John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the Bright Star
Death—specifically death from tuberculosis—and Italy are entwined in the lives of both Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. Shelley left England—and, as things worked out, left it forever—in the winter of 1818 because he showed signs of serious T.B. He took with him his wife Mary Godwin Shelley and their two very young children, William and Clara. Shelley continued to have serious health problems, especially kidney trouble, but the T.B. seemed to go into remission. However, the Italian climate, his seeming cure, proved fatal first to Clara, who died in Venice of dysentery on September 24, 1818, and then to William, who died in Rome on June 7, 1819.
Shelley and Keats knew each other only slightly in England. They met in 1817 because both were friends of the poet Leigh Hunt. Keats at the time was making the big decision to leave the career as a doctor for which he had been trained in order to devote himself to being a poet; Shelley, as heir to a fortune, did not have to make such a career choice, but he had already made choices that separated him from the possibility of the life as a landed squire to which he had been born. And they both had an impassioned commitment to the writing of poetry. So you’d have expected these two brilliant young men to get along very well—but they didn’t. Or at least Keats didn’t find himself comfortable with Shelley because the latter, despite his real and conscious radicalism, was unconsciously imbued with a superior attitude that Keats understandably found annoying.
Still, Shelley “worked with” his snobbery, as we would put it now, was very good-hearted, and even though condescending in manner toward Keats, really did find him impressive. So when he heard from a friend in England, in the late summer of 1820, that Keats was seriously consumptive, he wrote Keats to invite him to come to stay with Mary and himself in Pisa. Keats returned a polite but vague thank you—and it doesn’t seem likely that he would ever have actually taken Shelley up on the invitation—but by September, 1820, as his condition worsened, it became clear that he must indeed leave England before the onset of winter if he were to have any chance of surviving. For Keats, though, the terrible irony was that physical survival came only through a death of the heart in that it meant that he must leave his betrothed, Fanny Brawne.
So that’s the story up to a moment on board the small ship, Maria Crowther, on September 30, 1820, still within sight of the southern coast of England. With an unknown—and, as it turned out, terrible—sea voyage ahead of him, when Keats sat on deck reading the sonnet “Bright Star” that he had written in 1819, revised, and transcribed onto a blank page of Shakespeare’s Poems, opposite “The Lover’s Complaint.” I want to read “Bright Star” with you in both its original and its revised version but first to read an excerpt from a letter that Keats wrote to Fanny Brawne on July 25, 1819:
“I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute. I hate the world: it batters too much the wings of my self-will, and I would that I could take a sweet poison from your lips to send me out of it. . . , What softer words can I find for you after this . . . .Nor will I say more here . . . for I am distracted with a thousand thoughts. I will imagine you Venus tonight and pray, pray, pray to your star like a He[a]then. Yours ever, fair Star, John Keats.”
Let us read together now the first version of the sonnet. There is disagreement about its precise dating, with conjectures ranging from April to December, 1819:
Bright Star! would I were steadfast as thou art!
Not in lone splendour hung amid the night;
Not watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature’s devout sleepless Eremite,
The morning waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores;
Or, gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors:—
No;—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Cheek-pillow’d on my Love’s white ripening breast,
To touch, for ever, its warm sink and swell,
Awake, for ever, in a sweet unrest;
To hear, to feel her tender-taken breath,
Half passionless, and so swoon on to death.
Critics generally agree that the revised version is an improvement:
Bright Star! would I were steadfast as thou art!
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night;
Not watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature’s devout sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores;
Or, gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d on my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest;
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.
