John Keats

Dear Readers,

Here's an essay I did for school. I got an A on it, but I sort of don't think I should have, uh... I'm not doing really well in the class, in my opinion, just because for the class we read a lot of dense, boring, pointless literary criticism. I do like John Keats poetry, though.

In the assignment, I had to use a secondary source, so my reference to Ronald Sharp is quiff; it does not really fit in to the essay, but whatever.

The Stubborn Mind in “When I have fears” and “Why did I laugh tonight?”

The poetry of John Keats is often filled with fancy and romance. Poems such as “Eve of St. Agnes,” which tells the story of two young lovers, and “On sitting down to read King Lear once again” which celebrates the artistry and beauty of Shakespeare’s play, showcase Keats’ romantic imagination and his love of beauty. Keats isn’t solely a hopeless romantic with his head in the clouds, though. Keats has written other poems that delve into stark sadness. One poem that struck me as expressing manic-depressive themes was “Ode to Melancholy,” in which “the melancholy fit shall fall/ Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,” and “in the very temple of Delight/ Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine” (Keats, 348).

Putting Keats happy/escapist/pastoral poems and his sad poems aside, Keats has also written poems that are less emotional and less fantastic, poems that are neither overtly celebratory of beauty nor despondent, poems that put emotions on the back burner, so to speak. Indeed, some of Keats poems have a stubborn logic about them. A close look at two sonnets, “When I have fears” and “Why did I laugh tonight?” will show you what I mean.

In the often anthologized sonnet, “When I have fears,” Keats says that when he’s afraid that he will die before all the wonderful ideas in his head are properly recorded, “Then on the shore of the wide world I stand alone, and think/ till love and fame to nothingness do sink” (Keats 221). Notice that Keats is using “think” here as an intransitive verb, which is an unusual way to use the word “think”. “Think” is usually a transitive verb; one usually thinks about something, or thinks of something. But here Keats leaves the verb alone, at the end of the line, without an object. The unusual grammatical use of “think” and its placement at the end of the line shows us that Keats is stuck with his own persistent, nagging mind, forever.

Keats emphasizes logic again in the second line of “When I have fears” when he writes, “Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain” (Keats 221) as if his brain was a repository for knowledge, as if his brain were something to be harvested, as if his brain were easily measured, weighed and categorized. In reality, brains are deep and mysterious, very unlike a field of crops, and current science has yet to explain all its inner workings. Keats’s objectification and simplification of his own brain suggests to the reader the preeminent place of logic in the sonnet.

“Why did I laugh tonight?” is the not-so-canonical logical thematic sequel to “When I have fears.” In “Why did I laugh tonight?” Keats logically questions the motivation for his own laughter. In the sonnet, Keats keeps asking, “why did I laugh?” over and over. In fact, “why did I laugh?” or some slight variant of the question, is repeated in the poem four times, including the title.

It is a strange question. Some questions are more easily answered than others. If one was to ask, “Why did the U.S. stock market crash in 1929?” or, “Why do penguins migrate?” one could give a logical explanation. But logically explaining why one laughs is more difficult. There is no clear-cut answer to Keats’s question, “Why did I laugh tonight?” But still, he keeps asking the question. It’s as if Keats is trying to squeeze logic out of something that is inherently illogical, laughter. Keats does recognize that to question the motivation for his laughter is a fruitless exercise. Neither Heaven, Hell, nor his own heart will make any reply to his question, because there is no satisfactory reply to give.

He ends the sonnet by talking about death, a stark contrast to laughter. Keats is trying to show that the only real, logical, ending to laughter is death. I don’t think he brings up death in a melancholy way, though, the poem’s treatment of death is matter-of-fact.
In this paper so far I have referred to the speaker of the poem as Keats himself, as if every poem Keats wrote with personal pronouns in them are literally autobiographical. But this is a faulty assumption. Often the speaker of a poem is not the author himself or herself. To a large extent, the attempt to deeply know an author through his works is futile. One might think, after reading my essay so far, that Keats is either fanciful, depressed, or logically-minded, or a combination of these three attributes. But an interesting article, “Keats and Friendship” an article by Ronald A. Sharp, gives a further in-depth look at Keats’s personal qualities. More specifically, Sharp describes how Keats regards the concept of friendship in his poems and in his life.

I add this reference to Sharp’s article to my essay to say that we can’t simplify Keats too much. We shouldn’t say that Keats’s life was dominated by escapism. We shouldn’t say that Keats’s life was dominated by emotions. And we shouldn’t say that Keats operated solely on logic. But we can say that Keats’s personality was multi-faceted, and that he explored many different selves in his poetry. Or, we can say that Keats explored so many different “selves” that eventually he had no self. As he says in one of his letters to Richard Woodhouse, a poet “has no identity – he is continually in for- and filling some other Body” (Keats, 547).

Works Cited

Keats, John. The Complete Poems. Ed. John Barnard. England: Penguin Books, 1988.
Sharp, Ronald A. "Keats and Friendship." The Kenyon Review 21.1 (1999): 124-37.