The Great Work of Your Life

by Stephen Cope

  EIGHT

  John Keats: Let Desire Give Birth to Aspiration

  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.

  2

  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 h
is 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

  Beauty that must die,

  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.

  6

  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.