EIGHT
EIGHT
Mark was my best friend in college. The only friend, really, who remained a constant presence in my life long after graduation day. We were close right up to the time of his tragic death at the age of forty-four.
Mark and I didn’t really “get” each other until sophomore year, when he lived across the hall from me in an ancient, battle-scarred dorm at the center of the Amherst College campus. I say we didn’t “get” each other right away. In fact, as a freshman, Mark scared me. He was a kind of campus celebrity—charming, skillfully extroverted, handsome, and (at least I imagined, and he later denied) popular with the whole cross-section of Amherst society—from jocks to intellectuals. Remember: I had just trucked in from the cornfields of Ohio, and I was awed by the tony (and still all-male) world of Amherst College. I was much less well prepared—both socially and intellectually—than all those boys who had been to elite New England prep schools. I spent most of my waking time trying to just fit in. Mark didn’t have to try. He was in. He occupied center stage naturally and without pretense.
The headline of Mark’s obituary in The New York Times read, “Mark Stevenson, Actor.” But I always thought it should have said poet. He was a poet at heart. He dressed like a poet. Spoke like a poet. In fact, before we became friends I had heard around campus that Mark identified with the poet John Keats—and later, when we became close, he sometimes mused with me about his hunch that he might actually be a reincarnation of Keats. How exotic.
But who was John Keats, anyway, I thought. And who were these guys who at eighteen years of age were already so knee-deep in life that they could identify themselves with such a luminary? Of course, I had no idea who I was, or who I wanted to be. I tended to corral myself with the other freshmen who were also obviously at sea in this elite new world, and were quietly crying homesick tears into their pillows at night. (I could sniff out these boys: that deer-in-the-headlights look. This was my tribe in freshman year.)
It took me the whole of freshman year to stop holding my breath. When I arrived back at Amherst for sophomore year, everything looked different. I had had a construction job all summer. I had—miraculously—added almost an inch and a half of height since my first day at Amherst a year earlier. I was muscled and tan. I’ll never forget driving onto campus that fall. Amherst looked for the first time like a place I could call home. I was not going to just survive this year, I said to myself. I was going to thrive. And as I settled into my dorm room, there was Mark Stevenson—rooming right across the hall from me. My luck had turned. Mark and I became friends that very day. And throughout the fall, we got into the habit of taking long walks in the New England woods surrounding the village. We hiked the nearby Holyoke Range together. By late October we were sitting at the top of Memorial Hill late into the night, sharing our adolescent secrets.
I continued to watch Mark in awe. But now I watched him up close. I watched throughout the next three years, as he went on being more and more himself—passionate about his many pursuits, and not particularly caring what others thought of him. At some point—after he had pledged one of the most elite fraternities—he decided, apparently, to live like the John Keats he thought he might be. He decorated his room like that of an eighteenth-century lord, complete with suits of armor and tapestries (where on earth did he find them?). He called me Cope, as if we were scholars at Oxford. He created around him an aura of another world. To live with Mark was to live inside a great drama.
There are aspects of our lives that we can never fully understand without the perspective of age. When I was a graduate student, studying psychoanalytic psychotherapy, a mentor of mine said, “Psychoanalysis is to help the patient acknowledge, experience, and bear reality.” Yes, I thought. This made sense. But then he added a line that I did not really understand at the time: “And to put it all into perspective.” Acknowledge, experience, and bear reality. And put it into perspective. Much of the developmental work of middle and old age is precisely about putting experience into perspective—about understanding perhaps for the first time what one’s life really means.
Mark’s story has only come into perspective for me deep into middle age. In fact, I don’t think I ever fully appreciated Mark until I began to study the life of John Keats. As much as Mark had tried to educate me about Keats (oh, all that poetry he read aloud at night in our dorm room, and quoted by heart on our walks on the Holyoke Range), I never really got it. I realize now that one cannot understand Mark—or anyone—without understanding his exemplars, his mentors, his heroes.
In the last ten years, I have indulged a fascination with Keats. And, strangely perhaps, this has happened in large part as a result of my interest in the Bhagavad Gita. When I started studying the Gita, I just couldn’t get Keats out of my mind. Vague memories from college began to haunt me. And then I realized: Keats was a man who was in love with his dharma. The idea of dharma was the key to understanding Keats’s life!
At the age of eighteen, in 1813, John Keats discovered what he called his “vocation to poetry.” Keats—celebrating the miracle of finding his calling—wrote in an early attempt at a long poem, “O, for ten years, that I may overwhelm Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed That my own soul has to itself decreed.” I began to understand Mark’s fascination with this guy.
