WELCOME
ODE TO A HOT POET
Posted 03.18.10 by annajohnson
There is no shame in saying you are reading a book because you saw the movie first. Before seeing ‘Bright Star’, the film about John Keats by Jane Campion, I had read possibly three of his most famous poems. Back in high school and barely concentrating. I don’t believe I am alone and whether you love the film or found it, as many men have commented, too ponderous and slow, it may have you reading Keats again. And with pleasure.
Two recent editions are a great current introduction to the poet. The shorter is ‘John Keats, Poems selected by Andrew Motion’ (faber poetry) and the second (with Campion’s film still on the front) is ‘Bright Star: The Complete Poems and Selected Letters’ (Vintage). Perhaps because I didn’t want to look like a novice or a romantic wannabe on the bus, so I began with the faber volume of selected poems. Unlike a lot of poetry books it was not scary thick. The introduction was only two pages long, this is teasingly short but written concisely enough to re-establish Keats as a bold contemporary mind of his time and not the feeble sickly tragic that the Victorians painted. Keats, you see, died young and stayed pretty. Famished in Rome on a diet of one anchovy and a slice of bread per day proscribed by a doctor who believed he merely had a bad stomach, the poet died of both starvation and consumption at the age of twenty five in a room with daisies painted on the ceiling. It was a raw deal for English literature for who knows what the genius could have composed if he had lived, and loved, a little longer.
The dramatic axis of ‘Bright Star’ (the film) is Keats’ stifled passion for the teenage Fanny Brawne. He wrote her thirty two letters and (perhaps) five poems, but in the space of his two year romance also wrote some of his finest sonnets and elegies. The film tempts us to believe that Keats was an emotional and sensual virgin before Fanny. A poseur on a couch, thinking about love without grappling with its physical pain or raw truths. But the joy of actually reading his collected work is that we find a young man under full steam before, during and after finding his great muse. Keats was always on fire and his imagery, his language is so often suffused in sensual humidity; the scent of human breath and sheen of molten flesh, as well as all those flower petals fit to burst their buds. Modern readers don’t expect this sort of heat from a man of Austen’s stuffy age. I didn’t. Yet many of his poems put contemporary erotica on the back burner. His nymphs and heroes are dew soaked and shaking like rain drenched trees:
‘he feels the moisture on his cheek, and blesses,
with lips that tremble, and with glistening eye,
All that soft luxury
That nestled in his arms.’ from Calidore
Stealing from nature all the secrecy and shadow his lovers don’t just kiss they pollinate:
She felt the warmth, her eyelids opened bland,
And, like new flowers at morning song of bees,
Bloomed and gave up her honey to the bees.
From Lamia
And, just when it all gets too soggy and fraught, Keats wit cuts through the fog with a biting salty gust. When it comes to the false morality of seduction he’s no shrinking violet and freely shows his bawdy side:
‘There’s a blush for won’t, and a blush for shan’t,
And a blush for having done it;
There’s a blush for thought and a blush for naught,
And a blush for just begun it.’
from Oh blush not so!
Biographers have noted the love Keats had for Shakespeare and, like the bard, the poet can spin a pot boiling yarn (lover’s exhuming graves and planting skulls in basil pots) or bang on about Roman banquets and serpents morphing into women, yet rarely does his imagery seem kitsch. His language is just too layered and too brilliantly faceted. And even when so many of his classical references are lost on the modern reader, the joy of the sound of his words makes ample time for finding out what they actually mean, later. Of course he spoke a very different English and a large proportion of his lexicon has passed from current usage. “What the hell is a ‘Lucent fan’ or a ‘Morphean fount’?” I mumbled as I plundered through the complete poems and google wasn’t much help as words depend on context for meaning. But just like a schoolgirl it pays to simply circle the boggling bits with a faint pencil line and press on. If you are not a scholar of nineteenth century poetry then you are in broad company. Keats’ ambitious, dense and double fisted lyrical style was confronting even for the readers of his time.
In ‘Bright Star’ the actress playing Fanny is open in her confusion about the truth of poetry and in the centuries that have intervened poetic verse has slipped further and further from daily life. Jane Campion was canny to have her heroine ask the question every generation asks of poets; “How can I read you? And what do you mean?” In the film the poet and his muse eventually reach complicity and understanding through their senses. The words become the emotions, the gesture fuses to the truth, love conquers art. But what great materials were at hand for Keats in 1820 and what a limited palette we have to paint with today. Imagine a poem beginning with the words “I am just so into you!” and you get my point. Young modern lovers quote film lines instead of sonnets and send epistles in the abbreviated slang of texts. OMFG and so on. We are now on a very distant shore from any sort of man who might fire off a breakfast email to his lady with the words:
‘Fresh morning gusts have blown away all fear
From my glad bosom…’
In word and in action this romantic poet was the anti-thesis of the commitment-phobe or the calculating cynic. He attacks emotion from every angle, and every dimension, bold, frail, heroic, timid, historically grand or rustic and raw. And then, to give it all an edge, there is death. The death he speaks of in his beautifully lucid letters (fully aware of his declining health), the death he addresses as a poetic symbol and the untimely death that threatened and ultimately obliterated both his greatest love and his art.
I didn’t cry watching ‘Bright Star’. Perhaps because I knew the grim outcome, our hero’s death came more as a relief than a blow. But when I read Keats, and re-read him, tasting his feverish energy, grasping how much he wanted to say, and noting his dry awareness of his own rapidly approaching end, then I cried. A little for his heart; so courageous and full to bursting. A little for his friends; who must have grieved the loss of his letters, and his fidelity. And a little for Fanny who never saw him live to deliver the burning promise of his desires. But mostly for the English language which seems to have been dying ever since.
Till next time, KEEPING IT YUMMY.
XXX ANNA
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