A LOVE LETTER BY JOHN KEATS
English romantic poet John Keats was
born at Moorgate, City of London, on 31st October 1795 and passed
away in Italy on 23rd
February 1821at the young age of 26. He
was a patient of tuberculosis which curbed his physical stamina but not his poetic creativity. In spite of living a short life, he has left
behind a good deal of great poetry, especially his famous odes which find place
in university curriculum almost everywhere in the world. Some of his quotations are ever green. They are easily memorable and vastly
quotable. For example:
A
thing of beauty is a joy for ever. Its loveliness increases, it will never pass
into nothingness. Beauty is truth, truth
beauty,--that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. Heard melodies
are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter. The poetry of the earth is never
dead. If poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree it had better not
come at all. Scenery is fine – but human nature is finder. Love is my religion,
I could die for it. I have loved the principle of beauty in all things. I am
certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of
the imagine. The world is a vale of tears.
The
letter that follows was written to his lady love Fanny Brawne. She is said to
have met Keats, who was her neighbor in Hamstead in 1818 when Keats was at the
height of creative activity.
The Letter: “You have absorb’d me. I have a
sensation as the present moment as though I was dissolving ---I should be
exquisitely miserable without the hope
of seeing you . I should be afraid to
separate myself far from ou. My sweet
Fanny, will your heart never change? My
love, will it? I have no limit now to my love….Your note came in just
here. I cannot be happier away from you.
‘Tis richer than an Argosy of Pearls. Do not threat me even in jest. I have
been astonished that Men could die martyrs for religion --- I have shuddered at
it. I shudder no more----I could be martyred for my religion --- Love is my
religion ---I could die for that. I
could die for you. My Creed is Love and
you are its only tenet. You have ravished me away by a Power I cannot resist;
and yet I could resist till I saw you; and even since I have seen you I have
endeavoured often ‘ to reason against the reasons of my Love.’ I can do that no
more --- the pain would be too great. My love is selfish. I cannot breathe
without you “
In
my opinion, this is one of the best letters ever written by a poet-lover to his mistress. But Matthew Arnold for whom for poetry the idea is everything;
the rest is a world of illusion, of division, and for whom the strongest part of religion is
its unconscious poetry, the letter written by Keats is the complete enervation
of the writer. “We have the tone, or rather the entire want of tone, the
abandonment of all reticence and all dignity, of the merely sensuous man, of
the man who is passion’s slave.:
Arnold
goes on to say Keats’s love-letter is the love-letter of a surgeon’s apprentice.
(It refers to the initial career of Keats) . It has in its relaxed
self-abandonment something underbred and ignoble, as of a youth ill brought up,
without the training which teaches us that we must put some constraint upon our
feelings and upon the expression of them.
Matthew Arnol was a moral
educationist. He did not have that
poetic liberalism which was the hallmark of romantic poets. Look at Shelley’s lines: “O lift me as a
wave, a leaf, a cloud, I fall upon the thorn of life, I bleed.” For Keats,
sensations rather than thoughts were important. The love-letter quoted here is
an unbounded expression of a lover whose days in this world were numbered. He
was at that time a most critical victim of a fatal disease. His only
life-support was his lady love. In his despair, he even longed to believe in
immortality and wrote to Fanny: “I shall never be able to bid you an entire
farewell. If I am destined to be happy
with you here ----how short is the longest life. I wish to believe in immortality---I wish to
live with you for ever.”
18th January 2020 G.
R. KANWAL
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