Explore John Keats's life through a dramatization penned by Archibald MacLeish and narrated by James Mason

[Music]

SHELLEY: John Keats died at Rome of consumption and was buried in the romantic and lovely cemetery of the Protestants in that city.

NARRATOR: This is the poet Shelley speaking, in the foreword to his elegy on Keats--his Adonais.

SHELLEY: It might make one in love with death to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.

NARRATOR: Shelley had his wish--if it was one. Drowned off the Italian coast a year later, he lies here too. This is his grave. And this is the grave of Keats. This grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet who, on his deathbed, in the bitterness of his heart at the malicious power of his enemies, desired these words to be engraven on his tombstone.

KEATS: Here lies one whose name was writ in water.

SURGEON: Now Keats, quickly.

CRITIC ONE: Back to the shop, Mister John.

CRITIC TWO: Back to your plasters, pills and ointment boxes, Mister John.

NARRATOR: Shelley and others believed that Keats had been killed by the brutal reviews of his poetry in the leading magazines.

SURGEON: What are you looking so worried about, Keats? He'll be all right.

NARRATOR: The critics had discovered that he had once been a medical student.

CRITIC ONE: 'Tis a better or a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet.

CRITIC TWO: So back to the shop, Mister John.

SHELLEY: The poor fellow seems to have been hooted from the stage of life.

NARRATOR: Hooted from the stage of life. Shelley thought so. His friends thought so. There was only one, it seemed, who didn't. That was John Keats himself.

KEATS: This is a mere matter of the moment. I think I shall be among the English poets after my death.

[Music in]

NARRATOR: And of course he was, but not at his death, not for years after his death. What the world remembered throughout the 19th century--or most of it--was the pathetic figure Shelley, in his anger, had imagined.

SHELLEY: Like a pale flower by some sad maiden cherished, the broken lily lies. . .

NARRATOR: The broken lily, the pitiful gifted boy who lived, but never had his life, loved but never took his love. Keats, had he known this estimate, would have grinned. He had a gift for grinning.

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KEATS: When I was a boy I thought a fair woman a pure goddess. I thought them ethereal above men: I find them, now, perhaps equal. I could say a good deal about this but I will leave it, for after all, I do think better of womankind than to suppose they care whether Mister John Keats, five feet high, likes them or not.

[Music]

NARRATOR: As a matter of precise fact, Mister John Keats at the age of twenty was five feet one and a fraction, stocky and quick with reddish brown hair and something about him which made men, and women, forget what height he actually was. There was something else about Keats at age twenty: more had happened to him for good or bad, usually bad, than most men look for in a lifetime.

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His father had died when he was eight; killed by a fall from a horse in the early hours of an April Sunday morning. Two months later, his mother, whom he passionately and possessively loved, had married a young bank clerk and then, a year later, gone off with another man, leaving her four children to their grandmother's care. She was gone for five years.

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She was gone for five years--five years during which Keats had started school, neglected his books, played football, fought, played football, fought, played football, fought--and distinguished himself for nothing. The opinion of his schoolmates was that he would end up as a general in the army--until she returned [music in], when everything changed.

Keats, according to an early biographer, resolved to "carry off all the first prizes in literature," and did it by reading every book in the school library. The first prize he carried off: C.H. Kauffman's "Dictionary of Merchandise . . . for the use of Counting Houses." But this too didn't last. Everything in Keats' life was haunted by death. Everything was brief. Everything was almost over before it had begun. His mother had come home to die of tuberculosis. When told at school of her death, Keats--who had nursed her, cooked for her, read for her--gave way to "impassioned and prolonged grief" [music out]. He was fourteen years old.

SURGEON: Now Keats, quickly.

NARRATOR: Years afterward, Keats wrote: "life must be undergone"--meaning, not that it must be endured but that it must be lived. He lived it. After his mother's death he left school, studied medicine for five years, served his intern year as "dresser" to the most notorious butcher among the London surgeons of his day; stood his tours of duty in the wards; slept next to the bloody operating room; handled accident cases at night--emergencies, hemorrhages--all without anesthetics or anything remotely resembling what we mean by sanitation. All this, and at the same time, trying somehow to keep his family together--his young sister and his brothers.

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KEATS: I have two brothers. One, with an exquisite love of life, is in a lingering state.

NARRATOR: This was Tom--three years younger than Keats.

KEATS: My love for my brothers, from the early loss of our parents and even earlier misfortunes, has grown into an affection "passing the love of women."

