‘That drop of blood is my death warrant’: Keats and the poetry of suffering

The poet John Keats made his way back from central London to the house he shared with Charles Brown in Hampstead. He was seated on the outside of the stagecoach through a bitter February evening to save on the fare and arrived shivering and feverish. Brown advised his friend to go straight to bed.

“… he leapt into bed. On entering the cold sheets, before his head was on the pillow, he slightly coughed, and I heard him say, – ‘That is blood from my mouth.’ I went towards him; he was examining the single drop of blood upon the sheet. ‘Bring me the candle, Brown; and let me see this blood.’ After regarding it steadfastly, he looked up in my face, with a calmness of countenance that I can never forget, and said, - ‘I know the colour of that blood; – it is arterial blood; – I cannot be deceived in that colour; – that drop of blood is my death-warrant; – I must die’.”

A little after this first slight attack a much more violent haemorrhage brought up a cup full of blood and Keats felt he was drowning.

(Keats, La Belle Dame sans Merci, 1819)

Keats knew the symptoms of tuberculosis well. They called it a consumption then and some thought it was the result of suffering from too great a passion, too strong a sense of longing. Keats had seen his mother and youngest brother, Tom, die of the disease; wasting, consumed, “pale and loitering”. He’d studied medicine with the intention of becoming a surgeon and understood the old system of “humours” by which the body was governed. He knew the colours of blood and their meanings, the significance of yellow bile, the sad ache of black bile and the debilitation of phlegm. He’d lived with sickness all his life and it had come to settle in his mind, in the words he used and the images he conjured for his poetry. Charles Brown’s account suggests he always knew this day would come. That consumption would claim him too. It was early in 1820. He was 24 years old.

Re-reading Keats’s poetry, it’s striking how much sickness seems to permeate it. Bloodless cheeks, bright, feverish eyes, palsies, wracking pain and dead swoons occur frequently and are described with an almost pathological fascination. That Keats was also so familiar with a disease which attacked the respiratory system is not lost on me. Daily I listen to reports detailing the intimate progress of diseased lungs, heart palpitations, struggling after breath, pain-wracked limbs. They’re all too familiar to us from our own fear of sickness, viruses, death, and Keats’s own intimations seem prescient: “He once talked with me,” wrote a friend, “upon my complaining of stomach derangement, with a remarkable decision of opinion, describing the functions and actions of the organ with the clearness and, as I presume, technical precision of an adult practitioner.”

The poet’s father died when Keats was not yet nine. Thomas Keats had fallen from his horse and cracked his head on cobble stones on City Road. A modestly prosperous childhood now became dogged by financial uncertainty, family feuding and sickness, and a pattern for life emerged. Keats’s doting mother Frances found she couldn’t cope, marrying too soon after her first husband’s death a man she didn’t love and finding herself at war with her mother and brother over money. She became distant and absent while her children went to live with their grandmother. School was a respite – an odd, kindly place, non-conformist in religion, run by a gentle, intelligent man called John Clarke, whose son Charles also taught there and who would first instil a love of poetry in young Keats.

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When Frances Keats reappeared in her children’s lives, she was already worn out with worry, and sick with tuberculosis. John nursed her lovingly over the Christmas holidays of 1809, cooking her meals, sitting up with her as blood-spattered expectorations kept her awake; reading to her when she felt a little calmer.

Two months after he returned to boarding school, he was told his mother had died and he sat hunched up, red-eyed and pale in the alcove of his school master’s desk, his body wracked with sobs.

(John Keats, In drear nighted December, 1817)

The young Keats boys’ new guardian, an unimaginative if sensible man called Abbey, felt that the eldest John needed no more schooling but a trade in which to prosper like his grandfather had. After his experiences with his mother, Keats chose medicine because he wanted to help the sick and injured. But he wasn’t wealthy enough or connected enough to become a physician. He was apprenticed to an apothecary instead and, when his intelligence made it obvious, was then enrolled among the first to study for a new qualification in surgery at Guys and St Thomas’s Hospital in London.

