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e wishes instead “to look into some
beautiful Scenery—for poetical purposes,” says John Keats (1795–1821), de-
clining a weekend invitation. Soon afterward, less flip, he begins a sonnet on
the song of grasshoppers and crickets, “The poetry of earth is never dead,” and
after several lines tries again: “The poetry of earth is ceasing never.”
Two years later, having nursed him devotedly for months, Keats lost his
younger brother Tom to consumption. The death jolted his attempts to square
poetry with “a World of Pains and troubles.” In “Ode to a Nightingale,” an
aching heart starts from the world “Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin,
and dies,” then flees on the “wings of Poesy” toward “Country-green” and the
nightingale—“Already with Thee! tender is the night.”
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild.Bird ’s song, botanic bliss, all their sensuousness cannot hold up: “Fled is that
music.”
We think of Keats as weakly, yet for a brief spell the poet had been hardy as
Coleridge and the Wordsworths. During the summer of 1818, with his friend
Charles Brown he took a walking tour of England ’s Lake District and the Scot-
“last oozings hours by hours”
John Keats Eking It Out
H