JOHN KEATS EKING IT OUT 49trees and edges of rock to prevent our tumbling headlong,” Brown says. He
feels unsteady, but “Keats scrambled down lightly and quickly.” They station
themselves on a jut of rock beside the falls, and Keats is buffeted by the all-at-
once action above and below him: “at the same time we saw that the water was
divided by a sort of cataract island on whose other side burst out a glorious
stream—then the thunder and the freshness.”
So much sight and sound cascading around him almost quashes speech: “I
live in the eye.” Giving Tom the falls’ different “characters,” Keats watches
one darting down “like an arrow,” another spreading “like a fan.” It ’s a rush of
force that shapes the sharp arrow and fan he sees.
Something marvelous in this event fascinates Keats, the way moment by
moment the flux holds still. This way too, life becomes art, like Shakespeare ’s
“never-resting time” resting for fourteen lines in a sonnet, a brief grip on life ’s
wasting force. Wordsworth in the Alps sees “The stationary blasts of water-
falls,” and Coleridge, their “Motionless torrents!” In a Swiss waterfall, Gerard
Manley Hopkins spots “branchings and water-spandrils... quills... fans...
jostling foam-bags.” Keats himself is “affected... extremely” by a “wave” of
wind “billowing through a tree.” So it is with the falls’ “thunder and the fresh-
ness” at Ambleside. Seeking the shape of his vision, Keats finds a darting arrow,
a spreading fan. “I shall learn poetry here.”
Curiously enough, his words from the Lake Country might be unknown
today had they not been published in Kentucky, then a frontier region. During
his walking tour, he would ask Tom to forward letters to their brother George,
who’d just emigrated to America. Years later George loaned this letter to an edi-
tor who ran it in Louisville ’s Western Messenger, saying these sentences “touch
upon the deepest veins of truth.” He ’s proud to publish Keats’s Ambleside
rapture here “at the Falls of the Ohio.”
When Tom perished of consumption in late 1818, Keats’s exposure had al-
ready damaged him, and the poetry shows this. He ’d been overwhelmed by
marble sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens, a friend notes, “and would sit
for an hour or more at a time beside them rapt in revery.” His “Ode on a Gre-
cian Urn” enters a scene on the urn’s carved face, freezing its forever-yearning
lovers beneath undying trees.
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
Forever piping songs forever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
Forever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
Forever panting, and forever young.