JOHN KEATS EKING IT OUT 55choosing “between despair & Energy.” What puns do is finesse a dire choice,
so that bonus play of “born” against “dies” was anything but frivolous. “As for
Pun-making, I wish it was as good a trade as pin-making,” he writes a few days
after “To Autumn.” And “at my worst,” says his deathbed letter from Rome
a year later, Keats “summoned up more puns, in a sort of desperation, in one
week than in any year of my life.” Call it escape, or call it revival.
John Keats made up an epitaph for his tombstone: “Here lies one whose name
was writ in water.” Yes, and no. Truer to think of him scrambling sure-footed
down the rock flank of Ambleside waterfall, stunned by its sudden thunder and
freshness, then seeing “the whole more mild, streaming silverly through the
trees.... I shall learn poetry here.”