This was a brave new world of ancient texts, dissected corpses, grave robbers and patients shrieking at the cut of the surgeon’s knife as Astley Cooper, Surgeon in Chief, operated on them without anything remotely resembling anaesthetic before a semi-circle of craning students. The smell, the blood, the moans of those wretches, all had their impact on the sensitive Keats. And as he began to loathe his chosen profession, so his calling as a poet became more intense.

He was also making new acquaintances. Around 1816, through his old schoolteacher Charles Clarke, he met Leigh Hunt, the leader of an ultra-radical liberal set of writers and political thinkers. Hunt had done time for libelling the Prince Regent, and evenings at his house in Hampstead introduced Keats to the reality of living in Britain for talented, intelligent men with little income and no position in a world run by greedy Tory grandees. The working classes and much of the middle class were effectively voiceless, disenfranchised by a corrupt parliamentary system and subject to ruthless and blatantly unequal laws.

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Britain was sick with naked corruption and palsied with the dying fever of a decrepit aristocracy which would stop at nothing to keep itself in power. In the years following the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, this “stopping at nothing” included vicious attacks on personal liberty, the suspension of the laws of habeas corpus allowing political enemies of the Tory party in power to be imprisoned indefinitely without trial. And a militant and reactionary Tory press, whipping up fear of radicals amongst the teacups and port decanters of Mayfair, would soon aim its fire at Hunt and his circle of what they would disparagingly call the “Cockney school” of poets.

Through Hunt, Keats would meet fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who would become one of Keats’s greatest champions, Shelley wrote later: “I am aware indeed that I am nourishing a rival who will far surpass me, and this is an additional motive and will be an added pleasure”. Keats was encouraged to publish with his new friends and to abandon his future as a surgeon. He needed little urging, but he hadn’t the means to support himself for long. The small legacy from his mother and grandmother was divided between himself and his brothers and sister. Abbey kept the purse strings tight until each was twenty-one. Keats nevertheless hoped to earn money through poetry.

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After a very modest book of poems published in 1817, mostly sonnets and short lyrics, which would be panned by the critics, he changed tack. The success of Walter Scott and Lord Byron in publishing long narrative poems encouraged him to try his hand with the far from perfect Endymion in which a youth chooses a life of dreaming and philosophical indolence over the call to action only to find himself pursuing a vision of love throughout the world. On the way, Keats makes some broadly savage comments about the nature of power and the principle of legitimate rule by an elite which draw on his fascination with the hollow show of corruption and public delirium:

(John Keats, Endymion, 1818)

Endymion was a necessary poem on the road to perfection, but Keats regretted publishing it. It became the basis of an excoriating critique from the Tory journals, Blackwoods and the Quarterly Review, which would haunt not only Keats’s few remaining years but posterity’s image of him.

Determined that narrative poetry was all, Keats wasn’t put off but wrote, in quick succession, the three most enduring of his long poems, Isabella or the Pot of Basil, The Eve of St Agnes, and Lamia. Isabella was the first in 1818. The old tale from Boccaccio was given a modern remake with the heroine’s wicked brothers representatives of the exploitative, slave-owning capitalists whose swag helped prop up the Regency government:

(John Keats, Isabella, or The Pot of Basil, 1818)

Love, Isabella’s love for her brother’s employee Lorenzo, is like a sickness, the degrees of it not unlike the physical decline he had experienced both personally and from his studies at Guy’s. Pale cheeks, thinness, the malady of love and grief, all are written on the lovers’ faces, ‘there is richest juice in poison-flowers’. Keats’s youngest brother, Tom, was already sick from the advanced stages of tuberculosis while the poet wrote these lines. Tom also complained of a desperate and unrequited love which many around him believed had been the original cause of his illness. Throughout his short adult life, Keats would equate love with sickness, a sort of malady of the brain or poppy-drunk listlessness from which it was impossible (and not always desirable) to escape, a state governed by the humour, black bile. The symptoms of love-sickness were not unlike those of consumption too.

