Young Keats, lying on a clifftop, confides his fear of never becoming a poet
Before the odes, before any fame, John Keats wrote a verse letter to his younger brother George admitting to long, dull hours when he felt poetry would never come to him. By the end he is stretched out on flowers above the sea, watching ships and gulls, and waving westward toward his brother.
The poem opens in low spirits. Keats describes lying on the grass, staring at lightning or the stars, and fearing he will never hear Apollo's music, that neither bees nor a beautiful glance will ever teach him a song. It is a startlingly candid admission from someone who would soon be ranked among the great English Romantics.
Then the mood lifts. There are moments, he tells George, when poets forget every sorrow and see nothing but poetry in the world around them. In such a trance, he says, citing Spenser, a poet sees knights on white horses jousting in the sky, and what the rest of us call sheet lightning is really the gate of their heavenly hall swinging open. Even the moon becomes a figure climbing through the clouds "like a sweet nun in holy-day attire".
The middle stretch imagines a dying poet looking forward to his influence on later ages: patriots stirred to fight, senators quoting him to wake drowsy princes, village girls on May morning reading one of his early tales aloud, mothers singing his lines to babies. Keats then turns on himself, wishing he could smother this mad ambition and be happier for it, though he admits a bright idea can relieve his pain for a whole day and that he loves knowing George reads his sonnets.
The close pins the letter to a place. He is lying on a bed of flowers on a high cliff over the ocean, oats on one side, poppies whose red reminds him of the "scarlet coats that pester human-kind", meaning soldiers, and on the other the sea streaked blue, purple and green. Keats himself was the eldest of four surviving children; George, born in 1797, was the next. He had trained as a surgeon's apprentice and at Guy's Hospital before choosing poetry, and died of tuberculosis at 25.
Source: Epistle to My Brother George
