A birthday sonnet for Tom Keats, written by firelight while his brother hunted rhymes
Coals crackle in the grate like whispering household gods, one brother reads, and John Keats searches for rhymes. It is Tom's birthday, and the poet asks only for many more quiet evenings like this one. Tom, born in 1799, would die in 1818, which makes the sonnet's hope painful to read.
The scene is domestic and hushed. Small flames flicker through freshly laid coals, and their faint crackling drifts over the brothers' silence. Keats compares the sound to the murmurs of household gods, guardian spirits who hold a mild rule over souls bound by kinship. The fire becomes a family shrine.
Each brother has his own evening task. The poet admits he is roaming the ends of the earth for rhymes, while his brothers' eyes are fixed on a book, sunk in what he calls a poetic sleep. That fluent, profound reading, he says, is what soothes their worries every night. Poetry is present twice over: one brother writing it, the others absorbed in it.
The sestet names the occasion. It is Tom's birthday, and Keats is glad it is slipping by so smoothly. He hopes for many more such evenings of gentle murmuring, spent together testing what the world's true pleasures are, before a great Voice calls their spirits away from its fair face. The ending gives a cosy poem an undertow of mortality.
At the time Keats was on course to be a doctor. After a five-year apprenticeship with the surgeon-apothecary Thomas Hammond, he registered at Guy's Hospital in October 1815 and within a month became a dresser, assisting at operations, roughly a junior house surgeon. He lodged with other students at 28 St Thomas's Street in Southwark. Money worried him constantly: an £800 bequest from his grandfather John Jennings seems never to have been mentioned to him, though the family solicitor William Walton knew of it.
Source: PoetryDB — To My Brothers · Public domain (GB: author died 1821, life+70 expired; US: author died 1821, so every lifetime publication is from 1930 or earlier)
