Tuberculosis and La Belle Dame Sans Merci: John Keats

Tuberculosis and La Belle
Dame sans Merci: John Keats

Purasu Balakrishnan

The tragedy of tuberculosis is well exemplified in the life of John Keats the poet who, in the words of Matthew Arnold, is with Shakespeare. He had a productive period of only five years, and he died of the disease at twenty-five after trials and tribulations enough to snuff out creativity in a lesser man.

‘A theme worthy of Sophocles,’ he said of the fate of his younger brother Tom dying of the same disease. Such indeed was the theme in the case of the poet, more truly than in the case of his brother, the greater for its being shorn of the element of a practical joke which, to some extent, made a mockery of his brother’s condition. Living upon his pulse (to use his words which he employed in a different context) Keats produced a matchless poem of a haunting and magical quality, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, which is a lyrical cry of youth, stifled and killed by the disease. Indeed tuberculosis among diseases in unique in having the finest monument erected to it, thanks to Keats who saw his brother, a victim of the disease, grow ‘pale and spectre-thin, and die.’ It is no wonder that the poet the apostle, of ‘negative capability’ (in his own words) who said, ‘If a sparrow came before my window, I take part in its existence and peck about the gravel,’ was able so closely to identify himself with his dying brother, two years his junior, and traversa the realm of La Belle Dame sans Merci.

Keat’s early traumatic experiences had served to build up a strength and resource of character which marked the man. In 1804 when he was only nine his father Thomas Keats, a common groom, died of a fall from horse-which resulted in a fractured skull, leaving four children, of whom the poet was the eldest. In just over two months his mother remarried. Years later, he wrote to Reynolds, ‘Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses...You will know exactly my meaning when I say that now I shall relish Hamlet more than I have ver done.’ His mother returned home only to take to bed and die of tuberculosis when he was fifteen. A year after her death he began his five years’ apprenticeship to Thomas Hammond, an apothecary. This period was the seen-time of his soul when, three afternoons every fortnight, he would walk two miles to Enfield to meet his friend Cowden Clarke to revel with him in Shakespeare, Milton and Spenser. In 1813 when he was eighteen he wrote his first poem. IN 1815 he registered at Guy’s Hospital for a twelve months’ practice in surgery. He became a well-educated and well-trained medical practitioner. But his end and aim was poetry, and he never wavered from it. He had a premonition that he might not have enough time granted him to grean his teeming brain of its ideas, and he wrote a sonnet, ‘Like a sick eagle looking at the sky’, indicating this.

The year 1818, when he was twenty-four years old, saw him at a crisis of his affairs. He had given up the medical profession to devote himself to poetry. He was faced with the problem of living. The muse left him to poverty and savage ridicule. He had fallen headlong in love with the beautiful Fanny Brawne. He had contracted tuberculosis from his brother Tom who was seriously ill and whom he was nursing assiduously, hardly ever leaving his side. His own death-warrant, as he called it, in the form of gross arterial bleeding from the lungs, was only a year away. He was confined to the house by the orders of his doctor. A sore throat which he had contracted two years earlier at Oxford had been wrongly diagnosed as syphilitic, and he was being dosed with large doses of mercury which had resulted in sore gums and nervousness. He had not heard from his brother George who had emigrated to America and was asking him for money to buy one thousand and four hundred acres on the Birkbeck settlement. His sister Mary was to be taken away from the Misses Tuckeys’ School since she had passed her fifteenth birthday. His friend Haydon noted that while he painted, Keats would sit for hours silent.

The wonder was that in the midst of these harrowing experiences he could write poetry. On February 17 he laid aside ‘The Eve of St. Marks’ in the middle, dismissing it and the earlier ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ as little pieces, and turned to write a major work. This was ‘Hyperion’. The progress on it was naturally slow.

