Keats and the Hands of Petrarch and Laura

Keats’s late poetic fragment, “This living hand,” initiates one half of the connection that Petrarch wants so fervently to achieve with Laura in the Rime sparse: the moment when the inviting hand of the lover meets the accepting hand of the beloved. With this salute, the beloved transforms from object to subject and the lover from subject to object, a reciprocal recognition that creates the intersubjectivity that is the ideal of love.¹ Which half of this mutual gesture Keats’s poem performs is ambiguous, however: “This living hand” could represent the lover’s plea or the beloved’s response. The poem creates similar ambiguities in its dramatic setting and mood. In Keats’s poem, the plea for intersubjective recognition crosses an imagined boundary between life and death as in a liberating dream or a chilling nightmare. “This living hand” imagines its speaker’s death but also compels its addressee to do the same, in what Jonathan Culler has called a “sinister reciprocity.”² In the Rime sparse, too, Petrarch usually imagines his hand meeting Laura’s only when one of them is dead.³ Keats’s poem implicitly contrasts its imagined deaths with a vitalizing touch, so that the proposed meeting of the hands carries both meanings of “salutare”: to greet and to save.⁴ As is also true for the Rime sparse, the connection initiated by the poet within the verse is contingent on the reader’s response in the poem’s afterlife.

“This living hand” has long fascinated critics. Due to its textual history—the lines were found within the manuscript of Keats’s unfinished 1819 satire, “The Cap and the Bells”—early critics conceptually severed “This living hand” from most of Keats’s poetry, identifying the poem as a scrap of character-specific dialogue in an unwritten play, as Keats’s threat against his harsh reviewers, or as his anxious rebuke to his beloved Fanny Brawne.⁵ In other readings the fragment becomes like a saint’s relic, exemplifying the dead’s supernatural power to affect the living.⁶ In most readings, the strange poem seems harder to love than other poems by Keats.

While respecting the poem’s Gothic quality, I read it as the capstone of subtle but pervasive Petrarchan affects that Keats absorbed from his literary culture and transmitted through his career-long, conflicted plea for recognition and through his “ambivalent attitude toward gender.”⁷ Keats encountered the late eighteenth-century characterization of Petrarch and Laura as “heroes of sensibility” and the sonnet as sensibility’s preferred poetic form.⁸ With its highly wrought expressions of alienation and unfulfilled desire, Petrarch’s Rime sparse—first circulated in Britain during the Tudor period—again became a target for English translation, imitation, and debate by readers and writers who also appreciated the poet’s republican and humanist themes. As the first poet since antiquity to be crowned with the laurel by the people of Rome in 1341, Petrarch modeled for later poets the possibility of achieving both contemporary popularity and immortal fame. In contrast to the first wave of Britain’s Petrarchan revival by male courtiers, however, the second wave during the late eighteenth century had women writers such as Susannah Dobson, Charlotte Smith, Anna Seward, and Mary Robinson in the vanguard. Although conservative critics began to denigrate Petrarchan-style sensibility and women writers in the late 1790s, Petrarch remained prominent enough in British literary and visual culture to have been part of Keats’s reading in the early nineteenth century.

Critics who have noticed Keats’s engagement with Petrarch—for example, Walter Jackson Bate, Helen Vendler, Susan Wolfson, and Edoardo Zuccato—generally stress the poets’ formal affinities and pay little regard to thematic connections. The exception is Wolfson, who addresses Keats’s Petrarchism in the late love sonnets and “This living hand” in the context of feminist readings of the misogynist Petrarch.⁹ Building on Wolfson’s observations, I find Keats engaging the androgynous Petrarch reconstructed in the late eighteenth century and claimed most noticeably by female poets of sensibility. After foregrounding Keats’s encounters with...