Young Keats heard church bells and predicted they would fall silent
In a sonnet about Sunday bells, John Keats does something bold for his time. He calls the summons to prayer gloomy, pities the people who leave fireside music and good conversation to answer it, and consoles himself that the old creeds are dying out like a burnt-down lamp.
The poem is a fourteen-line sonnet in two movements. The first eight lines describe the bells tolling a melancholy round, calling people to more prayers, more gloom and more of the sermon's dreadful sound. Keats suggests the human mind must be caught in some blind spell, since everyone tears himself away from pleasures such as warm hearths, Lydian music and lofty talk about the famous and glorious.
The final six lines turn inward. The endless tolling would leave him with a damp chill, like air from a tomb, were it not for one conviction: the bells are sighing and wailing on their way into oblivion, and after them will come fresh flowers and many glories of immortal stamp. The sensuous consolation, blossoms and lasting beauty rather than doctrine, fits the richly sensual manner for which his odes are known.
Keats belonged to the second generation of Romantic poets, alongside Byron and Shelley, and his career was brutally short. Born in Moorgate, London, in 1795, he lost his father to a riding accident when he was eight and his mother to tuberculosis at fourteen. He then trained for five years with the surgeon and apothecary Thomas Hammond, and in October 1815 enrolled at Guy's Hospital, where he was quickly made a dresser, assisting surgeons in operations.
His poems were in print for under four years before tuberculosis killed him in 1821, aged 25, and they were received indifferently while he lived. After his death his reputation climbed fast; by the end of the century he was part of the English canon, and his medieval poems such as The Eve of St. Agnes shaped the Pre-Raphaelites.
Source: Written on a Summer Evening
