Corona Virus - When I have fears by John Keats

Hello ATS friends,

In these uncertain and stressful times, I would like to provide a classical interlude. The following poem by John Keats has given me food for thought and solace, notwithstanding its gloomy nature. I was going to post this in the Corona Virus Updates #5 thread, but it would have been too off-topic. So here it is, my first ATS topic (who would've thought).

What makes this poem particularly poignant for me is that John Keats, an English Poet, died in Rome, Italy in 1821, at the tender age of 25 from tuberculosis, a bacterial disease that affects the lungs, much like the dreaded Corona Virus.

When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be

By JOHN KEATS

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starred 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 faery 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.

Stay well, stay safe.

thank you...I'll just go read it again slower....

the first line......then apply the magic hand of chance on symbols of....high romance.....

dude

Thank you. I really like Keats.
I was just going through some boxes of old books and found a long-lost Sara Teasdale book of poems.

a reply to: Encia22
Thank you for posting this.
I will add that the poem is a sonnet, with a precisely patterned format and rhyme scheme. Best appreciated when read aloud.

(On a minor detail, the Spanish flu was a century later)

The Second Coming
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

There's this one, as well:

The Peace of Wild Things
Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

a reply to: Encia22

Beautiful, thanks for sharing.

Death is what’s on my mind

THE CHARIOT - Emily Dickinson

Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

Check out this sonic rendition.

originally posted by: DISRAELI
a reply to: Encia22
Thank you for posting this.
I will add that the poem is a sonnet, with a precisely patterned format and rhyme scheme. Best appreciated when read aloud.

(On a minor detail, the Spanish flu was a century later)

Thanks, I fixed it. What's a century or two between friends. It must be the fever making me hallucinate!

Well, it don’t rhyme at all and I don’t understand a word.

“No more rhymes now I mean it!”
“Anybody want a peanut?”~ Fezzik

In relation to the poem in the OP, I love this one by Percy Shelley, one of the greats who also died young, drowning in a storm at sea at the age of 29.

Ozymandias
By Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Interesting how Susan Sontag in her brilliant essays on Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and It's Metaphors (1978 and 1989, published in one volume by Penguin Books in 1991) exposed connections between how different diseases were connected to different personality types.

So before the etiologies or causes were really known, TB was seen as the outpouring of too much sensitivity and the constitution of a mental waif.
The Pox (Syphilis) on the other hand, despite its eventual repulsive physical effects was seen as manly and heroic, even a Byronic excess of passion.

Similarly in the mid-to late 20th century both cancer and AIDS were infused with war metaphors, although the former was associated with an excess of (feminine) depression, while oddly AIDS (along with the war on drugs) was seen as the "enemy within", and complete failure of (male homosexual, heroin addict, immigrant, sex worker) human restraint.

Where would we place Covid-19?
Despite being a respiratory affliction the image of the long-term skeletal, pasty, world-weary, excessively romantic TB victim isn't quite apposite.

In fact, extreme cases are more associated with obesity, although this is not always politically correct to point out.
Although, perhaps so far the duration of infection is simply too short as yet, to associate poetically with any specific personality type and textual grouping (just as the Spanish Flu didn't really get associated with any school of poets and authors).

Of course as Sontag argues, these kind of social and political metaphors were highly myopic, and while stigmatizing some social groups they completely left out others, for example with AIDS an entire generation of hemophiliacs (including children) or the growing heterosexual AIDS epidemic in parts of Africa in 1989.