A Brighter Word Than Bright: Keats at Work

Last Portrait: Of His Hand

149 Last Portrait Of His Hand Soon after his death, many of Keats’s dearest friends attempted to write down his life. All of them failed in completing their projects, as if the fragmentary nature of Keats’s history refused completion even when transferred to another ’s still living hands. Severn, Keats’s friend and nurse and confidant through his last, wasting days, didn’t put pen to paper immediately—save for his letters recording those heartrending last days—but instead put paint to canvas. The paintings he produced bear the mark of Severn’s need to paint Keats in the most “poetic” light, giving us not the poet embroiled in the very crisis of what it means to write a poem, not the poet in his pugilistic pride and the difficulty of imaginative rapture, but the poet as pale, inspired flower, whose gift is too rare to survive this troubled, troubling world. I find it strange to realize that in Keats’s greatest ode, “To Autumn,” unlike the other Odes, the poet as speaking subject hardly exists. So deeply ingrained is the poem in its perceptive life that saying “I” would falsely limit the nature of thevision whose imaginative forceexpands past the self’s mere limit. Keats has himself disappeared into the poem. But when the poet disappears in life his friends deny him the absence he so longed for. His hope for an anonymous tomb is ignored in spirit if upheld in letter. He is, as it were, being ceaselesslydragged back into the identity from whose grasp he had finally slipped away. George Keats, writing to Dilke some eleven years after his brother’s death, says: “Doyou hearanything of Severn, I am anxious to have some painting of his, for which I desire to pay well, he was kind to John, and is the last link of associa- 150 Last Portrait tion in my mind with John and life—could you put me in the way of obtaining one, what are his circumstances—. . .”1 The image of life fills in the place of the life itself, that life gone missing, past the threshold of any living grasp. Severn began one painting of Keats—one of the most well known—almost immediately after Keats’s death. Indeed , he claimed to John Taylor that in May of 1821 it was already almost done: “I am very happy at what you tell me about your intended memoir of Keats—his bea[u]tiful character will astonish people—for very few knew it.— I will make every communication to you—but not yet— I cannot stand it—only writing this has made me like a child.—I have begun a small whole length of him—from last seeing him at Hampstead—this I will finish and send to you—. . .”2 In the painting Keats is sitting cross-­ legged in a chair, one arm leaning against another chair, his hand holding up his head that is bent down to the open book in his lap. The light in the painting comes through the open window, a thick, sentimental light. Keats’s other hand holds open the book at its binding, its odd weight on the recto page, his eyes gazing down on the verso. His angelic aura speaks lovingly, but falsely. In the letter in which Severn describes Keats’s death, he mentions a seemingly insignificant fact: “On the following day a cast was taken—and his death made known to the brutes here . . .”3 Casts were taken not only of Keats’s face, but of his hand and foot. Taylor would like them sent to him, but Severn is still in need of their presence: “The casts I must send another time—because I shall require them to finish the picture from . . .”4 The picture Severn speaks of is the portrait of Keats reading in Hampstead.The ease of the portrait is meant to catch Keats in a habitual stance, reading by the open window, the verdure outside matched only by the imaginative verdure 151 Last Portrait invisible within the poet himself. His hand holds down the book—and as one looks at that hand, it seems to hold down the book with a weight far beyond the needed pressure, a weight that seems like it could push through the page, push through the book, sever itself from the poet’s arm, and crash awfully to the ground. It looks...