John Keats always knew he would die young. I don't know how he knew, but his poems are overshadowed by that knowledge, haunted by his tragic end. Famously, Keats lies buried in a grave that doesn't even bare his name. He himself desired the words "Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water" to be engraved into his tombstone. He died at the age of 25 with the belief that he would be forgotten, tormented by the knowledge that the only legacy he left was the anguish he would bring to the lover to whom he never returned.
Keats' letters to Fanny Brawne were full of musings concerning his own death, as were his poems. The fear of an early death sits ripe in them, rich as flesh is with blood. In one of the most haunting personifications of death I have ever read, Keats wrote "I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath". The theme of oblivion ripples deep only to be swallowed like an echo that hangs hollow in the air. Reading his works, one constantly feels like the shadow of a spectator watching as Keats stands alone, contemplating "on the shore of the wide world...till love and fame to nothingness do sink".
Keats knew he did not have long, and so, love for him was painful, impatient, and urgent. He was so haunted by the fact that he would have to leave her that at times he fled from her even when he did not have to. It was like he did not want to allow himself to live, to relish in things that belong to a full-lived life, with its experience, and its aging, its soft winding down. But death showed itself with that first drop of blood on his own pillow. Death fueled his exigency every night when he wrote to her desperately only to tame himself by morning. Thus, when his poor health drove him to the warmer climates of Italy, he knew already that he would not return.
I recently read the letters that he wrote to her before his flight, when life still held some taste for Keats.
He did not write to her after he fled to Italy.
I read in the book's introduction that the letters she sent to him throughout those weeks were buried with him unopened. I also read that based on his friend's accounts Keats was tormented by visions of her on his death bed, visions fueled by the fear of what his death would do to her. She was so young, so new, and he had died a thousand times.
Strangely, these horrid deathbed visions also seem prophesied in Keats' own writing. He wrote to her once that she should "suppose (him) in Rome", saying that he would see her there. "I should there see you as in a magic glass going to and from town at all the hours". Yet Keats never saw Fanny again. The Fanny he described in this early letter sounds like a ghost. Even the magic glass, at first described so lovely and innocently, turns out to be something ghastly and agonizing.
Towards the end, Keats was haunted by her.
As I read the works he wrote for her I tracked the lines with etchings, skimming his love letters as they slowly unraveled into tragedy. I could see my own lines even as I turned the pages, like half-healed scars shown through skin-thin paper.
I did not think there was any particular purpose to the order in which the poems appear, until I read the final one. Not until, at the end, Keats wrote about drawing out her blood with his once live inky grasp into his now cold dead fingers. Like an image wrought straight from Shelley's Frankenstein, love and loss becomes a monstrous thing, vampiric in its ability to draw the heart out of you.
It was there that Keats reached out to me completely, desperately, from death itself. "See" he says, reaching out his pale dead hand. "Here it is – I hold it towards you."
At the start of the book, an illustration of Keats slept in shadows, nestled between the pages, a silhouette of man of whom no photographs exist. By the end, the only thing the book leaves you with is the imaginary image of his cold corpse, sweat still drying, blood spots on his sheets from his coughing, fingers unmoving, laying where he last reached out.
As I contemplated the collection I was left with an image of Keats on his death bed, surrounded by haunted mirrors reflecting the image of the woman he loved but could never marry.
But the is truth, this is not how the story of Keats and his love ends.
It ends with a twenty year old girl cutting off her own hair and spending three years dressed in black, dwelling in the Heath where she had once walked with him. It ends with Fanny's unnamed husband who came thirteen years later and a life lived into old age with no account of the passion with which it began. Finally, it ends with a woman remembered by time only for the greatness of her grief and the love she never got to hold.
After all, it is Keats' anguish that we read about. We never get to hear about her suffering from her own mouth. Her own letters were never read, not by Keats, not by anyone.
Instead, they lie unread and entombed, withered with her first loves corpse before the woman herself even breathed her last.
Still, she must have had the gift of a poet within, for one can feel
her agony when she asks by Keats' account: "Is there another life?... There must be, we
cannot be created for this kind of suffering".