From the first moments of the discovery of his dharma, John Keats was aware of a willingness to let himself be “used” by his calling. “The genius of poetry,” he said at the tender age of nineteen, “must work out its own salvation in a man.” (Who understands these things at the age of nineteen?) Within six years of trying his hand at poetry, Keats would have written some of the most brilliant verse in the English language. Soon after that he would be dead.
Keats was living his dharma, to be sure. But it gets even more exciting than that. He independently discovered—out of necessity—the pillars of The Doctrine of Inaction in Action. He was letting himself be used by his dharma. He had stumbled onto the secret of “not the Doer” (a central principle of dharma that we will explore later on). In his very short but intense life, Keats had intuited many of the most central teachings of the Gita, and had put them to work for himself. His greatness is based on these very discoveries.
As I dug into Keats’s life, Mark’s story, too, began to haunt me. After graduate school, Mark had gone on to write a one-man play about Keats, entitled This Living Hand: A Visitation from John Keats, which he performed for many years in New York and around the United States and Europe. I wondered how deeply Mark himself—through his association with Keats—had wandered into dharma territory. Perhaps he, too, had really understood The Doctrine of Inaction in Action. This was an exciting thought for me: Perspective can at times bring exhilaration.
I rummaged around in my photo albums, and pulled out pictures of Mark—not only from college, but also from our many adventures together during our thirties and forties. I found a photo of Mark standing on a mammoth rock jutting out into the ocean in northern Rhode Island, taken while we were on a summer bicycling trip. His head is tossed back, his shoulder-length blond hair blowing in the ocean breeze. I hung the picture over my writing desk.
And then I realized it for the first time: Mark looked remarkably like Keats. I mean—astonishingly. Both were short of stature and compact—handsome, blond, with beautiful smiles and chiseled features. How could I have missed this? Joseph Severn, one of Keats’s closest friends, had once described Keats as seeming taller than his true height because of his erect bearing, and a “characteristic backward toss of the head.” I looked again at the picture: There it was in Mark. The backward toss of the head. Severn also described “a particularly dauntless expression, such as may be seen on the face of some seamen.” Mark, again. Reincarnation? Really?
Having gone this far, I knew that I had to know everything about Keats’s journey. I dug into biographies and collections of his poetry in search of his dharma story.
It’s easy to be put off while reading about great lives. We tend to read them backward, and inevitably to gild them in the process. We read Keats through the prism of his fame, his final few poems. But what happens if you read Keats’s life forward—the way it actually unfolded?
Read this way, Keats is a much more interesting character. He’s courageous. He’s tragic. He died at twenty-five—penniless and almost entirely alone in a foreign land—of a ravaging and wasting disease. He and his work were mostly unknown when he died. By the time of his death, he had published only a few slim volumes of poetry—much of which was really not that good—but some of which was the most phenomenal and daring verse yet to be written in English.
Keats and his friends and associates alike all assumed he had died without realizing his potential. And yet. Read his story, and you will see that he did bring forth what was within him. Not in great volumes, but in marvelous intensity. Poetry had, finally, saved John Keats. Just as the Civil War had saved Walt Whitman. Just as painting landscapes had saved Camille Corot. And did Mark’s writing save him?—I wondered as I sniffed out Keats.
Keats did not achieve fame until many decades after his death. Indeed, it would be a century after his death before his reputation was really established. I don’t expect Mark to achieve fame—or at least any more than he already has. But that is not the point. Did Mark, in his short life, have a fulfilling experience of bringing forth what was within him? Did Keats’s lessons help Mark live an exuberantly full life? Had Mark already learned—through Keats—what I am only learning now? And had Mark actually tried to share with me, even as an undergraduate, his excitement about dharma?
3
After studying Keats’s life closely for many years, Keats’s biographer, Aileen Ward, concluded that “He was not one of those rare poets who are born, not made. He lacked the endowments or opportunities with which the other great poets of his time started … He was to rise above his own narrow background by stubborn ambition and hard work, making himself a poet by studying the best examples of poetry he could find and absorbing what he could from them.”
Stubborn ambition and hard work. Just like the rest of us. Not a genius. A product, rather, of deliberate practice. Keats’s story is one of strong determination. It is a story of desire for the realization of dharma. And, most important for our purposes now, it is the story of the transmutation of this desire into aspiration, of the transmutation of desire into determined action, and finally into realization. Keats’s self-realization required effort, yes—but a particular kind of effort. Precisely the kind that Krishna prescribes to Arjuna: “Do your dharma passionately, but let go of the fruits.” This is, for me, where the story of Keats’s life becomes truly exemplary.
4
John Keats was born in London to a working-class family. He had an apparently happy childhood. But disaster struck in his early teens. His father died in a riding accident at the slim age of thirty, and his mother died not long afterward at age thirty-six—when Keats was only fourteen—succumbing to what Keats would later call the “family disease”—tuberculosis.
