A Brighter Word Than Bright: Keats at Work

Inspiration

18 Inspiration The air carries on it the scent of flowers, as if the inspiring breeze is inspired itself. Keats, throughout his poetry, is aware of such burdens, if perfume can be a burden to what carries it. Air also carries the bee’s hum, the bird’s music. “What is more tranquil than a musk-­ rose blowing / In a green island, far from all men’s knowing?,” Keats writes in the opening of “Sleep and Poetry,” making of “blowing” a gentle pun implying both the musk-­ rose’s full blossoming and the air that blows the flower’s scent to the poet. Such “blowing” is far from “knowing,” is no fact of mere witness, but a deeper fact, one that can be known only by being experienced . To experience it, breathe in; and the eye, too, sees by breathing into the mind what’s in front of it. The air—we forget it, but Keats realizes and realizes it again— is a medium. It is blank as the page is blank, but a blanker form of blank, inscribed not with words but theworld’s own sense—odorand sound and light—that across unmeasured distance speaks of that which exists, but exists elsewhere. “[A]ll the secrets of some wond’rous thing / . . . breathes about us in the vacant air.”17 The poet breathes in, closes his eyes and breathes in, and finds in the mind’s bower the musk-­ rose full blown, and the air “[s]ometimes . . . gives a glory to the voice.”18 “Air” itself is a pun: music and breath as well as what wind pushes through; nor is it far to pneuma and spirit, so that air becomes a strange sort of soul, outside every body but into every body breathed, carrying on it the old voices just as it carries a rose’s scent, so that the poet is one who might “echo back the voice of thine own tongue”19 in order to write a poem. Sometimes that voice is poppy laden, and to listen is to fall asleep. Keats breathes in just such a voice, finds himself desperate to do so—not to know, for know- 19 1816 ing in any typical sense is not Keats’s concern. He seeks a glimpse exactly of what he cannot know, would not know, but would be in presence of. The cost of such poetic desire baffles itself with itself, and in “Sleep and Poetry,” Keats expresses this desire that will wend its way through the major poems to come, poems in the air, even now, as he breathes in and so falls asleep. He must. The sleeping mind unfolds into its other waking where the scent of the rose unfolds in the mind, present in the space of knowing, but a presence that cannot be known—imagination being, like the air, a thing that is also a nothing, real but ungraspable, frustrating knowing with a refusal toexist in knowledge, frustrating philosophy by refusing to not exist. Inspiration initiates Keats into imagination, and imagination initiates Keats into death: . . . yet, to my ardent prayer, Yield from thy sanctuary some clear air, Smoothed for intoxication by the breath Of flowering bays, that I may die a death Of luxury, and my young spirit follow The morning sun-­ beams to the great Apollo Like a fresh sacrifice; or, if I can bear The o’erwhelming sweets, ’twill bring to me the fair Visions of all places: a bowery nook Will be elysium—an eternal book Whence I may copy many a lovely saying About the leaves, and flowers—20 Imagination is a sacrificial rite. To imagine is to find oneself on the altar. Sleep allows us to continue to experience the world without the world falling into experience, experience into recognition, recognition into knowledge, and knowledge into that dull idea of the world which needs no senses to be in it. Keats gains as a poetic truth something that will later, in such heartbreaking ways, become a mortal truth. Death lives inside us. The poet—as the hero must 20 1816 on a quest—enters the underworld, the afterlife, in order to find that world that never passes out of itself, the unceasing world. Consciousness is a myth. Keats seeks such consciousness ; the poems are the very evidence of the effort. In this Elysium, this death within the self to which the self must be sacrificed, one finds...