A trainee surgeon wrote that beauty never passes into nothingness
The opening of Keats's Endymion makes a bold promise: beauty does not fade, it grows. Sun, moon, sheep under shady trees, daffodils and forest streams all lift the gloom from our spirits. Keats wrote that faith in lasting loveliness while training in hospitals and would die of tuberculosis at 25.
The passage begins with one of the most quoted lines in English, "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever", and immediately argues for it. Loveliness increases rather than wears out, and it keeps a quiet bower for us, a sleep full of sweet dreams and easy breathing. The claim is almost medical: beauty is described as something that restores health.
Keats does not pretend the world is kind. He lists the reasons for despair plainly: despondency, a shortage of noble people, gloomy days and dark paths we are forced to search. Every morning, he says, we weave a flowery band that ties us to the earth anyway. Then comes a catalogue of ordinary consolations, including trees offering shade to simple sheep, daffodils in their green world, and clear streams making their own cool shelter against summer heat. The list ends with something grander, the imagined fates of the mighty dead, pictured as an endless fountain of immortal drink pouring from heaven's edge.
The poet's life gives the lines an extra charge. Born in Moorgate, London, on 31 October 1795, Keats lost his father to a riding accident when he was eight and his mother to tuberculosis when he was 14. He was apprenticed to a surgeon and apothecary, Thomas Hammond, then in October 1815 enrolled at Guy's Hospital, where within a month he was working as a dresser who assisted at operations. His family assumed medicine would give him security; money worries dogged him throughout, not helped by an inheritance of £800 nobody seems to have told him about.
His poems were in print for less than four years before he died and were received coolly. Fame came quickly afterwards, and later Victorians gave him a secure place in the English canon, admired for sensuous imagery and a major influence on the Pre-Raphaelites.
Source: A Thing of Beauty (Endymion)
