Keats envied a winter tree because it cannot remember summer
In this lyric John Keats calls a bare December tree and an icy brook too happy, happy, because neither remembers the warmth it has lost. People are not so lucky. The final stanza admits that feeling the absence of joy, with nothing to heal or numb it, has never been put into rhyme.
The poem is built from three matching stanzas, each opening or turning on the same pattern. First comes the tree in drear-nighted December. Its branches have no memory of their green felicity, so the north wind's sleety whistle cannot hurt them, and frost will not stop them budding when spring arrives. The second stanza gives the brook the same gift. It has forgotten Apollo's summer look, the sun god standing in for the warm season, and keeps up its crystal fretting without ever sulking about the frozen time.
The third stanza breaks the spell. Keats wishes it were the same for many a gentle girl and boy, then asks whether anyone ever lived who did not writhe at a joy gone by. His closing lines name the real pain: "The feel of not to feel it", the ache of missing happiness when no cure and no numbness is on offer. That sensation, he claims, was never said in rhyme, though of course the poem has just said it. The heavy internal rhymes, forgetting with fretting and petting, give the music a lulling sweetness that contrasts with the sting at the end.
Keats knew loss early. Born in Moorgate, London, on 31 October 1795, he was the eldest of four surviving children. His father died in April 1804 after a fall from his horse, and his mother died of tuberculosis in March 1810, when he was 14. The children lived with their grandmother Alice Jennings in Edmonton, under two guardians, and that autumn he left John Clarke's school in Enfield to train with a surgeon and apothecary.
Poetry won out over medicine, but only briefly. His poems had been in print for less than four years when tuberculosis killed him at 25, in February 1821. Lukewarm reviews in life gave way to rapid fame, and by the end of the century he was firmly in the English canon.
Source: In Drear-Nighted December
