Erotic literature -- History and criticism; Psychoanalysis and literature; Sex in literature
Another posthumous poem addressed to Fanny is the one beginning with
the lines, "What can I do to drive away remembrance from my eyes?"
He is now wishing he were free from love, and that he had his old
liberty. He wants to devote himself to his muse as freely as he once
did. He thinks of wine as he did in the nightingale poem, and asks:
"Shall I gulp wine? No, that is vulgarism." He is in hell, he realises,
but he concludes with a wish to satisfy his physical love for Fanny.
He wants to rest his soul on her dazzling breast, to place his arm
about her waist, and feel her warm breath spread a rapture in his
hair. In a posthumously published sonnet he pleads, "I cry to you for
mercy"; he wants her entirely, including "that warm, white, lucent,
million-pleasured breast." In the sonnet he wrote (not before his
death, as usually thought but as Colvin says, in February, 1819), in
a blank page in a volume of Shakespeare facing "A Lover's Complaint,"
"Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art," he concludes most
sensuously. He longs to be:
"Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel forever its soft fall and swell,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live forever--or else swoon to death."
All this shows that Keats's love was not one where the reason or
moral sense played a great part; it was not tender or kindly, but a
madness, and more than usually physical. There can be no doubt, from
the evidence given by Keats, that he indulged in reveries of physical
satisfaction with Fanny in day dreams.
Keats has himself written that he had sensuous night dreams. He
wrote in April, 1819, apropos the sonnet, _A Dream_, after reading
Dante's Episode of Paolo and Francesca: "The dream was one of the most
delightful enjoyments I 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." A flying dream always has a sexual
significance, even without any female figure to accompany the dreamer.
Of course this figure was Fanny Brawne to whom he had just been or was
about to be betrothed.
II
We now come to his two greatest odes, the one to the Grecian Urn and
the other to the Nightingale. Both were written in the spring of 1819.
In both Fanny Brawne is with the poet though there is no direct mention
of his love for her or his troubles with her. The lines in the _Ode to
a Grecian Urn_ that particularly were written with Fanny in mind are
those addressed to the lover of the Grecian Urn.
"Bold Lover, never, never, canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal--yet do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love and she be fair."
Keats saw a resemblance between himself and that youth. He, too, was
winning and near the goal, and he no more had her love than did the
youth on the urn. He himself knew the passion
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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