'I Look Upon Fine Phrases Like a Lover'

For some, it’s jewelry or porcelain or a field of purple loosestrife – an object or scene so self-sufficiently perfect, so unexpected yet inevitable, it moves one, briefly, to speechlessness. One rainy morning in late 1970, outside my freshman dormitory, while running late to class I stopped to wonder at a locust tree, its leaves turned buttery yellow and densely covering the wet sidewalk as though painted there. Fifty-two years later, if I knew how to paint I could reproduce the scene in detail. I was certain I had seen something important but have no understanding of why it was important or why the memory has stuck with me. 

In 1819, Keats visited Winchester, “an exceeding pleasant Town.” While there he took walks and visited the library. In a letter written August 14, Keats tells his friend Benjamin Bailey he has finished “Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil” and "The Eve of St. Agnes" and a portion of "Lamia." He writes:

“One of my Ambitions is to make as great a revolution in modern dramatic writing as Kean has done in acting. Another to upset the drawling of the blue-stocking literary world—if in the Course of a few years I do these two things, I ought to die content, and my friends should drink a dozen of Claret on my Tomb.”

 

Those final phrases are chilling. In eighteen months, Keats would be dead at age twenty-five, but within a month he would compose his masterpiece, “To Autumn.” He writes to Bailey:

 

“I am convinced more and more every day that (excepting the human friend Philosopher), a fine writer is the most genuine being in the world. Shakspeare [sic] and the Paradise lost every day become greater wonders to me. I look upon fine phrases like a lover.”

 

“Fine phrases” are like that golden vision of the locust tree and any experience of inexplicable beauty, as in Keats’ “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness . . .”