Keats envied winter trees because they cannot remember summer
A bare tree in a bleak December does not mourn its lost leaves, and a frozen brook does not pine for the summer sun. In his short lyric Stanzas, John Keats calls them lucky. People, he says, are cursed with memory, and the ache of a joy that has gone is almost never put into verse.
The poem has three eight-line stanzas, and the first two share a pattern. Each opens with the same dreary December night, addresses a piece of nature as too happy, and praises its forgetfulness. The tree's branches never recall their green contentment; northern winds whistling sleet through them cannot harm them, and frozen thaws cannot stop them budding again when spring returns.
The brook gets the same treatment. Its bubbling water keeps no memory of the summer god Apollo's warm gaze, and thanks to what Keats calls a sweet forgetting, it stills its restless glittering without ever sulking about the freeze. Nature, in this picture, lives entirely in the present season, sheltered from regret by its own blankness.
The third stanza turns to people with a sigh: if only the same were true of many a gentle girl and boy. Keats doubts anyone has ever lived who did not twist in pain over pleasure that had passed. The worst of it, he suggests, is knowing the change and feeling it, with nothing to cure the hurt and no numbness to dull it. His closing claim is that this particular misery "Was never said in rhyme," a neat irony, since he has just rhymed it.
Keats knew loss early. Born in Moorgate, London, on 31 October 1795, the eldest of four surviving children of Thomas and Frances Keats, he grew up partly at the Swan and Hoop Inn, which his father managed for his grandfather John Jennings. He died of tuberculosis at 25 in February 1821, having published poems for less than four years. They met a lukewarm reception in his lifetime, yet by the end of that century he had entered the English canon.
Source: Stanzas