(John Keats, The Eve of St Agnes, 1819)

In the second of the three narratives written in quick succession, The Eve of St Agnes, Keats’s medieval tale of love among bitter rivalry is the most sensual and frankly sexual of his mature poems. Madeline dreams of her love, Porphyro, a trick of St Agnes Eve, only to wake and find the real man in her chamber transformed, and not in a good way, “pallid, chill and drear”. Porphyro’s response is to revive and relive her dream-version of himself with a feverish brightness not unlike mania...

St Agnes was written in the early weeks of 1819. In December of the previous year Tom Keats had died in his brother’s arms in the shabby rooms they shared on Well Walk, Hampstead. The poem is the first of an extraordinary collection of narratives, odes and lyrics Keats would write that year, perhaps the most remarkable sequence of sustained and brilliant poetic writing in the English language.

Just over a year before, Keats had told his brothers George and Tom of a conversation he’d had with a literary friend, Charles Wentworth Dilke.

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“… several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…”

Negative capability is one of those combinations of words that sound puzzling until you remember Keats’s training in medico-scientific theory where the notion of “negative” is not disparaging, but a quality of absence, or more specifically an openness to sensations, all sensations which allows the artist to inhabit his subject thoroughly. Earlier in 1817 he’d written: “Nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.” A great poet, like Shakespeare or his fellow Elizabethan, Edmund Spenser, has no character or rather, subsumes that character into the feelings and sensations which produce a poem of genius. This nascent philosophy of poetry lies at the heart of the series of odes he would compose throughout 1819.

Keats was maturing rapidly as a writer, which would lead to a cooling of his relationship with Leigh Hunt, whose obsession with writing overtly political verse teetered on caricature and who’d begun to patronise his young acolyte in a way Keats found stifling. It would also help Keats to reassess his admiration for other contemporaries, notably William Wordsworth, essentially an egoist whose poetic talent, as he saw it, was put solely to the service of self-absorption.

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After that letter of December 1817, Keats never used the expression “negative capability” again, but he developed what it meant and how it influenced composition. The genesis of his most famous poem, Ode to a Nightingale, is a concentration of empathic sense and feeling. According to Charles Brown’s famous account:

“In the Spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house… Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast table to the grass plot under a plum tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand.”

The papers were stuffed behind some books in a gesture which seems to suggest the poet’s diffidence towards his own work. On one level Ode to a Nightingale is dangerously revealing of Keats’s state of mind. It begins:

(John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale, 1819)

The passivity is telling. Negative capability feels a little like a state of invalidity, listlessness, a heightened awareness of the sense, depression even. This state contrasts with the seeming happiness of the nightingale singing “of summer in full-throated ease’. First there is recourse to the age-old remedy for melancholy and sickness, strong drink, as substitute for joy, a means really of dulling the pain of the world, and the nightingale’s vital song is contrasted with what is now the familiar lot of humankind:

It isn’t wine, though, that will draw him after the bird, but poetry itself upon the “viewless wings” of which he will fly:

Only in his fancy, though, where he can seemingly become one with the nightingale’s song while resting where he is in a garden in Hampstead. This passivity itself has something of the death wish about it, as Keats acknowledges in the penultimate stanza of the Ode.

And as Keats weaves this into an eternal melody, musing on the distant past and how the nightingale’s song is as ancient and magical as time itself, he is suddenly brought back to himself and a state of half-living. The bird’s song recedes. He’s left perplexed: “Was it a vision, or a waking dream?... Do I sleep or wake?”

Ode to a Nightingale is a perilous poem. Its seductive drawing in, sensuality of language and intimations of suicide can be troubling for the reader, particularly as Keats is charting out a path for himself towards some sort of annihilation, to “leave the world unseen / and with thee fade away into the forest dim”. Much of Keats’s verse has this disconcerting power around death, which may explain why he feels so much like a poet of youth, that “grows pale, spectre-thin, and dies”.

In another of the great odes written a little after this, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Keats teases out the idea of immortality, not through death or the eternal song of a bird, but through a work of art, an ancient urn which is clearly not specific, but does for the universal. As Keats’s contemporary, the famous essayist William Hazlitt, wrote about classical sculptures, “they are raised above the frailties of pain or passion”.