Much of Keats’s poetry seems to have been an attempt to work through the almost unbearable losses of his early life. From its rough beginnings, his poetry is saturated with a sense of the fragility of life and love—and the transience of beauty. He wrote repeatedly about
and joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh
turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips.
A quality of “paradise lost” saturates much of Keats’s greatest poetry. In his work—as in his life—beauty and happiness appear as unearthly visitors, inevitably evaporating as quickly as they came, leaving him bereft on the empty shores of life.
From childhood onward throughout his short life, Keats had to grapple with the realities of impermanence—the realities so often emphasized by Krishna in his long talks with Arjuna. Keats discovered early on that he could hold on to nothing. And so his koan—the central question of his life—became how to live life fully without holding on to it. How to have it without possessing it. “Kiss the joy as it flies,” says William Blake. In order to become a great poet, Keats would have to work through the problem of grasping. The evidence that he finally did learn to live in the stream of impermanence is written—at his instruction—on his very tombstone: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”
Precisely how Keats used poetry to work through this great existential problem—the problem of grasping—is for me an endlessly compelling story. He worked it all out through words.
As I have said, Keats’s mother died a gruesome death when he was only fourteen. This appalling event turned young Keats into a voracious reader. Through books he absorbed himself in the world of great men and daring deeds—the worlds of Julius Caesar and Brutus and of William Tell and William Wallace. Early on, one can see Keats’s attempts to master his difficult circumstances through imagination. Even at the age of fourteen he was beginning to gather together the skills of the poet. (“Poetry,” Cyril Connolly has said, “comes from the ferment of an unhappy childhood working through a noble imagination.”)
Soon, into his fifteen-year-old life, came the next essential ingredient of a great poet: a mentor. Keats’s world was vastly expanded when he met the most important friend of his youth: Charles Cowden Clarke. Clarke, just eight years older than Keats, was the son of the headmaster of Keats’s school, and he was an extraordinarily bright and generous friend to Keats. Clarke noticed that Keats seemed to devour books rather than read them, and he took an interest in this handsome, lively, and engaged boy. He introduced Keats to Chaucer and Shakespeare and Spenser, and challenged him in vigorous debate about the issues of the day.
Keats responded well to Clarke’s interest. His imagination and intellect came alive. The stories of their friendship—later told by Clarke—are compelling. At the drop of a hat, the two friends would walk the fifteen miles to London to see their favorite actor, John Kemble, on stage in Shakespeare’s plays, and then walk back, arriving home at dawn, having talked through the entire night.
Keats was a sensitive boy, and particularly sensitive to beauty. Clarke helped wake in him a latent love of nature, during what would become long, thoughtful walks in the countryside around the school. English poets, it seems, are forever walking. From Wordsworth to Auden. And as I read the stories of Keats becoming a walker, I could not but think of my walks with Mark in the hills around Amherst. We walked constantly, vigorously, in all seasons, but almost always talking as we went, about literature, music, art, love, life’s vicissitudes.
5
Keats had little interest in poetry until he was almost eighteen. One afternoon, probably in the summer of 1813, Clarke read Edmund Spenser’s “Epithalamion” aloud to Keats, and as he was reading, Clarke looked up to see Keats’s face positively “alight with pleasure.”
The encounter with Spenser’s poems was a turning point. That night Keats went home with the first volume of The Faerie Queene. The next time they met, Clarke “discovered that he had gone through the book like a young horse through a spring meadow, ramping.” By Clarke’s account, it was as though Keats had fallen deeply in love—overnight.
The first encounter with dharma is very often described as falling in love. When we see our dharma—smell it, feel it—we recognize it. It is chemical. Undeniable. Keats was smitten. At the beginning, he did not have any apparent genius for poetry. Just a love of it. And he knew—in the way that we know these things—that poetry was just the right vessel for him. Clarke introduced Keats to the principles of poetry as they had been held in England for the previous hundred years, and together, Clarke and Keats began to read the standard authors, from Milton to Gray. In his spare time, Keats began to write poetry, though he withheld his early efforts even from his mentor until much later.
Keats was, like most of us—like Arjuna—full of doubt about the viability of his dharma. Throughout his teens, he was almost constantly involved in an inner struggle around his identity. In an attempt to develop a practical career, he apprenticed to an apothecary, determined to move toward the medical profession. He felt keenly the need to make his way in the world. He was bright enough to succeed in medicine. And he was determined to do some good for the world. Early on in his apprenticeship, indeed, he did rise to the top of the field, and he was given prized positions among his peers.
But from the start, Keats was conflicted about medicine. In fact, this doctor in training was sickened by the very sight of illness. He had never recovered from seeing his mother’s slow death from tuberculosis. As a result, he overidentified with his patients and their suffering. He likely would have been a very unhappy physician.
