by Sudhir Kakar
Precisely because death is not a burning issue for most young men and women, I begin my teaching of Keats with these reflections and anecdotes, which provide an immediacy that leads easily to a consideration of the relationship between transience and beauty that is so central to Keats. About twenty years ago, one of my students approached me after that particular class and asked if he could speak with me in my office. Michael Stone, who was blind, sat in the first row each day, participated regularly in class discussions, frequently cracking us all up with his acid wit, and often asking the most penetrating questions.
When we sat down in my office, Mike told me that he had never encountered a writer who spoke so intimately to him as Keats. Having been diagnosed as a child with a very rare form of cancer, Michael had spent much of his young life in hospitals, enduring frequent—and usually experimental— surgeries, virtually constant pain, and—as the unfortunate result of one of those surgeries—blindness since the age of ten. What I was labouring to explain to the other students, Michael had grasped instantly. Indeed, this sense of the crucial relationship between suffering and beauty, and death and beauty, was the very foundation on which this extraordinary young man had built his own courageous vision of living. To see it articulated so powerfully and poignantly in Keats’s work was simply breathtaking for Michael.
Over the next couple years my friendship with Michael grew. We talked regularly about Keats, about literature, and then about the heartbreaking news that his cancer had returned, about how he would cope with dropping out of school so that he could have another surgery, and how he would return to his studies because cancer, goddamn it, was not going to do to him what tuberculosis had done to Keats. ‘Hell,’ he said, ‘I’m nowhere near twenty-five yet. I’ve got lots of time.’
He did return to school, and one day he knocked on my office door with a big smile on his face. ‘Hey, Mr Sharp,’ he said. You got a minute?’
‘Sure,’ I said, delighted to see him back in school. ‘Come on in.’
‘Well,’ he began, ‘I may soon be seeing our buddy Keats.’
The cancer was back yet again and the doctors all agreed that he could not survive another operation. As he sat in my office telling me this devastating news, he insisted that he was going to persuade the doctors to proceed anyhow. He knew he would survive the surgery and he was just not ready to die yet—though ‘The prospect of meeting Keats was tempting,’ he said, with his characteristic grin.
As I was hugging him, it was perfectly clear that, although I was doing my best to comfort him, it was Michael who was comforting me, and I couldn’t help but be reminded of Keats consoling his friend Joseph Severn, the young painter who had accompanied him to Rome when it was clear to Keats’s doctors that the poet could not survive another winter in England. Having nursed his brother through his death from the same disease that would take his own life, on his own deathbed Keats asked Severn if he had ever seen anyone die, and when Severn said that he had not, Keats did his best to comfort his friend and get him through the darkness ahead.1 As we embraced there in my office, I think Michael and I both silently understood that he was drawing his heroic strength precisely from what Keats considered the crucial relationship between mortality and vitality, between death and life, transience and beauty.
Michael did, as it turned out, persuade the doctors to operate, and the night before he went into the hospital he walked with his cane to the college chapel, wrote a note to God, left it there in the chapel along with his cane, and then walked home, unassisted, in the dark.
Mike left the cane, as he said in his written account of this remarkable incident, ‘to prove my faith to myself (God needs no proof, being all-knowing).’ Not only did this blind man get home safely in the dark without his cane; against all odds, he survived the surgery to remove the tumour from his head, and was soon released from the hospital to recover at an apartment he had rented near campus. I visited him there frequently, and although Mike could barely talk during those first weeks after the surgery, he was frantically writing me notes on his computer, many of them in the same spirit of gallows humour that, his mother later told me, he demonstrated two days before he died, some months later. She had been lifting him up. He was very weak and she asked him, ‘Do you think you’re up to this undertaking?’ ‘Poor choice of words,’ he replied, demonstrating the same spunk he was now revealing to me as he typed out on his computer screen the words, ‘ I picked out my gravestone for the college graveyard today. It’s incredibly cool, incredibly beautiful. I hope the students will lean against it while they watch the moon, and maybe smash a beer bottle or two on it.’
A few days later I asked Kenyon’s president, Philip Jordan, if he would consider taking the unprecedented step of awarding Michael an honorary degree before he died. Having heard for years amazing stories about this young man, and having been moved by him himself, the president not only agreed immediately, but fifteen minutes later the two of us showed up at the apartment where Michael’s mother was caring for him after the surgery. When the president told him the news that Kenyon had decided to award him an honorary degree, Michael leaped up from his chair, spit out the bandages that were stuffed in his mouth from the surgery, ran outside, and started screaming his excitement to the whole world. ‘Yes!’ he shouted, though a few minutes before he could barely talk. ‘Yes! Yes! President Jordan is a party animal!’