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And so are the figures carved on this piece, lovers and pipers, priests and sacrificial victims exist in a form of stasis, poised eternally to be, indifferent to the actual, sickening world:

(John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn, 1819)

The lover will never kiss his love, the “heifer lowing at the skies” will never feel the knife, but the little town “emptied of its folk, this pious morn” will remain desolate too. And the urn will maintain its perfect form “When old age shall this generation waste, / … in midst of other woe / Than ours”, a “Cold Pastoral” which both teases and reassures humankind with one of Keats’s great conundrums:

Keats would have known that such urns contained the remains of the dead, their serene and timeless beauty hiding a charnel of charred bones and ash. The irony, if irony is the right word, lends the poem an elegiac tone, leaving the reader very much aware of his or her own mortality even as they puzzle over the moments when truth and beauty meet.

The last ode, as sequenced in the publication Poems 1820, is the Ode to Melancholy, the subject of which will immediately suggest moments of listlessness and stasis, if not actual sickness, governed in the old system of “humours” by black bile. Keats had been reading Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy over several months of 1819 and was tempted by the notion that sadness and pleasure were somehow eternally interlinked. The language of Ode to Melancholy is all water and cloud, with a fine sense of urgency about it. Only three stanzas in length, the poetry, plucking exquisite images from out of the air, draws to its now familiar conclusion:

(John Keats, Ode to Melancholy, 1819)

Keats was writing as in a fever during these months of 1819. He told his brother and sister-in-law, who had emigrated to America the previous year:

“I am… straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness – without knowing the bearing of any one assertion of any one opinion. Yet may I not in this be free from sin? May there not be superior beings amused with any graceful, though instinctive attitude my mind m[a]y fall into, as I am entertained with the alertness of a Stoat or the anxiety of a Deer?’”

He couldn’t in the end keep this up. Money worries – George Keats had lost a great deal on a bad venture on the Mississippi – and the need to earn a living had by late 1819 convinced him to try his hand at journalism. The times, the ruthless oppression of the poor which culminated in a peaceful working-class crowd being cut up by gentlemen dragoons at Peter’s Field near Manchester, and the attempts to silence government critics with hastily conceived sedition laws gave him the subject, but he was still hesitant, still dawdling among nightingales and urns when he wrote a letter to Charles Dilke outlining his plans – “if I am swept away like a spider from a drawing-room, I am determined to spin — homespun anything for sale. Yea, I will traffic.”

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At one point he breaks off to indulge his sensual fancies in one of the most celebrated passages in his correspondence:

“Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine — good God how fine. It went down soft, pulpy, slushy, oozy — all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large beatified Strawberry. I shall certainly breed.’”

Negative capability in action, perhaps, but also a reminder of the almost constant sore throat Keats suffered from at the time, and which the nectarine would have soothed. While the sensual world was always as dear to him as the spiritual, the truth is that Keats was already sick. The beautiful poetry he wrote in 1819 was written by a man who was never well, and often feverish. He had entered a relationship with a young woman called Fanny Brawne around about this time – they would even get engaged – but as his disease progressed, she became both an impossible ideal and a torment, and he knew he would never be able to live happily with her.

Eighteen-twenty was a harsh year beginning with that first bloody indication of sickness on the bed linen. Still haunted by the vicious baying of the Tory press, he barely summoned the strength to read through proof copies of what would be his third and last poetry collection, containing most of the poems on which his reputation now stands.

But he was growing weaker and was unable to write much that was original. Eventually, on advice from his doctor, his friends decided that he couldn’t survive another winter in England. Through donations and a subscription, enough money was gathered over the summer of 1820 to send him and a companion to Italy for several months in the hope that the drier, warmer air would arrest the progress of tuberculosis. Shelley offered to put him up and nurse him in his house in Pisa, but Keats preferred a degree of autonomy and anonymity, and settled on an apartment in Rome, just by the Spanish Steps. But who would accompany him?

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Charles Brown was the obvious choice. He was away for the entire summer hiking through Scotland, though, and wasn’t aware of the plans until it was too late. So it was settled that a young painter called Joseph Severn would be his companion. They already knew each other, not well, but Severn liked and admired Keats – he’d painted a nice, sensitive portrait of the poet – and was more than willing to take the opportunity to travel to Italy.

