I
Stress has never been laid on the real unconscious origins of some of Keats's best poems. We know that his sad love affair with Fanny Brawne, who coquetted with him, inspired a few poems directly addressed to her; it is also indisputable that Keats had her in mind when he wrote La Belle Dame Sans Merci, he was telling of his own fate in the account of the knight's mishap. But it is rarely recognised that emotions connected with Fanny Brawne inspired his two most famous odes, the one to the Nightingale and the other to the Grecian urn; that the tale of Lamia, which ranks among his best poems, is a symbolic description of his attitude towards Miss Brawne, and that her presence is felt in other poems and sonnets by Keats. He thought of her constantly, and he could scarcely write a love poem but she somehow or other stepped into the pages. When we compare these and other poems to the letters that he had written to her about the same time, we will find that often the same emotions inspired both.
Keats met Miss Brawne in the fall of 1818, when he was twenty-three years old. He quarrelled with her in February, 1819, but, nevertheless, was her declared lover in the spring. His first love letter that we have to her is dated July 1, 1819, and the last about May, 1820. In the spring and summer of 1819 he wrote some of his best poems, and he showed most emphatically the repression of his emotions by the coquetries of Fanny. He took a walk among the marbles of the British Museum, in February, 1819, and three months later penned his Ode to a Grecian Urn. In the latter part of April he heard the nightingale in Brown's garden, and he wrote the famous ode. In the same month he also wrote La Belle Dame Sans Merci. In August and September of 1819 he worked on Lamia. He had his first hemorrhage in February, 1820, left England in September, and died in Italy February, 1821.
Those who have read the letters to Fanny will remember with what anxiety the poet wrote, how he showed his jealousy and complained and pleaded without pride. In one letter dated June 19, 1819, he said he would resent having his heart made a football, that Brown, with whom she flirted, was doing him to death by inches, and that the air of a room from which Fanny was absent was unhealthy to him. "I appeal to you by the blood of that Christ you believe in.... Do not write to me if you have done anything this month which it would have pained me to have seen." In October he writes, "Love is my religion—I could die for that; I could die for you." The letters are the record of the agony of a man who is being played with and who cries out in helplessness. He cannot bear seeing her smiling with others or dancing with them. Miss Brawne asserted after his death that she did not regard him as a great poet, and thought it advisable for people to let his reputation die. It is also said she referred to him as the foolish poet who loved her.
Let us see how this sad affair influenced his work.
The Keats of the first volume, Poems, 1817, is a much different person from the Keats of the Lamia volume, in 1820. The three intervening years had brought a maddening love affair, a fatal disease and the famous, though not as once thought fatal review, attacking Endymion. His art principles remained much the same. With growing sorrow he worshipped beauty more and sought in it a refuge from grief. His attitude towards women and life was now somewhat different. He paid woman a tribute in the poem in the first volume, beginning with the lines, "Woman! I behold thee," etc. But he had not yet suffered from a Fanny Brawne; here he spoke of woman's being "like a milk-white lamb that bleats for man's protection." And yet before he was twenty he may have had a foreboding that his fate in love might not be a happy one. In the poem, To Hope, he wrote:
"Should e'er unhappy love my bosom pain,
From cruel parents or relentless fair;
O let me not think it is quite in vain
To sigh out sonnets to the midnight air."
Alas for himself, but perhaps (it may be cruel to say) fortunately for the lovers of literature, those sonnets and other poems were sighed out later!
Before we can, however, quite understand his sad life and the nature of his work and philosophy, something must be said about his relations to his mother. She died from consumption when he was past fourteen. Keats, who was her favourite child, sat up nights, mourning her, and was inconsolable; he would hide for days under his master's desk. Once, at the age of five, he guarded her sick room with a sword. His mother re-married a year after her husband's death, when the poet was in his tenth year. She separated from her second husband and went to live with her mother. Keats then had a guardian. The poet was the oldest of five children, and was a seven months' child. All this is significant. The Œdipus Complex was strong in the poet. He was not only deprived of his mother early, but witnessed her marry a second time. This event revived the babyish jealousy he felt of his father, and made him unconsciously hate the new husband. He looked for a substitute for the lost mother and thought he found her in Fanny Brawne, and then he learned what grief was. He loved beauty so much because of unrequited love. Some poets, like Wordsworth, seek consolation in nature for lack of love, others like Byron simply voice their woe in a personal note, others like Shelley find it a spur to spread views of reform in connection with the marriage institution. Keats's love of beauty has a strong sexual component. His unfulfilled physical desires were sublimated into poems worshipping beauty. Art was his refuge.