With the discovery of poetry, Keats’s interest in medicine began to wane. He cut classes. And when he did go to class, he sat absorbed in the working out of a poetic image or the structure of a sonnet. Some of his classmates later described him as lazy, as indolent—and as a dreamer. They had no idea what he was working out in his notebooks.
For several years, Keats wrestled intensely with his doubt. His choice was between a mainstream career—with its imagined security, money, and position—and the never-really-acceptable life of the poet. He saw clearly enough that to be a poet is to live on the edge. No security in that life.
By his eighteenth year, Keats had worked through much of his ambivalence: He resolved to become a poet. His desire first showed itself as a burning ambition. He wanted to be, as he said, among the first of the English poets. His ambition at this time was so great that he reportedly told his brothers that if he did not succeed he would kill himself. Keats told his friend Henry Stephens that poetry was “the only thing worthy of the attention of superior minds,” and that to rank among the poets was the chief object of his ambition. He threw himself into poetry with the energy almost of despair.
Sometime in 1816, when he was about twenty years old, Keats began to intentionally take on the look of the poet. He appeared with his neck nearly bare, like the then-fashionable poet Lord Byron. He took to wearing loose trousers like a sailor’s and a short seaman’s jacket (also Byronic). He let his own thick curls grow long, and experimented with a series of mustaches. Keats was posing as a poet. This is what we do in the early stages of finding our dharma. We try it on. As W. H. Auden noted, “human beings are by nature actors who cannot become something until they have first pretended to be it.”
Keats was on fire with his dharma. “I find that I cannot exist without Poetry,” he said. “Half the day will not do.” His early enthusiasm for dharma is expressed in a long, rambling, and ecstatic poem called “Sleep and Poetry.” One night, after a languorous dinner party during which the talk was of nothing but poetry, Keats was too excited to sleep. Lying in bed, he had a waking dream of his own destiny. His vision expanded to a vision of his own future as a poet—and not only that, but to the past of English poetry and his intersection with it. He allowed himself to feel his kinship with Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton.
This turned out to be a pivotal moment in Keats’s dharma story. It marked his discovery of his own artistic lineage—and most important, his connection with William Shakespeare. Just as one cannot really understand Mark without understanding Keats, one cannot understand Keats without knowing Shakespeare. From the days of his romps with Charles Cowden Clarke, Keats had been devoted to the Bard, but now his interest and affinity deepened. He put up a picture of Shakespeare over his writing desk, and it would remain there for the rest of his life. He now found new meaning in line after line of Shakespeare. He reread the plays and the sonnets. He copied out the sonnets and emulated them in his own writing.
This move toward Shakespeare is central in Keats’s dharma story. Every one of us who takes his dharma seriously will search for exemplars. On fire with our own dharma, we sniff out others who are working in the same dharma gold mine as we. Jane Goodall sniffed it out in Louis Leakey, her famous mentor. Susan B. Anthony in Charlotte Brontë, whose pictures, as I have said, hung over her bureau until her death. Beethoven, as we will see, found it in Bach.
What role do these exemplars play? We see in them the full expression of a kindred dharma. We see in them the full flower of what we know exists as a seed within our own self. These exemplars become essential doorways for us into our own dharma. They become transitional objects. We read them, study them, take them apart and put them back together again, just as Keats did with Shakespeare. We ingest them. And eventually, through them, we are awakened to our own idiosyncratic genius, just as Arjuna is eventually awakened to his dharma through his relationship with his exemplar, Krishna.
We cannot really understand another human being without understanding his dharma story. And we cannot understand his dharma story without grasping the importance of his dharma mentors. The more I dug into Keats, the more I discovered that one cannot understand Keats without understanding Shakespeare. Mark apparently discovered the same thing. His second major play would be about Shakespeare.
8
Keats’s desire to express himself—fueled by his increasing identification with Shakespeare—was now at the flood. It was at this moment that he declared: “O for ten years, that I may overwhelm Myself in poesy;” He feared, of course, that his life would not be long enough to realize his “genius.” Remember his history: His father died at thirty, his mother at thirty-six. From his point of view, even a decade seemed a lot to ask.
But Keats now took the next necessary step. He dove headlong into the phase of mastery that we have called deliberate practice. His early writing was mediocre. But he discovered that if he persevered, every now and then some truly fine poetry would emerge. It did not come easily. But he found within himself a quality of strong determination that allowed him to persevere. He worked hard. He wrote daily—as he said, always groping for the noble chiseled line.
Keats now entered into his famous competition with English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, his rival and peer, who had already begun to make a name for himself in poetic circles. Shelley challenged both Keats and himself to write a long narrative poem—of 4,000 lines. The terms of the challenge? The poem must be completed in six months—a formidable task for a young and untried poet.
