A Brighter Word Than Bright: Keats at Work

The Many Last Months: Imagination’s Ambivalence

141 The Many Last Months: Imagination’s Ambivalence On 6 February Keats writes a letter to his little sister Fanny giving the cause of the serious downturn in his health: “From imprudently leaving off my great coat in the thaw I caught a cold which flew to my Lungs.”1 What he does not say is that, after riding home on the outside of a carriage through weather quite suddenly turned awful—thaw returning to the season’s freeze—he walked into the quarters he shared with Charles Brown and hemorrhaged blood from his mouth. So began many months of convalescence, set back always byanother spitting of blood, often occurring at the point when Keats felt he might finally recover. Or so he said in his letters, when he could mustera bright mood in which to write—that he might recover. He knew that spitting of blood on 3 February was his “death-­ warrant.”2 Death did not come quick. Death is over a year away. Death is in anothercountry. But Keats knows, as if inscribed within himself, as if his mind is reading over and again the heart’s insistent sentence, that he is dying, and that every possibility he cherished in his life—from fame to his love for Fanny Brawne—has become impossible. “I cannot say forget me,” he writes to Fanny in one of his nearly daily letters , “but I would mention that there are impossibilities in the world.”3 Aristotle makes a bewildering and beautiful claim about the sensibility of the great poet in comparison to a lesser: “Things probable though impossible should be preferred to the possible but improbable.”4 One of the measures of Keats’s greatness can be felt, seen, heard, in the ways in which he shows that our perceptive lives forge those links that trace the vertiginous path of probable impossibilities. 142 1820 Sensation reveals the actuality of probable impossibilities in ways that thought often shuns; sensation isn’t bound to those “consequitive reasonings”5 of which Keats is so critical , connections a mere logic insists upon, those seemingly sound improbable possibilities. A probable impossibility insists on the poem’s ability to enter into those realms the poem itself has opened, and doesn’t hem back at the impossiblevision seen only from the impossiblevantage point. Keats leaps over those chasms imagination opens, leaps into them—chasms imagination must also fill. Declining Shelley’s offer to have Keats stay with him in Italy, Keats offers this writing advice: An artist must serve Mammon; he must have ‘self-­ concentration,’ selfishness perhaps. You, I am sure, will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and ‘load every rift’ of your subject with ore.6 The advice says much of the poet Keats found himself to be—or, now that he is so firmly within the process of ceasing to be, the poet he knows he would have become. Keats wants a poem to be that which fills itself with source; he wants not the golden artifact, but the gold. It is a strange vision for what a poem might offer, for it undoes the assumed end of the work of art as a finished thing, ornate in beauty, whose pleasure comes in appreciating what another has done (which is often to say, what I cannot do myself). Keats’s aesthetic vision differs. He wants a poem to include within it those rifts and chasms that well might tear the poem and its world apart. But it is within those rifts, those ruptures that probable impossibilities inflict on the poem that contains them, that the reader finds the ore by which to create not an appreciation of the poem in hand, but an ore to forge another poem.This writing work, Keats says, is elemental. It is where Mammon’s idol is melted back down into ore. 143 1820 Keats is not forging other poems, not really, not now. That ore is for others, buried resplendent in his work, shining sun-­ diamonds on a swift-­ moving stream, but hidden from his own eyes. He feels much more—as his nerves torment him into the continual realization of his own death— that he has failed as a poet. Now I have had opportunities of passing nights anxious and awake I have found other thoughts intrude upon me. ‘If I should die,’ said I...