Yes, heartaches have I had many,
Deprived of hordes of wild beauty,
Forever beyond the reach of desperate hands-
No, the nightingale didn’t cry and fill
My ears with drowsy numbness-
That lunatic lovelorn, years ago dreamt,
O, not of beauties such as to perplex me,
But of some pitch black bird!
Oh! And the mismatched epithet 'lover Keats'-
What of love did he know-?
The frantic cries of Isabella,
Feeding her basil with tears?
The exotic Lamia dying on her marriage night?
Some unspoken words that were best left buried
In his chest, out of sight?
What of love he knew, I ask
When he never wrote of peers?
Dealt in fantasies of unhurried
Arcadia, in the long buried past?
He mistook intellectual illusions for
Stirrings in his heart.
Hallucinating, trauma induced,
He mistook himself for Romeo
And played his tragic part.
-6\8\99,Calcutta-63
COMMENTS :
Keats is always the favourite with students of
poetry. The biggest reason is probably that he was the most
romantic, in the popular sense of the word. There is always an
element of sensuousness in his poetry- sensuous in both senses
(firstly, pertaining to the senses. Secondly, pertaining to sex),
sometimes bordering on saccharine. The surprising fact about Keats
is that people should be so much besotted to his poetry because of
its love content- and if you carefully examine his poems you will
find that there is no love to be found. Even if we exclude his
personal life from consideration (almost an impossibility in Keats
criticism) and take his poems at their own merit, we find a form
of love that is very insubstantial, we find the lovers not quite
human and even the quality of love borders on extremity. Thus, in Lamia
we have a supernatural female falling in love with a human male;
in Isabella we have the most grotesque love-story of all
literature; in La Belle Dame Sans Merci we have another
human-supernatural match; in Eve of St. Agnes we have a
prototype of the Romeo-Juliet story in a setting that is not quite
conductive to love with nebulous horizons; we have some odes where
the speaker of the poem falls in love with some deity, etc.
Everywhere we either have grotesque lovers or grotesque stories-
he quite seems to have forgotten that love is the most human of
all emotions. His poetry is devoid of humanity in this sense.
Comparing his love poetry with that of Donne, Browning and Yeats
we find what love in human context means- the only form of
love that is comprehensible to us- and which is missing in Keats.
[This is only a personal observation]
