Realms of Gold Letters and Poems of John Keats Read by Samuel West with Matthew Marsh POETRY NA243712D 1 Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold 6:42 2 To Benjamin Haydon, 20th November 1816 0:12 3 Great Spirits now on Earth are sojourning: 1:05 4 To John Reynolds, 17th and 18th April 1817 Carisbrooke, Isle of Wight 3:26 5 On the Sea 1:05 6 To Benjamin Bailey, 22nd November 1817 1:40 7 Wherein lies happiness? 4:33 8 To George and Tom Keats. Hampstead, Sunday 21st December, 1817 2:04 9 To George and Tom Keats, 23rd, 24th January 1818 0:44 10 On Sitting Down to read King Lear once Again 1:17 11 To J. H. Reynolds, Teignmouth, May 3rd 1818 3:41 12 To Benjamin Bailey, l0th June 18l8 1:23 13 To Tom Keats, 25th June, 18l8. Endmoor, Cumbria 2:59 14 Bright star! Would I were steadfast as thou art – 4:03 15 To Tom Keats, 29th June, 1818. Keswick 0:28 16 To Fanny Keats, 2nd July, I818. Dumfries 0:50 17 Old Meg 1:13 18 To Benjamin Bailey, Inverary, 18th July 2:21 19 To Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818 2:54 20 Deep in the shady sadness of a vale 4:25 21 To George and Georgiana Keats, 14th October 1818 6:09 22 To George and Georgiana Keats, 16th December 1818, 2-4 January 1819 4:19 2 23 A casement high and triple-arched there was 1:27 24 To Fanny Keats, 1st May 1819 Wentworth Place, Saturday 0:48 25 Ode to a Nightingale 5:10 26 To George and Georgiana Keats, Friday 19th March 1819 2:30 27 Ode on Melancholy 4:45 28 Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell: 2:11 29 La Belle Dame Sans Merci 3:01 30 To George and Georgiana Keats, Friday 19th March 1819 (cont.) 6:42 31 Ode on a Grecian Urn 4:07 32 To Sleep 1:34 33 Ode to Psyche 4:41 34 To Fanny Brawne, 1st July, 1819 Shanklin, Isle of Wight 3:50 35 To Fanny Brawne, 25th July 1819. Sunday Night 1:35 36 To Fanny Keats, Winchester, 28th August 1819 3:03 37 To John Taylor, 5th September, 1819 0:42 38 A haunting music, sole perhaps and lone 1:45 39 To J. H. Reynolds, 21st September, 1819. Winchester 1:34 40 To Autumn 2:03 41 To Fanny Brawne, 13th October, 1819. College Street/To Fanny Keats, 20th December 1819 Wentworth Place 3:26 42 To Fanny Brawne, 4th February 1820 1:21 43 To Fanny Brawne, February 1820 2:12 44 To Fanny Brawne, February 1820 2:20 3 45 To Fanny Brawne, March 1820 3:54 46 To Fanny Brawne, May 1820 Wednesday morning 47 This living hand, now warm and capable 0:32 48 To Fanny Keats, 23rd June 1820. Friday Morning 1:03 49 To Fanny Keats, 5th July 1820 Wednesday 1:15 50 To Fanny Keats, 22th July 1820 1:40 51 To Fanny Brawne, August 1820 3:38 52 To Fanny Keats, 13th August 1820 Wentworth Place 1:33 53 To Percy Bysshe Shelley, 16th August 1820 3:31 54 To Fanny Keats, dictated, 11th September 1820 1:27 55 To Charles Brown, 30th September 1820. The ‘Maria Crowther’, off Yarmouth, Isle of Wight 5:08 56 To Mrs. Samuel Brawne, 24th October 1820 Naples Harbour 3:39 57 To Charles Brown, 1st November 1820 4:14 58 To Charles Brown, 30th November 1820 2:56 59 When I have fears that I may cease to be 2:17 Total time: 2:37:21 4 Realms of Gold The Letters and Poems of John Keats The Life abandoned by her husband and living in John Keats was born in London on the 31st poverty, died. October, 1795. Two brothers, George and 1814 saw the death of his grandmother, Tom, and a sister, Fanny, followed during Mrs Jennings, and in the following year the next eight years. Their father, Thomas Keats entered Guy’s Hospital as a student, Keats, helped in the management of his qualifying as an apothecary in July 1816. father-in-law’s stables and tavern; their This was the year when his passion for mother, Frances Jennings, was from a well- poetry – and for politics, philosophy and the to-do business family, and seems to have arts in general – truly took hold of him. His been an intelligent, well-educated and circle of acquaintances rapidly enlarged to forceful woman. include such radical thinkers and artists as Young John was himself, by all accounts, Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt and Benjamin Haydon. of a passionate, possessive, even wilful By December, Keats had abandoned character: ‘violent and ungovernable’, said medicine in order to pursue his vocation as a family servant in later years. When he was a poet. eight, John began to attend a school in Barely five years of life remained to him, Enfield run by the sympathetic and but within that time he was to live with an imaginative John Clarke; but, within a year, intensity, a gusto and a creative