As in many of his poems, and particularly in the great odes, Keats sets up a symbol—a Grecian urn, a nightingale, a star—but tests it, questions it, as the poem progresses, creating those tensions and ambiguities that made him the darling of the New Critics. But here, you’ll notice, the questioning does not turn on the satisfactoriness of the symbol as an image of permanence like the urn, which makes it but a “Cold Pastoral” in the face of changing human life. The difficulty with the symbol finds expression in the adjective “lone,” and the resolution comes through changing the “I” as steadfast as the star to an “I” that includes “my Love,” with both “still steadfast, still unchangeable.” In other words, the loneliness that made the star unacceptable as an ideal image for “I” becomes resolved when the star mirrors a united pair of lovers. However, that resolution immediately creates a further complication in that steadfastness becomes lost in the constant change of “ripening,” “soft fall and swell,” and “sweet unrest.” The final resolution is left to the last word: “death.”
One further quotations needs to be put into this showcase. On that same day of September 30, 1820, Keats wrote to his friend, Charles Brown, as follows: “ The very thing which I want to live for most will be the great occasion of my death. . . . The thought of leaving Miss Brawne is beyond everything horrible—the sense of darkness coming over me—I eternally see her figure eternally vanishing.”
Three biographies of Keats, all written in the mid-to-late 1960s have shaped all discussion of Keats since, as Andrew Motion states at the beginning of his own 1997 biography: Aileen Ward’s psychological study and Walter Jackson Bate’s New Critical one both appeared in 1963. Robert Gittings’ book, which places Keats in the context of his culture, was published in 1968. Each, as I have suggested, has a very different “reading” of Keats’s life, and those readings become pronounced in their reactions to “Bright Star” and to those sentences I just quoted from the letter to Charles Brown.
Aileen Ward juxtaposes the initial version of “Bright Star” with the letter written to Fanny Brawne on July 25, 1819, saying, “From this moment a sonnet was born.” About Keats’s letter to Charles Brown, she writes, “His wild longing for Fanny broke through at last.” She reads that love as what Keats claims to be “the very thing I long for most” and the impossibility of its consummation as what he states to be the cause of his death. On board the Maria Crowther, in her interpretation, as he broods on this sorrow, Keats revises his earlier version of the sonnet.
Walter Jackson Bate dislikes Fanny Brawne, not to put too fine a point on it, and works hard to minimize her importance in Keats’s life. He doesn’t see any necessary link between the letter to Fanny written on July 25, 1819 and the writing of the sonnet—which he says might just as well have been written between October and December, 1819—and he focuses more on Keats’s devotion to poetry than on any connection with Fanny Brawne. So, in Bate’s version, Keats could see flaws in this sonnet, and on board ship as a dedicated poet, he gave it an excellent revision. And when Keats writes to Brown that “the very thing which I want to live for most will be the great occasion of my death,” according to Bate, “In all probability, he is speaking of the writing of poetry . . . . We are also free to assume, indeed the incurably sentimental are quick to assume, that he refers to Fanny Brawne.”
Robert Gittings, with a no-nonsense approach, undercuts both these views. He says that Keats’s “deep-seated neurosis about women had taken the final form that love was an actual cause of his death. . . . Poetry took no place in his thoughts, which were now totally centered on his unattainable love for Fanny.” He places the first version of “Bright Star” in April, 1819, well before the July 25 letter to Fanny that identifies her with the planet—and the goddess—Venus and dates its revision somewhat later. On board the Maria Crowther, in his view, Keats was not revising the sonnet but simply brooding over the revised version as he mourned his parting from Fanny. Andrew Motion, in conscious dialogue with all three biographers, conjectures that the poem was written in October, 1819 and agrees with Gittings that aboard ship Keats was reading the poem but not revising it.
One important issue in this scholarly controversy turns on the interpretation of Keats’s words, “the very thing which I want to live for most will be the great occasion of my death.” Was the “very thing” passionate human love or was it the impassioned love of poetry? I think that the answer that subsumes and transcends both possibilities—and links both to the “Bright Star” sonnet—may be found in the elegy Shelley wrote for Keats, Adonais.
But we need a biographical bridge to that poem. Keats very nearly died on board the Maria Crowther before the voyage was over, but he survived it and with his companion, Joseph Severn, he made it to a small apartment on the Spanish Steps in Rome, rallied a bit, but died there on February 23, 1821 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery.
