10 - Late poems & lasting Keats

Summary

Late poems

Keats lived what he called a “posthumous existence” – not just in his sad last days in Rome but under such a shadow from early years on that even first poems come across as late-minded. A sonnet from January 1817, beginning “AFTER dark vapors have oppress'd our plains / For a long dreary season, comes a day / Born of the gentle SOUTH,” concludes its sweet catalogue of vernal promise with “a Poet's death.” In another untitled sonnet, written as he was finishing Endymion (31 January 1818), Keats renders that peculiar genre of pre-posthumous epitaph:

When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,

Before high piled Books, in charactery,

Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain—

When I behold upon the night's starr'd face,

Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

And think that I may never live to trace

Their shadows with the magic hand of chance:

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,

That I shall never look upon thee more,

Never have relish in the fairy power

Of unreflecting Love: then on the Shore

Of the wide world I stand alone and think

Till Love and Fame to Nothingness do sink.—

(K 97)

The sonnet is imprinted with the temporal urgencies of Shakespeare's Sonnet XII (“When I do count the clock that tells the time”) and the echo in Milton's Sonnet XVI (“When I consider how my light is spent”), both fated for a reckoning volta (turn). But Shakespeare turns the count outward (“Then of thy beauty do I question make”), and Milton's When cues “patience to prevent / That murmur” (but not before seven lines).