Two Wives Ago: Selected Poems
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Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. Alexa Actionable Analytics for the Web. If I am dumb beside your body while silence blossoms like tumors on our lips. I have seen the hunters kneel before her hem Even in her sleep She turns away from them. The only gift they offer Is their abiding grief I pull out my pockets For a handkerchief or leaf. Millennium from "Flowers for Hitler" This could be my little book about love if I wrote it-- but my good demon said: The fire's not important! I went home to take a bath.
I phoned my grandmother. She is suffering from arthritis. Hours later I wondered did she mean don't mind my pain or don't mind her pain? Whereupon my good demon said: Was it all I could do? There was the old lady eating alone, thinking about Prince Albert, Flanders Field, Kishenev, her fingers too sore for TV knobs; but how could I get there? The books were gone my address lists-- My good demon said again: You know how to get there! I remembered it from memory!
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I found her pouring over the royal family tree, 'Grandma,' I almost said, 'you've got it upside down--' 'Take a look,' she said, 'it only goes to George V. The only tourist in Havana turns his thoughts homeward from "Flowers for Hitler" Come, my brothers, let us govern Canada, let us find our serious heads, let us dump asbestos on the White House, let us make the French talk English, not only here but everywhere, let us torture the Senate individually until they confess, let us purge the New Party, let us encourage the dark races so they'll be lenient when they take over, let us make the CBC talk English, let us all lean in one direction and float down to the coast of Florida, let us have tourism, let us flirt with the enemy, let us smelt pig-iron in our back yards, let us sell snow to under-developed nations, It is true one of our national leaders was a Roman Catholic?
Havana April Waiting for Marianne from "Flowers for Hitler" I have lost a telephone with your smell in it I am living beside the radio all the stations at once but I pick out a Polish lullaby I pick it out of the static it fades I wait I keep the beat it comes back almost alseep Did you take the telephone knowing I'd sniff it immoderately maybe heat up the plastic to get all the crumbs of your breath and if you won't come back how will you phone to say you won't come back so that I could at least argue Poem 1 "I stopped to listen, but he did not come I begain again with a sense of loss.
As this sense deepened I heard him again. I stopped stopping and I stopped starting, and I allowed myself to be crushed by ignorance. This was a strategy, and didn't work at all.
Much time, years were wasted in such a minor mode. I offer buttons for his love. I beg for mercy. Haltingly he moves toward his throne. Reluctantly the angels grant to one another permission to sing. When they finally docked in Naples, the ship was held in quarantine for ten days due to a suspected outbreak of cholera in Britain. Keats reached Rome on 14 November, by which time any hope of the warmer climate he sought had disappeared.
Keats wrote his last letter on 30 November to Charles Armitage Brown ; "Tis the most difficult thing in the world to me to write a letter. My stomach continues so bad, that I feel it worse on opening any book — yet I am much better than I was in Quarantine. Then I am afraid to encounter the proing and conning of any thing interesting to me in England. I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence". Despite care from Severn and Dr. James Clark , his health rapidly deteriorated. The medical attention Keats received may have hastened his death.
Clark eventually diagnosed consumption tuberculosis and placed Keats on a starvation diet of an anchovy and a piece of bread a day intended to reduce the blood flow to his stomach. He also bled the poet: What Severn didn't realise was that Keats saw it as a possible resource if he wanted to commit suicide. He tried to get the bottle from Severn on the voyage but Severn wouldn't let him have it. Then in Rome he tried again Severn was in such a quandary he didn't know what to do, so in the end he went to the doctor who took it away. As a result Keats went through dreadful agonies with nothing to ease the pain at all.
He repeatedly demanded "how long is this posthumous existence of mine to go on? The first months of marked a slow and steady decline into the final stage of tuberculosis. Keats was coughing up blood and covered in sweat. On first coughing up blood, he said "I know the colour of that blood!
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It is arterial blood. I cannot be deceived in that colour. That drop of blood is my death warrant. Severn nursed him devotedly and observed in a letter how Keats would sometimes cry upon waking to find himself still alive. Keats raves till I am in a complete tremble for him [66] The phlegm seem'd boiling in his throat, and increased until eleven, when he gradually sank into death, so quiet, that I still thought he slept. His last request was to be placed under a tombstone bearing no name or date, only the words, "Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water.
Severn and Brown added their lines to the stone in protest at the critical reception of Keats' work. Hunt blamed his death on the Quarterly Review ' s scathing attack of "Endymion". As Byron quipped in his narrative poem Don Juan ;. For public health reasons, the Italian health authorities burned the furniture in Keats' room, scraped the walls, made new windows, doors and flooring. Describing the site today, Marsh wrote, "In the old part of the graveyard, barely a field when Keats was buried here, there are now umbrella pines, myrtle shrubs, roses, and carpets of wild violets".
