A Sweet Unrest

Overdosed on...

Well, I don't know if that is possible. But I may have overdosed on books about Keats. I enjoyed reading the poems so much but even with the helpful notes in my edition, I feared I wasn't understanding enough. In Edward Hirsch's beautiful introduction to the poems, he recommends 4 biographies of Keats. I found 3 of them used pretty easily and I started reading the one by Walter Jackson Bate a couple weeks ago. Like most of us, I don't have much time to myself these days so I was reading the biography at the expense of reading the poetry. I learned a lot and it was helpful but truthfully, it wasn't quite as inspiring. Well, Keats' life itself is actually very inspirng, but reading a biography wasn't the same beautiful rush as reading the poetry. Of course it wasn't.

When I went back to the poems it was like opening the window and letting a fresh gust of air in. And I'm starting to sense that, in a way, the poems themselves will teach me how to read them. If I let them. If I read them aloud to myself, a few lines at a time, and really listen to the words, allow the pictures to form in my mind, quietly reflect, and keep rereading. I may not always understand everything, but if I give it enough time and space I will actually know what the poem means anyway. And that I guess is the magic of it. The language itself tells you what it means, and in a very different way- on a different level- than prose does.

This is not to say that I won't keep reading the biographies, because I will. I want to learn as much as I can. But I also want to allow myself to experience words and their meaning the way poetry teaches us to, which is very different from what I've trained myself to do in life. Keats believed that the imagination was the way to truth, the only way to know the truth. It's so foreign to me to think that way. But I'm drawn to it.

To Start

I don't recall ever reading a poem in school. I guess I must have, somewhere along the way, but I don't remember it. And until recently I never read poetry as an adult. Poems to me were nothing more than the slightly exasperating spaces in the New Yorker one glanced over uncomprehendingly while reading something else.

Then one day this winter I decided to read the poetry of John Keats. The chain of events leading up to that decision is long and complicated, so we'll leave it for now and simply say that it was a late Saturday night, December 8th in fact, when I opened my newly-purchased volume of his work. I didn't understand a lot of what I read, at least not in the way I'm used to understanding things. But what I read did absolutely speak to me and I spent the entire night wondering how I'd lived so long without that stunning use of language. I'm still wondering. It's kind of painful to think of.

I fell instantly in love with the sound of this one, and the more I read it, the more it means to me. (My apologies- TypePad looses the indentations)

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon the more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;-then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.