NARRATOR: And yet, with all this, because of all this? In spite of it? Something else was happening to Keats in the wards and the operating theater and Tom's sick room.

KEATS: The Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man . . . That which is creative must create itself.

Then forth he came, his both knees falt'ring, both
His strong hands hanging down, and all with froth
His cheeks and nostrils flowing, voice and breath
Spent to all use, and down he sunk to death.
The sea had soak'd his heart [music out] through; all his veins
His toils had rack'd t' a labouring woman's pains.
Dead weary was he.

NARRATOR: Two weeks before his twenty-first birthday, Keats had walked out to his old school at Enfield. Here his school friend, Charles Cowden Clarke, had showed him a book, Homer's "Odyssey," translated by the Elizabethan George Chapman. Chapman's rugged verse moved Keats profoundly.

KEATS: It sounding fell, and back did swim
With th' ebbing waters, till it straight arriv'd
Where Ino's fair hand it again receiv'd.

[Music in]

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold--the realms of gold. And many goodly states--and many goodly states and kingdoms seen. Round many western islands have I been.

NARRATOR: Walking the six miles home towards his lodgings, as that night ended in the first light of dawn, Keats had hammered out a sonnet in his head--a sonnet ending with six of the most famous lines in English poetry:

KEATS:
Much have I travelled in the realms of gold
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been,
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne:
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise
Silent upon a peak in Darien.

SWEEPER: Evening, sir.

NARRATOR: There was now no question of the future for John Keats. He let his appointment at Guy's Hospital lapse and burned his boats by taking nothing with him--no document, no certificate to show that he'd ever been there. And from that time on, without knowing how he would live as a poet, uncertain even what a poet was, he committed himself to poetry.

KEATS: That which is creative must create itself.

[Music in]

NARRATOR: Six months later, in March 1817, his first volume of poems was published. It was read, as he put it . . .

KEATS: . . . by some dozen of my friends who liked it and by some dozen I was unacquainted with who did not.

NARRATOR: But when his next book, "Endymion," appeared, there were more than a dozen readers who did not like it--and they included most of the best-known critics of England and Scotland.

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CRITIC: Back to the shop, Mister John.

KEATS: I am pursuing the same instinctive course as the veriest human animal you can think of. I am, however, young, writing at random. Straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness.

CRITIC: Back to your pill boxes, Mister John.

NARRATOR: But however dark the darkness, however unjust the criticism, his instinctive course was sure. He seems to have been born knowing what many poets never learn--

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that the only subject of poetry is the living of life.

KEATS: The world is full of misery and heart-break, pain, sickness and oppression. We see not the balance of good and evil. We are in a mist. We feel the "burden of the mystery"--burden of the mystery.

NARRATOR: How to bear that burden [music out]? Keats put his trust in poetry.

KEATS: I am certain of nothing but the truth of the imagination. What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.

[Music in]

Nothing startles me beyond the Moment. The rising 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.

NARRATOR: In the summer of 1818, when Keats was twenty-two, his older brother George married and emigrated to Kentucky. Keats' many-paged letters to him and his wife are filled with a growing belief in his "powers for poetry," and with his own "exquisite love of life."

KEATS: My dear brother George . . . Brown and I walked along the border of Windermere all beautiful with wooded shores and Islands . . . and green overhead, full of Foxgloves . . . Dear Sister, I am so tired after my day's walking that when I am asleep you might sew my nose to my great toe and trundle me round the town like a Hoop without waking me.

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DINNER GUEST: Gentlemen, gentlemen, a toast--to Mr. Newton's health and confusion--to mathematics.

KEATS: . . . there was at this "immortal dinner" as Haydon called it--Wordsworth, Monkhouse, Landseer, Charles Lamb . . . and your humble Servant. Lamb got tipsy. My dear Taylor . . . Can you lend me thirty pounds for a short time? Ten I want for myself [music in], and twenty for a friend.

The faint conception I have of Poems to come brings the blood . . . into my forehead.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn . . .

[Music out]

Whenever I find myself grown vapourish, I rouse myself, wash, put on a clean shirt, brush my hair, tie my shoestrings neatly and in fact adonize as I were going out--then all clean and comfortable, I sit down to write. I feel every confidence that if I choose I may be a popular writer. That I will never be. But for all that, I will get a livelihood. As you are fond, my dear George, of giving me sketches of character you may like a little one from my hand. Shall I give you Miss Fanny Brawne?

