A Brighter Word Than Bright: Keats at Work

Second Portrait: Apprenticeship

31 Second Portrait Apprenticeship Keats began his medical training at the young age of fourteen , apprenticed to a surgeon in Edmonton, a Mr.Thomas Hammond. He lived in the same house with his mentor , took meals with him, and began his study of anatomy among other, often menial chores. The secret benefit to the placement had little to do with Mr. Hammond himself , but everything to do with the fact that young Keats was only two miles away from Enright, where his older friend Charles Cowden Clarke lived. When Keats found himself free of duty, he would wander over: “He rarely came empty-­ handed; either he had a book to read, or brought one to be exchanged. When the weather permitted, we always sat in an arbour at the end of a spacious garden, and—in Boswellian dialect—‘we had good talk.’”1 I like to think about Keats walking those miles, carrying in his hand a book between two houses. In each house, in different but overlapping ways, he was an apprentice. I like to think the lessons of anatomy taxed his imagination in ways that reading poetry both affirmed and complicated. One practice taught him to read so as to see into what the body keeps hidden; the other practice taught him that the body keeps hidden things which are not of the body at all: birds, the singing of birds, beautyand beauty’s own world. I like to think of that road Keats walked, the place where both forms of knowledge confounded each other, where seeming opposites —medicine and poetry—ceased to oppose. Imagination can so radicalize empathy that one can weep for what isn’t there. 32 Second Portrait Clarke remembers: Once, when reading the “Cymbeline” aloud, I saw his eyes fill with tears, and his voice faltered when he came to the departure of Posthumus, and Imogen saying she would have watched him— ’Till the diminution Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle; Nay follow’d him till he had melted from The smallness of a gnat to air; and then Have turn’d mine eye and wept.2 It takes but a mile or two for a body to become a needle and then a gnat. So must Keats have looked to Clarke as his young friend returned to the house in which he lived, not yet poetry’s bower, but the doctor’s office in which the future poet learned how the blood circulated through the human heart. Keats’s medical training was far from “modern”; noone had yet introduced ether into the surgery room.Towhateverdegree new discoveries had begun to revolutionize the medical profession, there still existed the old beliefs, handed to young Keats—much as Cowden handed him Shakespeare and Spenser—from centuries before. In such thinking, the blood contained humors, and as with consumptive patients, sometimes the blood would be let to let the bad humor out. Some bodies produced a “black bile” and such people became Melancholic, given over to fantastic imaginings, erotic raptures seldom made actual, and profound retreats into gloom and darkness.3 Keats in later years suffered from his “blue demons.” Body and mind in such medicine did not keep themselves separate, but were wholly interpenetrating , so that Empedocles’s old belief that thought was blood circulating around the human heart was not a poetical error from ancient times, but a valid medical theory. And as the 33 Second Portrait mind could find no genuine separation from the body, so the body can find no real distance from the world. As Giorgio Agamben writes: “[T]he breath that animates the universe, circulates in the arteries, and fertilizes the sperm is the same one that, in the brain and in the heart, receives and forms the phantasms of the things we see, imagine, dream, and love.”4 The heart was the center of such spiritual work, this work of soul and breath.The senses press upon the body an image the body stores; the storeroom is the human heart. When an image is evoked—by word or sense of memory or will—the heart releases back into the blood that phantasm of breath that in the mind unfolds again as body, the imagined body.5 Keats learned from medicine, as much as he learned from poetry, the reality of imagination’s work. To think, to imagine fully, eclipses the mind’s mere bounds...