When Keats decided to commit himself to Shelley’s challenge, he had no idea whether he could actually accomplish such a deed. But he decided to bring everything he had to the task. This was his first taste of true “unity in action.” He would organize all of his energies in the service of this challenge. In the face of this undertaking, he finally and completely gave up medicine. He did not take the final exam for his apothecary license. This was a key moment, because Keats showed that he was willing to risk failure. He was willing to let his dreams of glory die, and actually take on the work—to succeed, or as he said, to be exposed as a fraud.
He realized that there was no way to discover whether he could write a long poem but to try. “I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest,” he said. This moment marked the beginning of a shift in Keats’s views about fame. He began to see its deleterious effects. “There is no greater sin after the seven deadly than to flatter oneself into an idea of being a great Poet,” he wrote to his brother. He realized what he would later call the folly of self-congratulations and lusting after fame—the folly of his early fascination with the laurel crowning.
Keats now headed off to the Isle of Wight, so that he could work uninterruptedly. He spent at least eight hours a day reading and writing. During this period he became for the first time a truly disciplined writer. And he began to examine his writing process—his own motivations and the ecology of his work and energy. He looked critically at his own output. He was writing massive amounts of poetry. But was it good? At one point, during a period of three weeks he wrote well over a thousand lines of poetry, without flagging. And yet, he was not satisfied with the work. He saw that he was writing in the spirit of cramming. In the spirit of greed. “A clenched fist was at work,” he said.
Keats mentions this insight in a letter to his brother George. “The high idea I have of poetical fame makes me think I see it towering too high above me.” He compared it to an attempt to scale the White Cliffs of Dover, and called it “the Cliff of Poesy.” He slowly began to see how his own longing and craving for success may have been undermining the quality of his work. Certainly, he saw how his craving for fame and “laurels” created a kind of anxiety that infected his work. (“Those who are motivated only by the fruits of action,” teaches Krishna, “are miserable!” Miserable! “They are constantly anxious about the results of what they do.”)
Keats, in a brilliant intuitive move, now attempted to work out the problem of grasping through the protagonist of the poem he was writing. He has his main character—Endymion—face the challenge of failure in his quest. And how does Endymion work it out? He enters what Keats called “the Cave of Quietude,” a retreat into the depths of consciousness. In quiet retreat and contemplation, Endymion realizes that success and failure are not the measure of life. He sees the way in which both light and shade, success and failure, and praise and blame, are all parts of life. He sees, even, the ways in which beauty can be revealed through sorrow, and through life’s losses. He decides to choose complete surrender to the endless richness of the moment, whatever the moment brings. He decides to embrace both sides of life—the light and the shadow. This was a pivotal moment in the development of Keats’s creative consciousness.
9
Keats finished Endymion at the age of twenty-one, on November 28, 1817. It was a triumph for the young poet. Not because it was a great poem. It was not. But because of what it had taught him. Keats would later say, famously, that life is the “vale of Soul-making” and his experience of Endymion was a soul-maker for him. Endymion made Keats a poet, for he realized that real fulfillment was not about the approbation of critics, but rather came naturally through the experience of bringing forth the best that was in him. It was not the poem’s success or failure in the eyes of others that created fulfillment for the poet.
Endymion—this one poem—represents almost half of the poetry Keats published in his short lifetime. Its writing occupied him through nearly one-quarter of his poetic career. And it was not, as I have said, an outward success. But it was an inward success. He realized that his having written it mattered more than what he had written. It was the process of bringing everything he had to the table that transformed him.
In the process of his deliberate practice, Keats had had moments of exhilaration. At regular moments during his work, he had experienced a surrender to some greater power. He would later say, “That which is creative must create itself.” He discovered, as all great artists do, that there was something impersonal at work. Something at work that was not him. And to surrender to this larger force gave him a new kind of freedom, and a new sense of faith in the process itself.
He realized (just as Krishna taught Arjuna) that he was not the Doer. That which is creative must create itself. Mastery of his art required humility and a capacity for surrender—a receptivity to experience, and to sorrow as well as joy. Having tasted this himself, he saw that this was the very essence of Shakespeare’s greatness. (And after Endymion his sense of oneness with Shakespeare increased.) He saw that the “immortality” that is gained in the creation of great art is not immortality in anyone else’s eyes, but a transcendence of time through the outpouring of the soul’s possibility. Indeed, he discovered, as did Shakespeare, that throwing oneself passionately into work brings a changed relationship with time. This was true immortality.
10
With this came a first glimpse, for Keats, of a sublime truth. He realized that the most precious fruit of his art would be the way it allowed him access to the innermost character of a person or thing. He saw that poetry was merely a vehicle—a way to know the world. A way to know the soul of a person, a landscape, or any object of beauty. He realized that he did not need to possess any of it. He only needed to know it. And this knowing was what brought not just happiness, but bliss, rapture, and authentic fulfillment.