[Music in]

She is about my height with a fine style of countenance of the lengthened sort. She wants sentiment in every feature. She manages to make her hair look well. Her mouth is bad and good. The nostrils are fine though a little painful . . . She is not seventeen but she is ignorant, monstrous in her behavior, flying out in all directions, calling people such names that I was forced lately to make use of the term--Minx. Notwithstanding your happiness, my dear George, I think I shall never marry . . . I am as happy as a Man can be--that is in myself I should be happy . . . if Tom was well. I copy out for you now the sonnet I wrote for his birthday.

Small, busy flames play through the fresh laid coals,
And their faint cracklings o’er our silence creep
Like whispers of the household gods that keep
A gentle empire o’er fraternal souls . . .
This is your birthday Tom, and I rejoice
That thus it passes smoothly, quietly . . .

I could not bring myself to say the truth, that poor Tom is no better but much worse . . . he looks upon me as his only comfort--the tears will come into your Eyes [music out]. . . . The common belief among the misguided and superstitious is that this world is a "vale of tears" from which we are to be redeemed by God and taken to Heaven. What a little, circumscribed straightened notion. Call the world if you please the Vale of Soulmaking. Then you will find out the use of the world . . . There may be intelligences in millions but they are not souls until they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself . . . How then are souls to be made? How then are these sparks to have identity given them? How but by the medium of a world like this?

[Music in]

TOM: John--John!

KEATS: Tom!

NARRATOR: To write high poetry in suffering and defeat is as nearly impossible as anything can be; and yet in the months of the brutal reviews and of Tom's death, incessant money worries, his seemingly hopeless love for Fanny Brawne, Keats had begun his "Hyperion," and by May of the year 1819 many of his greatest poems were finished as well. It was one of the most extraordinary years in the annals of English poetry. A poem to its poet is never a telling, it is a discovering. What Keats had discovered in the writing of poems like his sonnet on Shakespeare's "Lear" was what few poets have ever known.

KEATS:
. . . once again the fierce dispute
Betwixt Hell torment and impassioned clay
Must I burn through; once more humbly assay
The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit:
Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion,
Begetters of our deep eternal theme!
When through the old oak forest I am gone
Let me not wander in a barren dream,
But when I am consumed in the fire
Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire.

NARRATOR: ". . . the fierce dispute" between human kind ("impassioned clay") and "Hell torment"--the contradiction at the heart of human life: poetry's "deep eternal theme." To be capable of poetry, Keats had discovered, is to be capable of life, of the suffering as well as the delight. Keats, at twenty-four, was indeed "among the English poets," though few then guessed it--but he had come almost to the end of his poet's life. He seems to have known.

KEATS: When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain . . .

[Music out]

NARRATOR: One night, returning to the house which after Tom's death he shared with a close friend . . .

KEATS: This blood's from my mouth. Bring me the candle--let me see this blood. I know the color of that blood. It is arterial blood. I cannot be deceived in that color. That drop of blood is my death warrant. I must die.

[Music in]

NARRATOR: The licensed practitioner had practiced at last on himself.

KEATS: My dearest Fanny . . . they say I must remain confined to this room for some time.

NARRATOR: From that time on, from February 1820, until September when he left London for Rome where he was to die, Keats' whole attention, clouded by his worsening illness, by a growing sense of failure, by loss of family, lack of money . . . centered itself on Fanny Brawne.

KEATS: The consciousness that you love me will make a pleasant prison of the house next to yours.

NARRATOR: Living next door to her, he saw her daily at first, and he wrote her letters which were sometimes brave, sometimes more than brave, sometimes miserable, shameful even.

KEATS: I'm recommended by the doctors not even to read poetry, much less to write it . . . You must come and see me frequently--this evening without fail [music out]--and you must not mind about my speaking in a low tone for I am ordered to do so . . . though I can speak out! By the bye, if ever you catch me on a stage coach again in the winter full against the wind, you may bring me down with a brace of bullets . . .Come round to my window for a moment when you have read this.

[Music in]

You are always new. The last of your kisses was ever the sweetest, the last smile the brightest. You must believe--you shall, you will--that I can do nothing, say nothing, think of nothing but what has its spring in the love which has so long been my pleasure and torment . . . I could write a Poem which I have in my head . . . They talk of my going to Italy . . . I'm much better this morning than I was a week ago . . . Perhaps I have imagined my illness more serious than it is . . . In town I met Monkhouse, who invited me to supper with Wordsworth, Southey, Lamb . . . In the end, I declined the invitation . . . too careful of my health to risk being out at night.

