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In Charing Cross station I recently came across notebooks on sale bearing the slogan “Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” — probably the most famous line Keats wrote. Come autumn, he will be all over cinema screens in Jane Campion's beautiful film Bright Star.
Today Keats House in Hampstead opens after renovation, thanks mainly to £424,000 provided by the Heritage Lottery Fund (Andrew Motion told me that when he worked there to write his biography of Keats, the rain would come in over his head).
In Keats's day all of this would have been unthinkable. When he sailed down the Thames in the autumn of 1820 to Italy, few in his native city knew his name. Such was his obscurity that he said that his epitaph should be “here lies one whose name was writ on water.”
For he was a Londoner: he grew up in Shoreditch and was sneered at by the critics who wondered how anyone with a Cockney accent could possibly think themselves capable of creating art.
His supporters were the few friends who had clubbed together to pay for his travel.
It was hoped that the warmer climate in Rome would help but, ill with tuberculosis (the disease which had killed his younger brother, Tom), he left London in the near certainty that he would never return to his fiancée, and Hampstead neighbour, Fanny Brawne. He died aged 25.
Brawne was the recipient of some of the finest love letters ever written in the English language. “You are always new,” he wrote to her in the spring of 1820. “The last of your kisses was ever the sweetest; the last smile the brightest; the last movement the gracefullest.”
His last poem, Bright Star, to Fanny, is a sonnet, wishing that he could have her constancy, and that of the stars above, knowing that his own strength was waning.
Keats struggled his way through a medical degree at Guy's before deciding poverty as a poet was preferable. His imagination was stoked in London, Ode on a Grecian Urn inspired by hours spent in the British Museum. The “cold pastoral” on its side shows two lovers in frozen in pursuit: “Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,/Though winning near the goal — yet, do not grieve;/ She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,/For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
He dreams up a strange consolation, saying it's good that they are frozen in time because they remain in a state of permanent desire. Of course, put another way, they remain — like Keats and Fanny — apart.
In Ode to a Nightingale, inspired by the bird in the plum tree that used to stand in the garden of the Hampstead house, he flirts with the idea of following the bird at dusk, into the darkness and oblivion of death: “Darkling, I listen; and for many a time/ I have been half in love with easeful Death,/ Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme…
Now more than ever seems it rich to die/ To cease upon the midnight with no pain
While thou art pouring out thy soul abroad/In such an ecstasy!'…
He was 24 then, in love, and yet he dresses up the death he feared as seductive. The “verduous glooms and winding mossy ways” described were the Heath, just yards from his front door.
Stanza, the word for a verse of poetry, in Italian means literally “room”; the real rooms of poets can have a power, long after their inhabitants are gone.
With Keats House, the Heritage Lottery executives have got it right and bestowed their largesse on preserving something priceless.
Reader views (2)
An Englishman who will be remembered for eternity, and I wonder who amongst our present generation will have that honour.
- Ken, Bexleyheath, 24/07/2009 15:40
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Very good post. Good that Heritage Lottery Fund is supporting the renovation of the house. I took my son to visit the house when he was studying GCSE and was interested in Keats after reading about him. When I arrived in this country in 1977, the first visit I made even before I looked for a place to live was the Keats House. Ode to a Nightingale was my favourite poem in my secondary school and I was thrilled to see the plum tree. It is for us the Londoners to cherish this heritage and more of us should visit the House.
- Normantheconqueror, London, 24/07/2009 10:07
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