poems 641(l.1–3). He wishes he could follow the nightingale’s
song out of the world, leaving behind his misery and
pain. He doesn’t want to live in a world of transience,
where joy and beauty fade and “youth grows pale,
and spectre-thin, and dies” (l.36). The poet wonders
what it would be like to die at this moment, when he
is peaceful and happy: “Now more than ever seems
it rich to die, / To cease upon the midnight with
no pain” (l.54–55). He reflects on the irony that the
birdsong will continue after his death, becoming a
requiem he can no longer hear. This in turn leads the
poet to think about the immortality of the nightin-
gale. Although the bird is not literally immortal, its
song has remained the same across centuries. Like
the Grecian urn, it is an example of beauty that
will survive the poet, just as it has survived listeners
before him.
Keats’s poems published after his death reveal a
bleaker perspective. In “When I Have Fears that I
May Cease to Be” (1848), the speaker discusses his
fear that he will die without achieving his life’s ambi-
tions and without seeing his lover again. Whereas in
other poems, art offered the speaker comfort in the
face of death, here the poem concludes with the
isolated speaker unable to do anything but “stand
alone, and think / Till love and fame to nothingness
do sink” (l.13–14). The final line implies that either
the poet’s fears will fade or that he will die and his
dreams will cease to matter.
“This living hand, now warm and capable”
(1848) is one of Keats’s most chilling poems about
death. The poet asks the reader to reflect on the
hand that is composing the poem. If it could, that
hand, once dead, would “haunt thy days and chill thy
dreaming nights” (l.4) until the reader would wish
himself or herself dead and the poet alive again. The
final lines of the poem—“see here it is—/ I hold it
towards you” (l.7–8)—are a powerful acknowledg-
ment of the failure of art, because we cannot, of
course, see the hand of the desperate poet pleading
for life, nor can we save him.
In “Sleep and Poetry” (1817), Keats asks to be
spared death for 10 years so that he can study poetry
and fulfill his dreams (l.96–97). Sadly, Keats was
dead in four years, consumed by tuberculosis by the
age of 25.
Siobhan Carroll
love in the poetry of John Keats
Keats’s poems demonstrate that the poet held vary-
ing attitudes toward love during his short life. Some
of his poems idealize love, portraying it as a power
that can elevate the lover into a state approaching
divinity. Other poems bypass idealism in favor of
bawdiness and celebrate sex and sexuality rather
than transcendent love. Finally, in the poems Keats
wrote toward the end of his life, we can see the
poet questioning his early idealization of love and
sometimes expressing frustration with the way his
new relationship competes with his long-held poetic
ambitions.
Keats’s idealization of love can be seen in poems
like “The Eve of St. Agnes” (1820). In this poem, the
sexual encounter and then escape of the two young
lovers is described in very romantic terms: “Into her
dream he melted, as the rose / Blendeth its odour
with the violet” (l.320–321). At the end of the poem,
the lovers flee into the night, leaving the dreary
world of religious and parental control behind them.
Keats also wrote several poems that celebrate
sex and sexuality more overtly. “Over the hill and
over the dale” begins innocently enough, describing
a journey “over the bourn to Dawlish” (l.1–2). In the
second verse, however, we meet “Rantipole Betty”
who “Kicked up her petticoats fairly” (l.5–6). The
poem’s sexual innuendo becomes clearer when the
speaker suggests to Betty that “I’ll be Jack if you
will be Jill” (l.7). Betty, agreeing, sits “on the grass
debonairly” (l.8). Comedy ensues when Betty panics
several times about being interrupted by passersby,
but the frustrated speaker is finally able to persuade
her to “lay on the grass” (l.12) like a “Venus” (prosti-
tute). The poem concludes by asking who would not
want to go to Dawlish and “rumple the daisies there”
(l.19). The poem is characteristic of Keats’s writing
about sex: It is bawdy in its innuendos and the sexual
encounter itself is implied rather than described.
In 1818, Keats fell in love with Fanny Brawne.
His poems from this point onward show both excite-
ment over his romance with Fanny and an increased
consciousness of the less-than-ideal aspects of rela-
tionships. Keats’s poems written to Fanny celebrate
her beauty and his love for her, but also express
concern over the toll their relationship may take
on his poetic career. In “To Fanny” (1848), Keats