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.