Shelley, meanwhile, who had been lofty about Keats’s long poem Endymion, had re-read it by this time and been much impressed with parts of it—and even more impressed by Keats’s Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, which had been published in July, 1820. (The “other poems” included Keats’s Odes: “To a Nightingale,” “On a Grecian Urn,” “To Melancholy,” “Indolence,” and “To Autumn.”) Shelley suddenly realized that Keats was good, and so he was truly distressed to learn on April 11, 1821, that he had died. Moreover, in the story that he heard—or as he understood the case—the cause of Keats’s death was the physical as well as mental distress that Keats experienced because of a particularly nasty review of Endymion by an anonymous critic whom Shelley took to be the poet Robert Southey. And he identified with that because his own poetry regularly received virulent and ad hominem reviews in the Tory English press. So in Shelley’s view, Keats’s commitment to poetry could be considered the cause of his death in that it made him vulnerable to the violence of critics.
Now Shelley never read “Bright Star,” which wasn’t published until 1838, and (of course) he hadn’t read Keats’s July 25, 1819 to Fanny Brawne or the September 30, 1820 letter to Charles Brown. So the situation he sets up in Adonais as well as the poem’s conclusion—which will be my focus for the time we have left—is not based on anything he would specifically have read in Keats’s work. It’s all the more extraordinary, then, that he would write a poem on Keats that could well have had as its epigraph Keats’s words to Fanny Brawne: “I will imagine you Venus tonight and pray, pray, pray to your star like a Heathen.”
Shelley chose the very long “Heathen” tradition of the pastoral elegy for his own poem of mourning and focused on a story that is central to the tradition: the tale of Venus, the Goddess of Love and therefore of Life (which necessarily includes Death) and with that of Beauty and therefore of Poetry—Love, Life, Death, Beauty, Poetry—and the beautiful and gifted human shepherd, Adonis. Struck by the beauty of the shepherd, Venus reveals herself to him, and they become lovers—though, of course, so intimate a relationship with the power of a god is a very high risk situation for a human. And indeed, though it’s hard to pinpoint cause and effect, in the story Adonis is killed while hunting a wild boar, yes, but it’s his relationship to Venus that puts him in that deadly situation. In the very, very ancient Sumerian version of this legend, the Mother Goddes of Love, Inanna, who is also the Goddess of Death, descends to the underworld for her shepherd-lover Dumuzi after he is killed and restores him to life. In the later Greco-Roman version that we know much better, a Venus (or Aphrodite) now subservient to the Father of the Gods, Jupiter (or Zeus), begs for Adonis’s life and is granted her wish—though in a constant cycle of love, death, and renewal repeated each year. (I’m necessarily using what amounts to shorthand here to talk about this complex tradition and its relation to the pastoral elegy. I’ve written about it at much greater length in Shelley’s Goddess, and I recommend also a book that much influenced my own thinking, David Halperin’s Before Pastoral: Theocritus and the Ancient Tradition of Bucolic Poetry.)
Now Keats’s Endymion, which Shelley, as I said, did read, tells a closely related story. The protagonist, Endymion, is a handsome shepherd beloved by the goddess Diana. She visits him in what he experiences as a kind of dream, but when he wakes she has vanished. The rest of the poem involves his pursuit—and eventually his possession—of her. Also, near the beginning of the poem, Endymion on his journey comes upon the dead/sleeping body of Adonis, his mirror image, just at the moment when the Goddess Venus descends to restore her beloved to life. So Shelley had reason to know that the story of the human son/lover of the Great Mother Goddess, who is the dedicated ideal of his life and at the very center of his reason for being; who is also the cause of his death; and who eventually is the source of his immortality is one that appealed to Keats as much as it did to Shelley himself. The myth somehow catches the situation of the poet who turns his experience of life’s transcendent meaning into language at no matter what cost to himself and who has this eternal reward: his language becomes one with the life, love, and beauty beyond words that he so ardently desires.