The question he had been asking—“Wherein lies happiness?”—now had its best answer. “A fellowship with essence!!!” he would exclaim. With this insight, Keats had solved the central riddle of his life: how to have a full experience of life without possessing it—without owning it, without grasping it, without holding on to it.
Hard upon the heels of this discovery came another: Grasping for an object actually interferes with knowing it. The discovery that holding on too tightly disturbs the mind, and finally interferes with the mind’s capacity to know. This is, of course, the very insight that Krishna teaches to Arjuna.
And so emerged the insight for which Keats is best known by generations of college students: his theory of Negative Capability. He had this remarkable insight on a walk—his favorite time for reflecting—and wrote it down later in a letter to his brother: “Several things dovetailed in my mind,” he wrote excitedly to his brother George, “and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” This Negative Capability also seems to require the capacity for surrender, and the capacity, as Keats said, to “annul the self.”
Keats found these insights exhilarating—freeing. “Let us open our leaves like a flower and be passive and receptive—sap will be given us for Meat and dew for drink—I was led into these thoughts … by the beauty of the morning operating on a sense of Idleness …”
Keats’s poetic consciousness now began to move beyond what the contemplative traditions often call the pairs of opposites: gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and ill-repute. He saw how the poet must be open to all experience, light and dark. He saw the importance of leisure, as Frost did. And he began to learn to wait patiently for a gradual ripening.
Observes Aileen Ward: “A year or two earlier he had described the writing of poetry in terms of a journey, a battle, a cliff to be scaled. Now he saw it in images of grain ripening, of wine aging, of the sun rising and setting, the flower which must drink the nature of the soil before it can put forth its blossoming.”
Keats now began to formulate his description of the greatest poetic virtue—what he would come to call “disinterestedness.” “To bear all naked truths, and to envisage circumstance, all calm,” he wrote in “Hyperion.” “That is the top of sovereignty.” Keats had rediscovered the soul of Krishna’s teaching.
In his attempt to put all of this into words, John Keats wrote two sonnets on fame. In the first, he states that fame comes only to the man who has learned to be indifferent to it. In the second, he calls fame “a fierce miscreed” of salvation, and he turns away from his earlier feverish grasping for success toward less aggressive images of unforced growth—toward the gradual unfolding of life that he now perceives to be in the natural order of things. He begins to use images of ripening. “If Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree,” he wrote, “it had better not come at all.”
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Now Keats’s most mature poetry pours forth. This outpouring must remind us of Thoreau at Walden, after he let go of his grasping for fame and success. Keats, quite aware of his own transformation, writes about it with uncharacteristic understatement: “I think a little change has taken place in my intellect lately.”
Keats declared that he would henceforth write “not for Fame and Laurel, but from the mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful even if my night’s labours should be burnt every morning and no eye ever shine upon them.” Ward captures the moment perfectly: “Being a poet, he now realized, was no glorious thing in itself but merely a fact of his own nature. What alone mattered was the activity of writing, the kingdom of his own creation which he entered every time he sat down to work. Beside this solitary delight the world’s applause or contempt meant nothing.”
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This far into Keats’s story, I was stunned by the growing realization that even as an undergraduate Mark Stevenson had fully understood the meaning of Keats’s transformation. I remembered, in fact, that Mark had struggled to communicate all of this to me—in those long talks on Memorial Hill, and later as we walked in the woods near my house in Boston. He had tried to tell me about Negative Capability. He had tried to tell me how strangely close he felt to Keats—and later to Shakespeare.
He had tried to tell me how he felt a call to communicate Keats’s truth to the current generation, and how lonely it was to have a vocation so few understood or valued.
As I gazed at Mark’s picture over my writing desk one morning—with all of these thoughts swirling—I had an idea: Call his mother. Call Dorothy! I hadn’t spoken with her since he died—sixteen years earlier. I dialed the number in my old address book. To my astonishment, she picked up the phone. There she was! She must be well into her eighties, I thought. But she sounded well, and completely on top of things as always.
Dorothy caught me up: Her husband, Robert, had died. She had sold the family home and now lived in an assisted-care community. We talked about Mark. About his play. About his last, difficult year. I told her about the book I was writing, about my rediscovery of the meaning of Mark’s work, and about the Bhagavad Gita.
I asked Dorothy if she had a copy of the manuscript of This Living Hand.
“Yes! I’m pretty sure I’ve got it packed away somewhere. I’ll find it for you.”
A week later, there it was on my doorstep with the mail. It was the original manuscript of This Living Hand, typed out on a manual typewriter in the early 1970s, with copious cross-outs and notes written in Mark’s elegant hand. It all came rushing back.
