gaius Cestius’ pyramid, his name do not appear on his gravestone.

In its stead, an inscription from Francis Beaumont and John Flecther’s play Philaster (1611) reads: ”here lies one whose name was writ in water”.

(Source: LIFE)

tragos:

Scriveners’ Birthdays: John Keats

Happy 215th Birthday, Mr. Keats.

“My Imagination is a Monastry and I am its Monk…I am in expectation of Prometheus every day.”

– Letter to Percy Bysshe Shelley, August 16, 1820

On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer (1817)

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold, 

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; 

Round many western islands have I been 

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. 

Oft on one wide expanse had I been told 

That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne; 

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene 

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: 

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies 

When a new planet swims into his ken; 

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, upon a peak in Darien. 

Thanks for bringing this to my attention, Tragos. Even though I would say that on Halloween night The Eve of Saint Agnes may be an even more appropriate poem with which to wish Junkets a happy birthday, what with all the spooky birds, foreseeing of husbands and general martyrdom splatter-fest… 

Saint Agnes’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!  
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;  
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,  
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:  
Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,  
Like pious incense from a censer old,  
Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith.

Winchester, England, September 1819 - letter from John Keats to Joshua Reynolds: 

“How beautiful the season is now—How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather—Dian skies—I never liked stubble-fields so much as now—Aye better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow, a stubble-field looks warm—in the same way that some pictures look warm. This struck me so much in my Sunday’s walk that I 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 mossed 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’erbrimmed 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-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed 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 cider-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 redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies. 

John Keats, Ode to Autumn - Online Collection of Keats manuscripts * 

[Edgar (Christoph Waltz) and Gloucester (Jürgen Holz) in Robert Wilson’s King Lear (Act IV, Scene vi) for the Frankfurter Schauspiel at Bockenheimer Depot, Frankfurt am Main, 1990]

SCENE VI. Fields near Dover.

Enter GLOUCESTER, and EDGAR dressed like a peasant

GLOUCESTER
When shall we come to the top of that same hill?

EDGAR
You do climb up it now: look, how we labour.

GLOUCESTER
Methinks the ground is even.

EDGAR
Horrible steep.
Hark! Do you hear the sea?

GLOUCESTER
No, truly.

EDGAR
Why, then, your other senses grow imperfect
By your eyes’ anguish.

(…) EDGAR
Come on, sir; here’s the place: stand still. How fearful
And dizzy ‘tis, to cast one’s eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles: half way down
Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head:
The fishermen, that walk upon the beach,
Appear like mice; and yond tall anchoring bark,
Diminish’d to her cock; her cock, a buoy
Almost too small for sight: the murmuring surge,
That on the unnumber’d idle pebbles chafes,
Cannot be heard so high. I’ll look no more;
Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong.

This is one of the most powerful and grotesque scenes in Shakespeare’s King Lear. Here Edgar, the disgraced son of the Duke of Gloucester, appears in disguise as mad beggar Poor Tom o’Bedlam, and pretends to help his father to commit suicide by jumping off the cliffs of Dover and into the sea.

Gloucester doesn’t recognise his own son because his eyes have been gouged out by one of the King’s daughters. (Eat your heart out, Quentin Tarantino.) The reason why Gloucester can’t “hear the sea” is that they are nowhere near the edge of the cliffs; of course he can’t see that Edgar is not leading him towards death, but rather on the path to self-acceptance and survival in a brutal, traumatic world.

By losing his eyes Gloucester regains his insight, and finally recognises his own blindness in believing the accusations made by his bastard son Edmund, which led to Edgar’s initial fall from grace. Eventually father and son are reconciled, albeit on the brink of death and civil war.

John Keats found the line “Hark! Do you hear the sea?” to be the most haunting verse in King Lear.

John Keats (1795-1821), Ode to the Nightingale, manuscript, 1819

Film log 2010 #6 Bright Star (dir. Jane Campion, 2009)

It’s a shame that the characters and the script are quite slight, and that the poetry is almost sidelined in favour of the sad romance; they really could have done more with the script.

There are, however, some beautiful visual moments, which make this film worth seeing. The camera is always used brilliantly - a combination of soft focus and high definition, if such a thing is possible, really brings out the material qualities of what’s being represented, transforming the images into a powerful sensory experience. At times I felt as though I was touching the threads and needles going through the ruffs and collars of Fanny’s astonishing clothes; hearing the call of the nightingale on top of the plum tree at Wentworth Place; smelling the bluebells of the Hampstead woods; and tasting the rancid blood spewed up by Keats’ sick lungs.

This visual quality really gave me a sense of the way Keats saw the texture of nature, of fabrics and bodies, of music and air, and was prompted to recreate it in words. “A thing of beauty is a joy forever”, indeed.

One of my moviesinframes: Bright Star, 2009 (dir. Jane Campion)