A few weeks later the entire student body assembled as the faculty, in full academic regalia, marched in, and the president awarded Michael an honorary degree. This is the formal citation which I read to the assembled guests:
MICHAEL C. STONE. For five years now you have graced Kenyon College with your radiant presence—reading, thinking, inquiring, writing, searching, joking, eagerly but patiently creating—as all first-rate students do—your own education. Along the way you have become our deepest teacher; as a result, you have already influenced and elevated this college and its members permanently. The gifts you bear are as rare as they are precious: wisdom in all its heartbreaking beauty and fullness; a ripeness of vision which has allowed you, in the words of one of your favourite poets [Wordsworth], to ‘see into the life of things’; a sense of humour that is irrepressible, often unforgettable, sometimes breathtaking, but always vitalizing, because it arises from a combination of acute insight and a profound love of life; courage which most of us have never seen the like of; and a generosity which through every hardship has found its roots in that same spirit of celebration which we honour here today. It has been your desire to make others, as you have said, love what you have loved, to make them understand what you have understood. That desire has already been fulfilled a hundredfold. Honoured student, you have been our teacher. For that gift and for the gift of your bountiful and unmatched friendship, we thank you and we honour you today.
I decided to risk what may seem like an unwarranted recourse to storytelling and personal experience in order to bring into focus certain crucial issues about death that might otherwise be ignored. I now want to consider in some detail exactly what is entailed in Keats’s vision of death and dying. While that vision comports readily with both the heroic and the comic aspects of Michael Stone’s vision, it differs radically insofar as it does not share Michael’s faith in both God and an afterlife. Indeed, it was Keats’s greatest challenge as both a poet and a thinker to find grounds for affirming life, not only in the face of his unwavering sense of the inevitability of suffering and death but also in the absence of any of the traditional religious consolations. As we shall see in a moment when we turn to his famous ‘vale of Soul-making letter’, Keats considers all religions attempts to come to terms with the fundamental reality of suffering and death, and the one thing that they all have in common is the assumption of some ultimate reality or presence beyond this world—beyond time, nature and history. Unable to accept such a premise, and unable to accept the ‘natural supernaturalism’ that so many of his fellow Romantics adapted as an alternative to traditional relig
ion, Keats sought what he called ‘a recourse somewhat human’ that was, as he said, ‘independent of the great Consolations of Religion’ (Letters 1: 179), but that would allow him to reconcile himself to suffering and death without violating his scepticism about all metaphysical issues.
‘There are enough real distresses and evils in wait for every one,’ Keats tells his sister, ‘to try the most vigorous health’ (Letters 2: 329—30). Even ‘in the very temple of Delight,’ he says in ‘Ode on Melancholy’, ‘Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine’ (25–26). In ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, he speaks of a world in which ‘men sit and hear each other groan’ (24), and in the verse epistle ‘To J.H. Reynolds, Esq.,’ he describes the horrifying clarity with which he ‘saw too distinct into the core/Of an eternal fierce destruction’ (96-97).
In the ‘vale of Soul-making’ letter, which contains Keats’s fullest explanation of suffering, the same theme recurs. ‘This is the world,’ he tells his brother and sister-in-law, ‘thus we cannot expect to give way many hours to pleasure—Circumstances are like Clouds continually gathering and bursting—While we are laughing the seed of some trouble is put into … the wide arable land of events’ (Letters 2: 79)—or, as I tell my students, precisely as we are celebrating or triumphing or falling in love, the first cancer cell splits off in the body of our mother or father. ‘I wonder,’ Keats says, ‘how people exist with all their worries’ (Letters 2: 83).
Keats realizes that all religions have attempted to explain or to justify suffering:
It is pretty generally suspected that the Chr[i]stain scheme has been copied from the ancient Persian and Greek philosophers … I think it is probable that this System of Soul-making—may have been the parent of all the more palpable and personal Schemes of Redemption, among the Zoroastrians, the Christians and the Hindoos. For as one part of the human species must have their carved Jupiter; so another must have the palpable and named Mediator and Saviour, their Christ their Oromanes and their Vishnu.
(Letters 2:103)
If one views the world from a Judaic perspective, for example, suffering will be considered an indication of inscrutably divine justice, as it is in the Book of Job. The Christian, likewise, will interpret it according to the doctrine of the felix culpa, the fortunate fall, by which the prospect of salvation renders any suffering just. In the case of Michael Stone, it is precisely because he acknowledges, as he says in the note he leaves at the chapel for God, ‘my total dependence on Him’ that ‘Here I leave my staff/For on you I shall lean … For Yours is the path to Truth and everlasting life.’ But if, like Keats, no matter how much one might long for such faith, one cannot, in the end, take that leap, then misfortunes and troubles must be viewed only in a human context. Their rewards, if any, must be experienced in this life. Only in such a fully humanized framework can suffering be seen as beautiful.
