'Every Lover Admires His Mistress'

“I have been reading lately Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy; and I think you will be very much amused with a page I here coppy [sic] for you.” 

Keats was in good company. Among the writers amused by Burton’s Wunderkammer (1621) are Swift, Sterne, Dr. Johnson, Coleridge, Lamb, Melville and Beckett. It’s less the book’s themes that attract readers than Burton’s crazy learning and logorrhea. Some of his pages recall Finnegans Wake. He loved lists and catalogs of nouns, verbs and adjectives. His prose is opulent, the opposite of minimalist.

 

Keats was writing one of his serial letters to his brother George and sister-in-law Georgiana Keats on September 17, 18, 20, 21, 24, 25 and 17 in 1819. We know he had acquired his copy of Burton the previous spring. The quoted Burton passage is in the letter entry dated Sept. 18. In the Hyder Edward Rollins two-volume edition of Keats’ letters, the quotation fills an entire page, thirty-one lines of print, all copied longhand. The poet takes it from the section titled “Symptoms of Love,” which begins:

 

“Every Lover admires his Mistress, though she be very deformed of herself, ill-favored, wrinkled, pimpled, pale, red, yellow, tann’d, tallow-fac’d, have a swoln juglers platter face, or a thin, lean, chitty face, have clouds in her face, be crooked, dry, bald, goggle-eyed, blear-eyed or with staring eyes, she looks like a squis’d cat . . .”

 

Keep in mind, Keats is sharing this with his brother and his brother’s wife. To no one's surprise, Burton was a bachelor (1577-1640). The parade of grotesqueries continues:

 

“. . .  a sharp chin, lave-eared, with a long crane’s neck, which stands awry too, pendulis mammis her dugs like two double jugs, or else no dugs in the other extream, bloody-falln fingers, she have filthy, long, unpaired, nails, scabbed hands or wrists, a tan’d skin, a rotton carcass, crooked back, she stoops, is lame, splea footed, as slender in the middle as a cow in the wast, gowty legs, her ankles hang over her shooes, her feet stink, she breed lice, a meer changeling, a very monster, an aufe imperfect, her whole complexion savors, an harsh voice, incondite gesture, vile gate, a vast virago, or an ugly tit, a slug, a fat fustilugs, a trusse, a long lean rawbone, a Skeleton, a Sneaker . . .”

 

An ambitious reader could devote a book to annotating the single passage quoted by Keats.