Dorothy gave me the phone number of her eldest surviving son, John, and I called him as well. We talked at length about Mark. What was Mark’s relationship to Keats? What about this old notion that Mark was a reincarnation of Keats? John had clearly thought about these issues.
“We often spoke about his feelings regarding this possibility [of reincarnation],” John wrote to me after our chat. “I do remember a distinct time when he wrestled with this notion, a restless period that ended with his acceptance of what he called ‘the spirit of Keats.’ This point is supported by two clear examples from Mark’s life. First, he told me of his experiences in feeling—and once seeing—Keats’s spirit at his house in England and also at his grave in Rome. Neither experience frightened Mark, but rather gave him a sense of calm and joy to be alive and carrying out his dreams of finishing the play and working to improve each scene—much like Keats’s own dedication to his poetry. In either case, what happened to Mark was much more than an inspiring moment; I think these occurrences had a lasting effect, and became part of the mysticism of Mark’s life forward. He was never afraid of these experiences; they gave him comfort, like meeting up with a long-lost friend who returned for a brief visit.”
I had never thought of Mark as a mystic. At no time during our years of friendship did we have that word in our vocabulary. But, of course, it does describe him.
John’s letter, too, reminded me of the years, after Mark finished graduate school in Texas, when he was working on This Living Hand. I saw now that these were his years of deliberate practice. He wrote and rewrote the scenes. He worked on the dialogue with a coach. He put it through many trial runs in front of live audiences, and then went through weeks or months of driven rewriting. The play went through countless iterations—and I really think that Mark was revising and improving it until he died.
In an attempt to befriend the spirit of John Keats, Mark frequently traveled to England and Rome, to walk in the places where Keats had walked. I realized that these were all part of Mark’s efforts to know the object of his work—what Keats himself would call “knowing the essence.” There must have been fulfillment for Mark in this process. It’s clear to me now that Mark absorbed himself in the life and mind of this great poet—until Mark himself disappeared.
I remembered that I had actually witnessed this absorption—this disappearance—when watching his play. John had seen the same thing, and wrote about it in his letter. “I got to see Mark on stage performing This Living Hand twice during his college/school tours through Michigan and Ohio,” he wrote. “On both occasions I witnessed the character transformation—from my brother Mark to the person of John Keats. I still wonder at Mark’s ability to achieve this early in the show and sustain the show by being Keats—not performing as an actor. That ability, that presence, made the show what it was and no other actor could accomplish the same outcome with Mark’s play.”
It made me happy to hear John say this. Mark had indeed been fully engaged in the work of the poet, the playwright. He had mastered the skills required to produce this magical transformation. And I knew that this mastery itself must have brought him a sense of fulfillment. It was his dharma. He was pursuing it with everything he had.
Twenty years after his death, I understood for the first time the sacrifice that Mark had made for his art. I grasped the meaning of those years of waiting tables and living in a tiny Manhattan apartment. It all made sense, though Mark himself wrestled with his doubts about this sacrifice from time to time. He talked about inevitable comparisons between the trajectory of his life and that of his many Amherst peers who went on to more mainstream lives—and the rewards of money and respectability.
Mark had thought of himself as a vehicle for his work. He found his calling, and dived in utterly. I think, too, that at some point he had really let go of the outcome. He understood that he was not the Doer. Can there be a more exciting life?
13
At the age of twenty-one, Keats had a premonition of his own death. He came to believe that he had only three more years—“one thousand days,” as he said at the time—to realize his gifts.
His premonition was not far off. By the time he was twenty-three, Keats had clearly contracted tuberculosis. All the symptoms were there, and from the Fall of 1818, he continually complained of them: pressure in the chest, coughing, an ever-present sore throat, colds that would not go away, fatigue, and night sweats.
But the shift in consciousness that had taken place through his fierce pursuit of poetry allowed him to face illness and even impending death. He was committed now, “to bear all naked truths, and to envisage circumstance, all calm,” he wrote.
Keats began to frame death in an altogether new way. He saw death as “the supreme experience—Life’s high meed.” While heretofore he had tried to keep out the “disagreeables,” he now saw that they had to be fully admitted in. And now, in “admitting in” even death—the great disagreeable—he was expanded and freed.
This reframing of death is his final embrace of “the world as the vale of Soul-making.” “Do you not see,” he wrote to George, “how necessary a world of pain and troubles is to school an intelligence, and make it a soul? This school is a place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!”
