That Other Keats

As you can probably tell by now, in a widely unsuccessful effort to restore my spirits by reading the frilliest dudes around, I've surrounded myself with lovely Georgian relics. This week is Keats. And I chose the portrait above--I have no idea who painted it--because all the other renderings of Big Tuberculosis make him look so frail and dreamy and inconsequential--like an idea--and this one, God bless it, just makes him look like a pervert. And a little like a gremlin.

So, we all know the soaring prettiness of his sonnet on, what, stars and swooning, yes?

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon in death.

Pillowed? Breast? I told you he was a pervert. Anyway, good stuff, with the weirdo metrics in the first line ("anisobarics," for all you pedants--ahem!) and the pseudo-mystical language that is, after all, merely an account of one doctor-flunky's feelings about stars. Also, by the way, in a holograph draft (now lost) of his too too cute "Stanzas, in drear-nighted December," Keats conjured some wicked bad grammar to make a hell of a line:

"But were there ever any / Writhed not at passed joy? / The feel of not to feel it."

Whoa, fella. That's hearty work for a stableboy. But back to the earlier point, which I haven't made yet, the star-sonnet struts and preens its way into history, so smooth and sensuous is its musing on stars. But due to complicated and boring circumstances beyond my control, another, crappier version of the poem exists, and it must have its reading too:

Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art!
Not in lone splendour hung amid the night;
Not watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's devout sleepless eremite,
The morning-waters at their priestlike task
Or pure ablution round earth's human shores;
Or, gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No;--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Cheek-pillowed on my love's white ripening breast,
To touch, for ever, its warm sink and swell,
Awake, for ever, in a sweet unrest,
To hear, to feel her tender taken breath,
Half passionless, and so swoon on to death.

Oh, isn't that precious? The sole responsibility of textual criticism must be to find inferior versions of already great poems and convince a disbelieving world that literacy bids us read both. I succumbed. And now, through my neurotic error, so have you!

Let's see how shitty text B compares to glorious text A. It seems to me the speaker wants to emphasize not the ambiguity of the star's place but its distance and unreality; so why "amid"? No reason; it sucks. Moving on, "not watching" glues up the pace and makes the second half of the first quatrain feel cloyed and cloistered, and stammering, too, not open and boundless and sublime. It also ruins the delicate liaison between the interdependent actions of hanging and watching. And what exactly are "morning-waters"? Okay, the phrase has melodic heft, and it sounds vaguely cool, but I think we can all agree that whatever it lacks in gooey sonorants, "moving waters"--given the explicit contrast between waiting like a gay permanent star and swirling around like a maniac, changing river--makes a lot more sense. And anybody know any inconstant hermits, like, say, weekend hermits? Then why "devout" as a modifier in line 4? "Patient" contributes so much more to the poetic argument, especially given the alternative's near tautology and the careful contrarian movement of the poem's final few lines. Anyway, it garbles the meter.

Moving on! Yes, the sexier language in B's tenth line tempts us--"cheek-pillowed" sounds coital, no?--and I admit that "fair love" is as weak as it comes, but in a Keatsian sort of way--the Spenser stuff, fairies and such. But let's keep our ears about us. The rhythm sucks knuckles, especially when heard against the earthy, fleshly, bodily, cock-throttling, breast-fondling heave of A, with its eager inversion rushing toward, and then, in its adolescent awe, fumbling over the meaty syllables of her body.

Moving on! "To touch" is more concrete and tactile, and more effective, I give it that. But it also loses too much in the repetitious, meek, and just unsatisfying build-up to "feel" in the penultimate line. This is not the place to decelerate, not with breasts getting ripe and people "touching." Notice that the verbs in the first version remain moderately apart, at some distance, from their object. While hearing is good fun, it isn't nearly so immediate as touching. To introduce touch, with its insistence on closeness and contact, undermines the irony and poignant, solitary logic of the speaker himself, who, despite mourning his star's inaccessibility, secretly delights in its impossibility. Like the urn, it is frozen--as is his chica-boom--and forever apart from him, even as it shines, and even as she breathes. Anyway, the heavy hands in this part of the poem wreck its extraordinary and patient irony, and the excessive clausal balance and parallelism deflate the speaker's abrupt climax in his "sweet unrest," where all is eternal and fixed and dead, and reduce to non-sequitur his bald, terrifying assertion that everything that is not immortal, including him and his girl and whatever else, water too, probably, can go right to hell. The too-balanced syntax impedes movement and drains energy, which the poem needs to establish the contradiction between permanence, with its cold, reluctant austerity, and time, with its pulsing Continental woof, as well as to make the final hemistich stick in the throat like a swallowed bone. The A text is gorgeous and baffling and wonderfully difficult and strange. The B text is dainty.

"And so swoon on"?? First, fuck that rhythm. Fuck it. Ew. Second, who "swoons on" to anything? Swooning is bad enough; it needs no particle.

The point of all this was, I don't know. I'm bored and lonely, and tired, and I was reading Keats when something occurred to me: I love little words. And I hate when bibliographers soil them. I also hate myself for wasting the last forty-five minutes writing this when I could have saved us all the trouble and watched Mariano Puerta lose a lot of points on clay, or maybe just watch the 2003 film version of Byron's many-countried pimposity, starring some actors I have never heard of and Vanessa Redgrave, in her post-I-played-Oscar-Wilde's-mother denouement. Look for that review soon!