A Brighter Word Than Bright: Keats at Work

Thought

25 Thought Words are substance strange. Speak one and the air ripples into another’s ears. Write one and the eye laps it up. But the sense transmutes, and the spoken word winds through the ear’s labyrinth into a sense that is no longer the nerve’s realm. The written word unfolds behind the eye into world, world’s image, and the imagination sees as the eye cannot see—thoughtfully. One of Keats’s early muses is Solitude, an allegorical figure whose strangeness lends it the feel of a companion even as it offers itself as a region of contemplation. Person and place coincide. In solitude Keats could learn to study “Nature’s observatory,” but he prefers “the sweet converse ofan innocent mind, / Whosewords are images of thoughts refin’d.”26 Theerotic strand of Keats’s poetic concerns is not absent from the other’s “innocent mind”; it depends upon it.The innocent mind is the one that can speak so that word and world and thought do not dissolve into those separate threads into which experience demands they unravel. It is a song resistant to the world as experience, the world of experience; it is a song before experience, sung so as to return us to a vision experience seems to deny as ours.To sing so is to see that thinking about the world is to dwell more profoundly in it. The words of the song are likewise those images of the world that are themselves the thoughts they pattern in it.To sing is to be among the sinews, the tendrils, the nervy span. When Keats, in the same poem, writes from his solitary witness of “where the deer’s swift leap / Startles the wild bee from the fox-­ glove bell”27 he is not merely describing an action, a cause and a consequence. He writes so as to see lyrically. Lyric vision shies away from logic and its consequences —if and then don’t proscribe a narrative frame- 26 1816 work; they open a field of interrelation in which simultaneities undermine consequence. The deer by its leap startling the bee out of the flower is but a single image, an image of how the mind might learn to think, if thinking occurs where word and world coincide, and if the eye is the organ of ­philosophy. ...