The ‘vale of Soul-making’ letter, then, presents what Keats calls a ‘grander system of salvation than the chryst[e]ain religion’ (Letters 2:102). And he considers it grander precisely because, by locating salvation in this world rather than in some afterlife, it is more real, in the Keatsian sense of beautiful or life-affirming. But there is no suggestion that there is some kind of essential or intrinsic rightness or justice that characterizes all aspects of life and therefore includes suffering and death. What Keats suggests, instead, is that to fully actualize the soul, or potential identity with which each person is born, one must not merely passively tolerate or stoically endure sorrow, but actively confront it. This does not mean that one must seek suffering or that, like Rimbaud, one should search out the most extreme and various experiences in order to savour even the gruesome and perverse for their full cargo of ‘life’. For Keats, suffering was not a rare commodity; no one need fear he would be denied his fair share. All of us are mortal.
Nonetheless, the idea of intensity is of the first importance for Keats’s resolution of the problems posed, for a sceptic, by both suffering and death. The intense experience of sorrow ironically helps one to bear that suffering and even to solidify one’s attachment to life. Just as a dying man who may feel great sorrow in leaving the world may also feel a new tenderness for it—as we saw that Keats did after his first haemorrhage—the piercing experience of loss can make us cherish life all the more. One must open oneself so fully to one’s experience that even suffering, without being blinked or transcended, will be seen to have some value. ‘I will call the world a School,’ Keats says, ‘instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read—I will call the human heart the horn Book used in that School—and I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that school and its horn-book. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!’ (Letters 2:102).
‘A World of Pains and troubles’—the mortal world in which we all live—is not something that we must merely tolerate or stoically resign ourselves to; it is a precondition for developing a soul and thus it must be fervently embraced. Soul-making is thus the process by which one develops one’s identity; to school one’s intelligence and make it a soul is to humanize it. But what can the value of soul-making be for someone who has already contradicted the first premise of the conception of a soul— namely, that, by definition, it is not only something that connects one with God or some higher reality, but that it is precisely such a higher reality that creates one’s soul. Yet, if souls are desirable for Keats, they are not so by reference to the higher realities of traditional religion. After all, he tells us explicitly that his idea of the ‘vale of Soul-making’ is a humanized system of salvation set in direct opposition to the ‘little circumscribe[d] straightened notion’ of Christianity, which is based on the ‘arbit[r]ary interposition of God’ (Letters 2:102). How much more radical a departure from traditional conceptions of spirituality can one imagine than a system based on the assumption that souls are not divinely but humanly created, that people are not born with souls that have been created by God, but that they must create them themselves? And they must do so not through the intervention of some mediator of a higher reality, but through living intensely in this world.
In an earlier book of mine about Keats, I explore the radically original ways in which Keats develops a new conception of the spiritual as the foundation of his poetry and poetics. When Einstein claimed that space was curved, many people disagreed on the grounds that by definition space is not curved; indeed, one of the key defining features of space is that it is not curved, they claimed. But of course it was exactly that definition of space that Einstein was challenging. Because of his radical scepticism about any higher reality, Keats redirects spiritual aspiration to this world, which he believes discloses its rich spiritual possibilities only to those who are sceptical of some higher sphere and have opened themselves with intensity to this world. To many, this would not be a spiritual view at all, but one can only make that denial if one stipulates that any definition of religion must include a belief in higher reality. It is precisely that conception of the spiritual that Keats is at such great pains to overturn, and in this respect his work can be seen as an attempt to alter the very paradigm of what constitutes the spiritual, just as Einstein would later redefine space.
But whatever grounds for affirmation Keats discovered were wrested out of an unending battle against despair. ‘We live … in a continual struggle against the suffocation of accidents,’ he had written to his friend Benjamin Bailey (Letters 1: 179), so that if he were to find a source of hope it must be one that never avoided the reality of death and loss and pain or violated his abiding scepticism. One need only remember lines like ‘I have been half in love with easeful Death’ or ‘Now more than ever seems it rich to die’ or ‘Death is life’s high meed’2 to realize that Keats is never so tender-mindedly self-assured in his affirmations as to be securely beyond the threat of despair. The fact is that for Keats every affirmation is only a
temporary victory. Since he rejects the idea that suffering can be seen as itself a vindication of some kind of divine plan, his affirmations must always be in spite of suffering, in the teeth of the hard reality of death, and they can never assume the character of insights that reveal some larger justice in which one can forever rest one’s confidence.
I want to turn now to one poem in particular to try to illustrate how Keats’s vision of death is transformed into the music of poetry. ‘To Autumn’ is the last of Keats’s great odes, and was written a year and a half before his death, when he was already quite certain that his days were numbered. Keats’s purest celebration of the transient mortal condition, the poem involves a sanctification of the human that goes quite beyond mere resignation or passive acceptance. Ironically, my central example of Keats’s vision of death does not, in fact, ever refer explicitly to human death, but no one has ever doubted that that is its central subject. But death is not mentioned in ‘To Autumn’ not because Keats is anxious about it, but because he has come so fully to grips with it that it has come to have the status of the obvious. The speaker’s awareness and acceptance of death occur at such a fully integrated level of consciousness that the outer world is rinsed of death’s stain, yet everywhere bears death’s signature.
To Autumn
1
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing-sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
