When you read this you will excuse the manner—I am quite beside myself—and have written the whole this morning Thursday on the deck after a sleepless night and with a head full of care—you shall have a better the next time.
The storm had driven them back from off Brighton more than half way to the Downs, and then abated enough to let them land for a scramble on the shingles at Dungeness, where they excited the suspicions of the coast guard, and to get the above letter posted from Romney. After this calms and contrary airs kept them beating about the channel for many more days yet. At Portsmouth they were held up again, and to pass the time Keats landed and went to call on Dilke’s sister Mrs Snook at Bedhampton; again by ill chance barely missing Brown, whom he supposed to be still in Scotland but who was actually only ten miles away, having run down to stay with Dilke’s father at Chichester. The next day, while the ship was still hanging in the Solent off Yarmouth, Keats wrote unbosoming himself to Brown of his inward agony more fully than he had ever done in speech:—
I wish to write on subjects that will not agitate me much—there is one I must mention and have done with it. Even if my body would recover of itself, this would prevent it. The very thing which I want to live most for will be a great occasion of my death. I cannot help it. Who can help it? Were I in health it would make me ill, and how can I bear it in my state? I dare say you will be able to guess on what subject I am harping—you know what was my greatest pain during the first part of my illness at your house. I wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these pains, and then I wish death away, for death would destroy even those pains which are better than nothing. Land and sea, weakness and decline, are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever. When the pang of this thought has passed through my mind, I may say the bitterness of death is passed. I often wish for you that you might flatter me with the best. I think without my mentioning it for my sake you would be a friend to Miss Brawne when I am dead. You think she has many faults—but, for my sake, think she has not one. If there is anything you can do for her by word or deed I know you will do it. I am in a state at present in which woman merely as woman can have no more power over me than stocks and stones, and yet the difference of my sensations with respect to Miss Brawne and my sister is amazing. The one seems to absorb the other to a degree incredible. I seldom think of my brother and sister in America. The thought of leaving Miss Brawne is beyond everything horrible—the sense of darkness coming over me—I eternally see her figure eternally vanishing. Some of the phrases she was in the habit of using during my last nursing at Wentworth Place ring in my ears. Is there another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.
That night, (September 28) adds Keats, they expected to put into Portland Roads; but calms again held them up, and again they were allowed to land, having made only some few miles’ headway down the Dorsetshire coast. The day of this landing was for Keats one of transitory calm and lightening of the spirit. The weather was fine, and ‘for a moment,’ says Severn, ‘he became like his former self. He was in a part that he already knew, and showed me the splendid caverns and grottoes with a poet’s pride, as though they had been his birthright.’ These are vivid phrases, that about the caverns and grottoes certainly a little over-coloured for the scene, which was Lulworth Cove and the remarkable, but scarcely splendid, rock tunnels and fissures of Stair Hole and Durdle Door. When Severn says that Keats knew the ground, one half wonders whether the Dorsetshire Keatses may really have been kindred of his to whom he had at some time paid an unrecorded visit: or otherwise, whether in travelling to and from Teignmouth in 1818, taking, as we know he did, the southern route from Salisbury by Bridport and Axminster, he may have broken the journey at Dorchester and visited the curiosities of the coast. But in truth, to understand and possess beauties of nature as a birthright, Keats needed not to have seen them before. On board ship the same night Keats borrowed the copy of Shakespeare’s Poems which he had given Severn a few days before, and wrote out fair and neatly for him, on the blank page opposite the heading A Lover’s Complaint, the beautiful sonnet which every lover of English knows so well:—
| Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art, Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores, Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors— No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable, Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever—or else swoon to death. |
Severn in later life clearly cherished the impression that the sonnet had been actually composed for him on the day of the Dorsetshire landing. Lord Houghton in his Life and Literary Remains distinctly asserts as much, and it had seemed to us all a beautiful and consolatory circumstance, in the tragedy of Keats’s closing days, that his last inspiration in poetry should have come in a strain of such unfevered beauty and tenderness, and with images of such a refreshing and solemn purity. But in point of fact the sonnet was work of an earlier date, and the autograph given to Severn is on the face of it no draught but a fair copy. Its original form had been this—
The sonnet is copied in this form by Charles Brown, under date 1819, in the collection of transcripts from Keats’s fugitive verses which from the spring of that year he regularly made as soon after they were written as he could lay hands on them. His dates I have found always trustworthy, and I have shown reason (above, p. 334) for holding the sonnet to have been written in the last week of February, 1819, and the first days of Keats’s engagement to Fanny Brawne. All that Keats can actually have done during that evening of tranquillity off Lulworth was to return to it in thought and recopy it for Severn with changes which in the second line heightened the remoteness of the star; in the fourth made an inverted metrical stress normal by substituting ‘patient’ for ‘devout’; in the fifth changed the word ‘morning’ into ‘moving,’[2] in the tenth cancelled one of his defining and arresting compound participles in favour of a simpler phrase; and in the four concluding lines varied a little the mood and temperature of the longing expressed, calling for death not as the sequel to his longing’s fulfilment, but as the alternative for it. In Severn’s first mention of the subject, which is in a letter written from Rome a few weeks after Keats’s death, he shows himself aware that Brown might be in possession already of a version of the sonnet, which of course could only have been the case if it had been composed before Keats left Hampstead. ‘Do you know,’ he writes, ‘the sonnet beginning Bright Star etc., he wrote this down in the ship—it is one of his most beautiful things. I will send it, if you have it not.’
The rest of the voyage, after getting clear of the English Channel, was quick but uncomfortable, the weather variable and often squally. Signs of improvement in Keats’s health alternated with alarming returns of hæmorrhage, and the painful symptoms of his fellow-traveller Miss Cotterell preyed sometimes severely on his nerves and spirits. At other times his thoughts ran pleasantly on poems yet to be written, and especially on one he had planned on the story of Sabrina. ‘He mentioned to me many times in our voyage’, writes Severn within a few weeks of the poet’s death, ‘his desire to write this story and to connect it with some points in the English history and character. He would sometimes brood over it with immense enthusiasm, and recite the story from Milton’s Comus in a manner that I will remember to the end of my days.’ It is good to think of Keats being thus able to occupy and soothe his fevered spirit with the lovely cadences that tell how Nereus pitied the rescued nymph,
| And gave her to his daughters to imbathe In nectar’d lavers strew’d with Asphodel, |