Keats+G525

Miss Lowell Eulogizes, Analyzes, Forgives the Poet

The Book. In 1795, the daughter of a man who ran a livery stable at the sign of the Swan and Hoop, Finsbury Pavement, Moorfields, married one Thomas Keats, her father's trusted head hostler and, a year later, bore him a son, John. This boy went to school till he was 17, was then bound apprentice to a surgeon, read Wordsworth, Byron, Spenser, looked into Chapman's Homer, wrote some stumbling poetry, made friends with Editor Leigh Hunt, Painter Haydon, Etcher Joseph Severn, Publish- er's Reader Woodhouse. Although lie was only five feet high, the beauty of his countenance and the vivacity of his manners charmed all who met him; the more discerning of his acquaintance found in his verse the evidence of great talent. He, happy in the promise of the career that opened before him, enjoyed life immensely— when he did not happen to have a sore throat.

To fortify his health, he started on a walking tour through Scotland. There the mist wetted him, the food was bad, he met "a mahogany-faced old jackass who knew Burns." While he was tramping 30 miles a day in drenched clothes for the sake of his throat, certain sharp dolts in Edinburgh published a review of his poem Endynrion, called it "Cockney Poetry," advised him to go back "to plasters, pills and ointment boxes," prophesied that his bookseller would not a second time "venture £50 on anything he might write." These reviews were waiting for him when he returned to England to nurse his brother Tom who, already in the last stages of tuberculosis, died soon after.

Keats, left alone, went to live with his friend Charles Brown in Hampstead, next door to a certain Mrs. Brawne "whose daughter senior," he wrote, "is, I think, beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange." He fell in love with this girl at once, she with him. Though circumstances—the increasing number of his sore throats, his intentness on his work, his need of money—kept them much apart, Keats' love for Fanny Brawne grew until it absorbed his life. One night, he rode on a stagecoach without his greatcoat, coughed a bright stain into his bedsheets. "I know the color of that blood," he said.

That winter, he lay ill in Charles Brown's house, languid with fever, able to write but little and consumed with longing for Fanny Brawne, whom he could not always see, though she lived so near. His doctor bled him often, fed him little; his illness grew fast. At last, after separation from Fanny in which he tor tured himself and her with jealous suspicions,* his friend Severn took him to Italy, nursed him through his last weeks. Wrote Severn: "He says words that tear out my heartstrings, 'Why is this ... I can't understand this' — and then his chattering teeth." Keats died on Feb. 23, 1821.