On February 18 he had news that Fanny Brawne and her mother would be moving in April to live next door to him. He had no money. On April 2 he drew the last remnant of what George had left behind. With this he cleared his debts and fortified himself for his lodgings in summer. On April 3 Fanny Brawne moved to his vicinity. He was having temperature and night sweats. Tom was near his death. Keats saw the pallor - the lily - on Tom’s brow, and the rose - the hectiee flush of the fever - on Tom’s cheek, and the parched lips open. Tom told Keats that he was dying of his love for a girl, by name Amena. Keats, from the enquiries he made discovered that it was a hoax played on Tom by his school - fellow Charles Wells who had sent Tom forged letters under the fictitious name of Amena, supposedly a French girl, addressing Tom as knight. Keats, infuriated, wrote, ‘murderously’ about this to George. His negative capability was such that his imagination rode on some light verses over this situation, characterizing George as an ape, Tom, as a fool and himself as a dwarf. Outwardly the round of life’s trivialities went on as before. But in lonely communion with his soul, the poet sat and wrote ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’.

Of this poem Robert Gittings, modern biographer of Keats, says:

So much went into this almost fragmentary poem, so much has been interpreted from it that any examination must start with the warning that nothing one says either about its origins or its effects can fully explain it. All that can be said in a general way is that in this magical poem the identification of Love and Death, implicit in the Darkness sonnet, the end of Bright Star and the Dante sonnet is made explicit, and that this is a theme to which Keats returns all through the rest of his writing life.

Such a poem which, again in the words of Robert Gittings has the cadence of Wordsworth, the nightmare quality of Coleridge, the medieval setting of Spenser and the picture of melancholy of Burton, needs to be read in full for a proper appreciation of it, and wee give it in full:

O WHAT can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge is wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.
O What can all thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.
I see a lily on thy brow
With anguish moist and fever dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful - a faery’s child,
Her hair aws long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone,
She look’d at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.
I set heer on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna dew,
And sure in language strange she said –
­‘I love thee true!’
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept and sigh’d full sore,
And there I shut her wild, wild eyes
With kisses four
And there she lulled me asleep,
And there I dream’d - ah! woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dream’d
On the cold hill’s side.
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried - ‘La Bella Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!’
I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.
And that is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.

Tom Keats died on 1 December 1918. Writing about him in November 1918, the poet noted, ‘The last days of Tom were of the most distressing nature.’ He told Severn that not only was his brother dying but that with the ebbing tide of life was going more and more of his own vitality. This, culminating in the wish for death under cover of love, is expressed in the Star sonnet:

To hear, to feel her tender-taken breath,
Half-passionless, and so swoon to death,

and again, in a pure isolated form in ‘Ode to Darkness’:

Verse, fame and beauty are intense indeed
But Death is intenser - Death is Life’s high meed:

La Bella Dame is both the Love that he loved and feared to lose and the Death that he feared and in despair mystically loved. Tuberculosis, taking on the form of Death, and as the lining on the cloud’s edge, Fanny Brawne, assumed the shape and image of La Belle Dame sans Merci in the poem, symbolizing love and death and poesy transfiguring life and death into a mystery of beauty without mercy.

A side - light is thrown on this image by the fact that Keats smothered his love in order to write poetry. When he happened to come to London from the Isle of Wight he kept away from Hampstead where Fanny lived. He wrote to her, ‘Am I mad or not? I love you too much to venture to Hampstead.’ He knew that he could never marry her whom he desperately loved. When mortally sick in Rome from haemorrhages he wrote to his friend Charles Brown. ‘If I had any chance of recovering, this passion will kill me, the very thing which I want to live for will be the great occasion of my death. Who can help it? Were I in health it would make me ill. How can I bear it in my state?’ This is the cry of a man in the mortal clutches of the disease.

‘I see ev’n now,
Young Keats, a flowering laurel on your brow,’

so wrote Leigh Hunt of Keats in an expansive after-dinner mood, twining a chaplet of Icrurel round Keats’s forehead.

A few years later Keats wrote of the wretched knight of La Belle Dame sans Merci:

I see a lily on thy brow
With anguish moist and fever dew.

La Belle Dame sans Merci symbolizes both the laurel and the lity, the laurel of love and the lily of tuberculosis, on the cold hill’s side of Love-Death. Love and poetic aspiration prove to be a greater burden than frail youth can bear along with merciless life and intimidating death. Keats himself was encompassed by all these all at once. Nowhere else is expressed so poetically, hauntingly and tragically the human cry for love and beauty smothered by the hard realities of life, disease and death, the spark in man to be love enkindled being quenched by the stress and strain that life and even love in such a situation are to the adolescent.