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According to all appearances, I'm to be separated from you as much as possible. How I shall be able to bear it I cannot tell. I must be patient . . . I should run around and surprise you with a knock at the door. I fear I am too prudent for a dying kind of lover. Yet there is a great difference between going off in warm blood like Romeo and making one's exit like a frog in a frost [music in]. When I send this round I shall be . . . watching to see you show yourself for a minute in the garden. Minx. When you passed my window home yesterday I was filled with as much admiration as if I had then seen you for the first time. Suppose I should go to Italy--I should there see you as in a magic glass going to and from town at all hours . . . I cannot forget what has passed. When you were in the habit of flirting. . . . My dearest, I am sorry . . . Let me no longer detain you from going to town--there may be no end to this imprisoning of you . . . I wish I had even a little hope.

FANNY: Going to town.

KEATS: To town?

FANNY: Shocking. Going to town--to town.

[Music out]

KEATS: Your going to town alone--your going to town alone . . . was a shock to me . . . and well may you exclaim, how selfish, how cruel, not to let me enjoy my youth! To wish me to be so unhappy! Well, you must be so if you love me . . . I can be contented with nothing else. If you could really enjoy yourself at a party [music in]--if you could really enjoy yourself at a party, if you can--if you can smile in people's faces and wish them to admire you now, you never have nor ever will love me. . . . You do not feel as I do. You--you do not know what it is to love. I appeal to you [music out]--I appeal to you by the blood of that Christ you believe in: do not write to me if you have done anything this month which would have pained me to have seen . . . If you can behave in dancing rooms--if you behave in dancing rooms and other societies as I have seen you, I do not wish to live.

[Music in]

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would'st wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again
And thou be conscience-calm’d--see, here it is--
I hold it towards you.

[Music out]

If I have been cruel and unjust . . . I swear my love has ever been greater than my cruelty which lasts but a minute [music in], whereas my Love come what will shall last forever. The thought of leaving her is beyond every thing horrible--the sense of darkness coming over me--I eternally see her eternally vanishing. Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes . . .


JOSEPH SEVERN: Day after day, night after night, here I am by our poor dying friend. Dr. Clark will not say much, although all that can be done he does most kindly. Little or no change has taken place, except this beautiful one--that his mind is growing to great quietness and peace.

NARRATOR: It was here, in Rome, in the old house in the center of the city in which his friend the painter Joseph Severn had taken rooms that Keats at last found "quietness and peace"--at last burned through in his own life the fierce dispute between Hell torment and impassioned clay. Hell torment was still real enough.

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KEATS: I should have had her when I was in health and I should have remained well. I can bear to die [music in]--I can bear to die, but I can't bear . . . Severn!

SEVERN: He has just fallen asleep--the first sleep for eight nights. How can he be "Keats" again--after all this?

NARRATOR: But a month later, though there was still no hope, less hope indeed than ever, Keats wrote to his friend Charles Brown in London, and now the victory was with impassioned clay. Poetry had saved him: even when he thinks in despair of Fanny, he thinks no longer of the suffering as an end but as a means, as it always is to poetry.

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KEATS: I am so weak that I cannot bear the sight of any handwriting of a friend I love so much as I do you. Yet I ride the little horse, and at my worst . . . summon up more puns in a sort of desperation, in one week than in any year of my life. There is one thought enough to kill me [music in]--I have been well, healthy, alert, walking with her, and now [music out]. . . the knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade, all that information (primitive sense) necessary for a poem are great enemies to the recovery of the stomach. There, you rogue, I put you to the torture.

[Music in]

NARRATOR: ". . . the knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade, all that information (primitive sense) necessary for a poem . . ." No critic, in the fullest flood of health, has ever put the essentials of poetry as well. And no dying man has ever summoned more impossible courage than Keats summoned for this last wry smile.

KEATS: I can scarcely bid you good-bye, even in a letter [music out]. I always made an awkward bow.

FANNY: My dear Mr. Severn [music in]. . . Nothing during his long illness has hurt me so much as to hear he is resigned . . . I believe he must soon die and when . . . tell me immediately. I'm not a fool. I have not forgot him--and never shall . . .

[Music out]

SEVERN: Tonight he's talked very much, but so easily, that he fell at last into a pleasant sleep. He seems to have happy dreams. Among the many requests he has made of me, this is the principal--that on his gravestone shall be this inscription: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." You . . . will understand this so well that I needn't say a word about it.

[Music in]

KEATS:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise
Silent upon a peak in Darien!


[Music out]