On board the ship, Keats had been made aware that while they’d waited for a fair wind at Gravesend, Brown’s ship bringing him back to London had docked, and they’d passed each other without knowing. A dreadful voyage followed. Keats’s boat was buffeted by contrary winds in the Channel for nearly two weeks before it could make headway to the Mediterranean. After a month, he and Severn arrived in Naples where they were forced to quarantine on board for a further ten days. “Oh what an account I could give you of the Bay of Naples,” Keats wrote, “if I could once more feel myself a Citizen of this world.”

By the time Keats and his companion reached Rome, he was in a bad way. An English doctor, James Clark, who’d been contacted prior to his arrival now took charge and with extraordinary kindness but employing the accepted prescription for consumption – bleeding and a starvation diet – nursed him through his final illness.

The young and inexperienced Severn stepped up to the challenge, soothing his violent bouts of fever, feeding him sips of coffee and broth, comforting him when the fits of coughing left the poet utterly exhausted, and keeping the landlady at bay who would have turned them out onto the street had her suspicions been confirmed that she was housing an invalid with a communicable disease. At this time he sketched a poignant and tragic portrait of the dying poet, eyes closed in a troubled sleep, his hair damp against his forehead.

Only once did Severn recoil with horror, when Keats begged him to end his life with laudanum.

But the end did come, late on 23 February 1821.

“Severn – I – lift me up – I am dying – I shall die easy – don’t be frightened – be firm, and thank God it has come.”

“I lifted him up in my arms,” wrote Severn. “The phlegm seem’d boiling in his throat, and increased until 11, when he gradually sank into death, so quiet, that I still thought he slept.”

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The poet was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. A handful of English expats were there, including Severn and Dr Clark. When Severn returned to the Piazza di Spagna he found the apartment being cleansed of his friend’s presence by city officials. The landlady presented him with a bill for some broken crockery she had laid out on a table. Calmly, Severn took his walking stick and smashed it to tiny pieces in front of her.

It was not the end of Keats the poet, of course. His “posthumous life”, as he called the last few months of his existence, became a reality. The legend of the artist hounded to his grave by a cruel and indifferent (and specifically Tory) establishment began that year with the publication of Shelley’s great elegy, Adonais. Damning the critics of Blackwoods and the Quarterly Review for their philistinism, Shelley saw Keats as a trailblazer who had transcended death to enter the immortal world of poetry itself, leaving the vale of sickness and mortality. Shelley was almost jealous and urged his own spirit to follow:

If Keats had gone on before to show the way to true immortality, Shelley ends with an astonishingly prophetic statement:

(Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais, 1821)

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Fourteen months later, Shelley would drown when his boat capsized in a storm off Livorno. His body washed up near Viareggio 10 days later, only recognisable by the copy of Keats’s 1820 Poems in his jacket pocket.

Keats the poet was looking for that most elusive of things, immortality, not for his life – he did nothing worthy of note, he won no battles or elections, he led no revolutions – but of thought, the immortal line, the eternal something that transcends the life of sickness and corruption, the snarling Tory critics and the patronising Hunts of the world.

If the poet sees into the eternal mysteries of a nightingale or an ancient vase or the “choir of gnats” that attend Autumn, then we, the reader, share those vicarious moments of absolute and perfect alertness. Sensation is all, and these carefully constructed, exquisitely languaged poems – where to remove or change a word is to kill the thing – become as much a part of our sensations as their inspiration was to his. It’s no surprise Keats has always been the darling of those for whom art is for art’s sake.

But he’s also the great poet of suffering and we, who must endure what he called the “vale of soul-making”, through pain and sickness, joys and disappointments, living hells and lasting griefs, we will appreciate the companionship of this young, brilliant man and love him for all time. As the novelist F Scott Fitzgerald wrote:

“I suppose I’ve read ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ a 100 times. About the tenth time I began to know what it was about, and caught the chime in it and the exquisite inner mechanics. Likewise with the ‘Nightingale’, which I can never read without tears in my eyes.”