When Keats died at 25, he had been writing poetry seriously for only about six years, from until the summer of ; and publishing for only four. In his lifetime, sales of Keats' three volumes of poetry probably amounted to only copies. Agnes and other poems was published in July before his last visit to Rome. The compression of his poetic apprenticeship and maturity into so short a time is just one remarkable aspect of Keats' work. Although prolific during his short career, and now one of the most studied and admired British poets, his reputation rests on a small body of work, centred on the Odes , [73] and only in the creative outpouring of the last years of his short life was he able to express the inner intensity for which he has been lauded since his death.
Aware that he was dying, he wrote to Fanny Brawne in February , "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. Keats' ability and talent was acknowledged by several influential contemporary allies such as Shelley and Hunt.
The loveliest and the last, The bloom, whose petals nipped before they blew Died on the promise of the fruit. Although Keats wrote that "if poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all", poetry did not come easily to him; his work was the fruit of a deliberate and prolonged classical self-education. He may have possessed an innate poetic sensibility, but his early works were clearly those of a young man learning his craft. His first attempts at verse were often vague, languorously narcotic and lacking a clear eye.
Indeed, during Keats' few years as a published poet, the reputation of the older Romantic school was at its lowest ebb. Keats came to echo these sentiments in his work, identifying himself with a 'new school' for a time, somewhat alienating him from Wordsworth, Coleridge and Byron and providing the basis from the scathing attacks from Blackwoods and The Quarterly. 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.
There is hardly a complete couplet enclosing a complete idea in the whole book. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feelings on the song of our nightingale. The winter of —19, though a difficult period for the poet, marked the beginning of his annus mirabilis in which he wrote his most mature work. With biting sarcasm, Lockhart advised, "It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John, back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes". Five months later came the publication of Poems , the first volume of Keats' verse, which included "I stood tiptoe" and "Sleep and Poetry," both strongly influenced by Hunt.
First stanza of " To Autumn ", [81] September By the time of his death, Keats had therefore been associated with the taints of both old and new schools: Keats' posthumous reputation mixed the reviewers' caricature of the simplistic bumbler with the image of the hyper-sensitive genius killed by high feeling, which Shelley later portrayed.
The Victorian sense of poetry as the work of indulgence and luxuriant fancy offered a schema into which Keats was posthumously fitted. Marked as the standard-bearer of sensory writing, his reputation grew steadily and remarkably. Agnes", "Isabella" and "La Belle Dame sans Merci", lush, arresting and popular images which remain closely associated with Keats' work. Ridley claimed the ode "is the most serenely flawless poem in our language. The largest collection of the letters, manuscripts, and other papers of Keats is in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Since the British Keats-Shelley Memorial Association have annually awarded a prize for romantic poetry.
None of Keats' biographies were written by people who had known him. Leigh Hunt's Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries gives the first biographical account, strongly emphasising Keats' supposedly humble origins, a misconception which still continues. These early writings coloured all subsequent biography and have become embedded in a body of Keats legend. Shelley promoted Keats as someone whose achievement could not be separated from agony, who was 'spiritualised' by his decline and too fine-tuned to endure the harshness of life; the consumptive, suffering image popularly held today.
The idealised image of the heroic romantic poet who battled poverty and died young was inflated by the late arrival of an authoritative biography and the lack of an accurate likeness. Most of the surviving portraits of Keats were painted after his death, and those who knew him held that they did not succeed in capturing his unique quality and intensity. It was directed by John Barnes. He is the companion and sidekick of the protagonist. In Dan Simmons ' book Hyperion , one of the characters is a clone of John Keats, of whom he possesses personality and memories.
In Tim Powers ' book The Stress of Her Regard , John Keats, along with Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, is the victim of a vampire and his gift with language and poetry is a direct consequence of the vampire breed's attention. As a Shakespearean, Keats is recruited by naval lieutenant Andrew Sullivan to spy on the antagonist, Adrian Hart, who has dubbed himself 'Iago'.
Keats' letters were first published in and During the 19th century, critics deemed them unworthy of attention, distractions from his poetic works.
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Eliot described them as "certainly the most notable and most important ever written by any English poet. Eliot wrote of Keats' conclusions; "There is hardly one statement of Keats' about poetry which Few of Keats' letters are extant from the period before he joined his literary circle. From spring , however, there is a rich record of his prolific and impressive skills as letter writer.
They glitter with humour and critical intelligence. Keats also reflected on the background and composition of his poetry, and specific letters often coincide with or anticipate the poems they describe. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion [chameleon] Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation.
A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity — he is continually in for — and filling some other Body — The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute — the poet has none; no identity — he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God's Creatures. A temperate sharpness about it I never lik'd the stubbled fields as much as now — Aye, better than the chilly green of spring.
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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; [81]. Later, To Autumn became one of the most highly regarded poems in the English language. There are areas of his life and daily routine that Keats does not describe.