14
The final year of Keats’s life is often written about as a miracle of creativity. But it is really no miracle. It is only the natural fruition of the process of transformation in which Keats had already been engaged for many years. In the spring of 1818, Keats walked daily on the heath with the now-famous young beauty Fanny Brawne—with whom he was passionately in love. During these months—months almost lifted from time—Keats’s most astonishing poetry poured forth. These were the months during which he wrote the so-called “Four Odes of May”—On Indolence, On a Grecian Urn, To a Nightingale, and On Melancholy—which would forever seal his reputation. In these odes Keats reached his own ripeness as a poet. “For these few weeks,” says Ward, “he stood at a point of perfect balance, confident in his ability to meet the future, able to contemplate his past with calm, and rejoicing in the beauty of the season, the joy of an answered love, the delight of a mastered craft—the themes of the odes as well as his incentives to writing them.”
During these months of creative exuberance, Keats became an uncharacteristically solitary creature, save for his walks with Fanny. Already sick, and chronically weak and fatigued, he found great relief in quiet, solitary days—days spent writing and studying Italian. He was in love with his work, and fully absorbed in it: “I look upon fine phrases like a lover,” he wrote. “Poetry is all I care for, all I live for.”
What emerged, finally, in these months lifted from time, was his most astonishing poem: “To Autumn.” This is sometimes called the most perfect poem in the English language. Keats called it simply, “Verse that comes not out of the fever of ambition.”
To Autumn
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimmed’d their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue:
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river shallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing: and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
The poem was a quiet triumph. In this poem, Keats’s personality is finally completely out of the way—utterly lost and absorbed in his images. He has here achieved the effortlessness that Robert Frost describes when he declares that “a poem should ride on its own melting.” “To Autumn” was a poem that wrote itself. Creativity creating itself! Keats is now at one with the world.
As it turned out, “To Autumn” was a gesture of farewell. Within months, Keats would be assured of his impending death.
15
After a bone-chilling coach ride from London (on an outer seat, because the impoverished poet could not afford to sit inside), Keats arrived home seriously ill, flushed and trembling. He climbed the stairs to his room, and as he got into bed a fit of coughing seized him. His friend Charles Brown, who was following him up the stairs with a glass of wine, heard him gasp. Blood was oozing from his lips.
Brown found Keats sitting up in bed, examining the bright red spot on the white sheet. Then, according to Brown’s account, Keats looked very steadily up into his friend’s face, and said, “I know the colour of that blood. It’s arterial blood. There’s no mistaking that colour.” As calmly as he could, he added, “That blood is my death-warrant. I must die.”
16
In the Fall of 1993, Mark and I went back to Amherst College for Homecoming. I knew that Mark had been sick for some time. But I had never yet really seen him obviously ailing. Now he was clearly ill. He was pale. His face looked strained. He had lost weight.
Still, his mood was exuberant, and he was buoyed by being back at “the fairest college.” So I was stunned when, just as we walked onto the campus, he sprinted to a sewer drain in the parking lot and threw up several times—violently. He didn’t want to talk about it. We just moved on—walking across the campus, kicking through piles of oak leaves, toward the soccer fields, where we would meet some old friends.
Later that afternoon, Mark and I sat again on Memorial Hill—as the skies turned red with the sunset and the throngs of alums moved toward their dorms to prepare for dinner. I looked closely at Mark. I could see the suffering written on his face. But his exuberance was there as well. There was the regal tilt of the head. The impish grin. Mark was in a mood to reflect on his life. He was glad he had written his plays. They were the chief satisfaction of his life. His many sacrifices for his art had been good and right. “Austen called her books her children,” he said. “I know exactly how she felt.”
Mark talked about the struggle involved in writing. “I know I’m not a brilliant playwright,” he said. “I’m not a natural, really. It didn’t come easy. But it was my work to do.”
He said, “You know, Keats sometimes wondered about where his poetry came from—marveled at it really. I’ve felt the same way about my own work so many times.” And then he quoted a line from Keats I had not heard: “many a verse from so strange an influence / That we must ever wonder how, and whence It came.”
We looked together—and for the last time—out over the expansive view of the Holyoke Range in the distance. Mark talked jokingly about his withering body. He had never really had more than a modest amount of physical vanity. He talked about how Keats had observed the terrifyingly rapid decline of his own body. And Mark reminded me that Keats had become obsessed with the look of his hands as he failed.
It provoked a question. I had never understood why Mark had quoted the whole of Keats’s poem “This Living Hand” at the end of his play—or why, in fact, he used that line—out of all the fantastic lines he had to choose from—as his title.
“It was ironic,” Mark said. He thought for a moment, looking out at the mountains in the distance. Mark spoke deliberately as he finished his thought. “Keats always had the sense that his greatest poems came from somewhere beyond him. That he was just the channel for them. And his life’s work was to prepare himself to channel these poems. At the end, of course, he was full of despair that he had not fulfilled his destiny. His hand was withering. And yet ‘this living hand’ had written some of the finest poetry in the English language. This living hand, though dying, was now immortal. Through his art, he had conquered time.”