We are now prepared to trace the origins of some of his work. Most critics saw the unconscious allusions in the La Belle Dame poem. It is symbolic of himself in the snares of a coquette. There is an allusion to an old song entitled La Belle Dame Sans Merci in Keats's The Eve of St. Agnes which Porphyro played to Madeline while she slept; it was a poem composed in Provence; and we all know that most of the love poems of the Provençal Troubadours were complaints about unrequited love. Keats's poem has a simple plot. A knight tells the poet, in response to a question as to why he was so woe-begone, that he met a fairy child and set her on his pacing steed. She claimed to love him, and she lulled him to sleep and he dreamed that pale kings and princes and warriors told him that he was in the thrall of a girl without mercy. They were evidently also her victims. He wakes and loiters on the cold hill side, realising that he was her victim.
This poem was written within a few months before the letter to Fanny was penned, in which he said he resented having his heart made a football. The poem corresponds to an anxiety dream. Freud tells us that the contents of the anxiety dream is of a sexual nature; the libido has been turned away from its object, and, not having succeeded in being applied, has been transformed into fear. This poem is a good proof of this one of the least-understood theories of Freud. Keats then is the knight and Fanny is the fairy child.
The nature of his day dreams and jealousy appears in the Ode to Fanny, a posthumous poem, probably not meant for publication. It contains some of the substance of his letters to Fanny. He imagines he is watching Fanny at a dance, and jealous thoughts come to him. "Who now with greedy looks eats up my feast?" he asks. His only remedy is to write poetry to ease his pain. He says to Physician Nature, "O, ease my heart of verse and let me rest." He loves her so much he cannot bear that any one profane her with looks. He wants her wholly, her thoughts and emotions. The poem was probably written about the time of the quarrel, in February, 1819.
Another posthumous poem addressed to Fanny is the one beginning with the lines, "What can I do to drive away remembrance from my eyes?" He is now wishing he were free from love, and that he had his old liberty. He wants to devote himself to his muse as freely as he once did. He thinks of wine as he did in the nightingale poem, and asks: "Shall I gulp wine? No, that is vulgarism." He is in hell, he realises, but he concludes with a wish to satisfy his physical love for Fanny. He wants to rest his soul on her dazzling breast, to place his arm about her waist, and feel her warm breath spread a rapture in his hair. In a posthumously published sonnet he pleads, "I cry to you for mercy"; he wants her entirely, including "that warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast." In the sonnet he wrote (not before his death, as usually thought but as Colvin says, in February, 1819), in a blank page in a volume of Shakespeare facing "A Lover's Complaint," "Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art," he concludes most sensuously. He longs to be:
"Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel forever its soft fall and swell,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live forever—or else swoon to death."
All this shows that Keats's love was not one where the reason or moral sense played a great part; it was not tender or kindly, but a madness, and more than usually physical. There can be no doubt, from the evidence given by Keats, that he indulged in reveries of physical satisfaction with Fanny in day dreams.
Keats has himself written that he had sensuous night dreams. He wrote in April, 1819, apropos the sonnet, A Dream, after reading Dante's Episode of Paolo and Francesca: "The dream was one of the most delightful enjoyments I had in my life. I floated about the wheeling atmosphere, as it is described, with a beautiful figure, to whose lips mine were joined, it seemed for an age; and in the midst of all this cold and darkness I was warm." A flying dream always has a sexual significance, even without any female figure to accompany the dreamer. Of course this figure was Fanny Brawne to whom he had just been or was about to be betrothed.