urgency the first of the many domestic tragedies which would lead directly to the which were to afflict the family occurred – extraordinary poems and letters we have his father was killed in a riding accident. A today. mere two months later, and apparently to By the time of our first letter – dated 20th the displeasure of John and his siblings, November, 1816 – Keats was enjoying the their mother remarried. Before long, the first excitement of an independent, if children went to live with their insecure, literary life. The remaining years grandmother in Edmonton. In 1810, when were to be dominated by the poetry, of John was barely fifteen, his mother, now course, but also by a consuming interest in 5 the value and purpose of poetic Not long after the onset of the disease, composition and the nature of the poet Keats’ poetic composition began to falter, himself. At the same time, Keats enjoyed the last of his major poems – ‘To Autumn’ – travelling the length and breadth of the being written in September 1819: he found British Isles, often walking huge distances in the activity of writing emotionally a day; continuing his education by reading exhausting, perhaps disturbing, especially everything he could lay his hands on; as he tried to come to terms with the developing radical political views in a post- apparent impossibility of sustaining the war England dominated by timidly relationship with Fanny, whom he could no conservative attitudes; and, finally, falling in longer see – unless it were by arrangement, love. when she would greet him through the Yet hanging over all this intense pursuit window from the garden of Wentworth of pleasure, self-knowledge and poetic Place. This distance had become necessary perfection was the cloud of the ‘family’ after the crisis of February 1820, when illness – tuberculosis, or consumption as it Keats had returned to Hampstead on the was then known. His beloved brother Tom outside of the coach: he staggered home to died of the disease in December 1818 after Wentworth Place, both chilled and feverish, a long illness, during the latter stages of and coughed blood as he got himself to which Keats had patiently nursed him. The bed. With extraordinary calmness, Keats agony of this loss must have been asked his friend Brown to bring a candle by intensified by the absence of his other which he could inspect the discharge, and brother, George, who had married and then announced: ‘I know the colour of that emigrated to America earlier in the same blood; it is arterial blood. I cannot be year. Within another year, Keats himself had deceived in that colour. That drop of blood begun to show the first symptoms of is my death-warrant. I must die.’ tuberculosis. He had now to confront the Keats’ last hope seemed to lie in a kinder real possibility of his own death within a climate, and to that end he set sail for Italy few years – or even months – his emotional in September. His last known letter was turmoil infinitely complicated by the written from Rome in November 1820: he simultaneous ripening of his love for Fanny died on 23rd February, 1821, at 26 Piazza di Brawne into an engagement, probably in Spagna. December 1819. 6 The Letters and Poems The Poems Many of the letters contain first drafts of CD1:1 On First Looking into Chapman’s poems by Keats, sometimes close to the Homer version which would eventually be In this sonnet Keats uses the metaphor of published, at other times less so: I have geographical exploration to convey the generally used the version of the poem with excitement of ‘discovering’ Homer in the which readers are familiar. Poems marked 16th century translation by George (L) in the notes below were included by Chapman. Keats himself in the letters. Elsewhere, I have inserted poems where Keats has made And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; reference to them, or to an idea or image Round many western islands have I been important to them – an example would be Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. To Autumn, which Keats specifically Oft of one wide expanse had I been told mentions in his letter of 21st September, That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne; 1819: ‘How beautiful the season is Yet never did I breathe its pure serene now…this struck me so much in my Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Sunday’s walk that I composed upon it.’ Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise – Silent, upon a peak in Darien.