Andrew Statum

There is an implacable sense of longing threaded throughout Keats' poetry (especially in the odes), the overwhelming sensation that Keats' narrator, like the figures on the Grecian urn, will never attain the sensual, emotional or spiritual state he is describing. This longing, I think, is attributable to Keats' awareness of his own mortality.

From what I understand about Keats' life, the poet had a not insubstantial training in medicine. He also watched helplessly as tuberculosis claimed the lives of his mother and younger brother, Tom, so when Keats himself began exhibiting symptoms, he had to have known his time was limited.

But he was still so young, with all the desires and urgencies a young person has. How awful it must be, when one is young, to know that you'll never grow old - and I hate to reduce my discussion to the lyrics of a pop song - but how awful to know you are "one more kid that'll never go to school / Never get to fall in love, never get to be cool?" Not that death is ever easy. Even the old and infirm (Valerie, I'm sure you can attest to this), whose deaths can be said to have been written on the wall for quite some time and who have had years to resign themselves to the idea of their own mortality do not, and please pardon the callousness of my terminology, "die easy." Very few people, I think, are completely at east with the idea of death when they go.

There is a sense of urgency in youth, that wild, feral ecstasy of the living moment that doesn't have time for contemplation or restraint. And I think there is this spirit living and moving in Keats' poetry. You can feel it in lines like "For ever panting, and for ever young; / All breathing human passion far above," or "if thy mistress some rich anger shows, / Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, / And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes," lines of a passionate youth that, with an almost guttural yawp, supremely declares its life-force, its potency, its prowess.

But these passages are buttressed by lines that seem to resign themselves to death and evanescence. The first is followed by, "That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd, / A burning forehead, and a parching tongue," and the second, "She dwells with Beauty--Beauty that must die," lines that resonate with the expectancy of decay and a moribund resignation to the fact of death. These are sentiments of an old, dying animal, not a lusty, young man.

And I guess that's what makes Keats so unique. He was young, sensitive, artistic, a genius, and he was all-too aware that he was dying. His poems explode with youthful vitality but they are controlled by the rigid formalism of a mature artist. And its that tension, I think, between the youth and age, between life and death, that leaves me with that almost unbearable sense of longing. In his poems, Keats is simultaneously railing against death and resigning himself to it.

If you haven't read it, check out "Bright Star." I think this one says it all.