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Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne: Written in the years MDCCCXIX and MDCCCXX and now given from the original manuscripts — John Shaqi

Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne: Written in the years MDCCCXIX and MDCCCXX and now given from the original manuscriptsKeats, John

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Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne: Written in the years MDCCCXIX and MDCCCXX and now given from the original manuscripts

Name: Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne: Written in the years MDCCCXIX and MDCCCXX and now given from the original manuscripts
Author: Keats, John

Keats, John

Brawne, Fanny, 1800-1865 -- Correspondence; Keats, John, 1795-1821 -- Correspondence; Poets, English -- 19th century -- Correspondence

“I am afraid that your anxiety for me leads you to fear for the
    violence of my temperament, continually smothered down: for
    that reason, I did not intend to have sent you the following
    Sonnet; but look over the two last pages, and ask yourself if I
    have not that in me which will bear the buffets of the world.
    It will be the best comment on my Sonnet; it will show you that
    it was written with no agony but that of ignorance, with no
    thirst but that of knowledge, when pushed to the point; though
    the first steps to it were through my human passions, they went
    away, and I wrote with my mind, and, perhaps, I must confess, a
    little bit of my heart.

      Why did I laugh to-night? No voice will tell:
        No God, no Demon of severe response,
      Deigns to reply from Heaven or from Hell.
        Then to my human heart I turn at once.
      Heart! Thou and I are here sad and alone;
        I say, why did I laugh? O mortal pain!
      O Darkness! Darkness! ever must I moan,
        To question Heaven and Hell and Heart in vain.
      Why did I laugh? I know this Being’s lease,
        My fancy to its utmost blisses spreads;
      Yet would I on this very midnight cease,
        And the world’s gaudy ensigns see in shreds;
      Verse, Fame, and Beauty are intense indeed,
      But Death intenser—Death is Life’s high meed.”[7]

Again in the same letter, on the 15th of April, Keats says “Brown,
this morning, is writing some Spenserian stanzas against Miss B —— and
me,”—a reference, doubtless, to Miss Brawne, probably indicative of the
engagement being an understood thing; and, seemingly on the same date, he
writes as follows:

    “The fifth canto of Dante pleases me more and more; it is that
    one in which he meets with Paulo and Francesca. I had passed
    many days in rather a low state of mind, and in the midst of
    them I dreamt of being in that region of Hell. The dream was
    one of the most delightful enjoyments I ever had in my life; I
    floated about the wheeling atmosphere, as it is described, with
    a beautiful figure, to whose lips mine were joined, it seemed
    for an age; and in the midst of all this cold and darkness I
    was warm; ever-flowery tree-tops sprung up, and we rested on
    them, sometimes with the lightness of a cloud, till the wind
    blew us away again. I tried a Sonnet on it: there are fourteen
    lines in it, but nothing of what I felt. Oh! that I could dream
    it every night.

Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.

Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne: Written in the years MDCCCXIX and MDCCCXX and now given from the original manuscripts

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