'The Simple Flowers of Our Spring'

A friend in England, a writer, is hobbled with arthritis and other ailments. He uses a wheelchair and hopes to “find [his] walking legs again.” It’s human to realistically hope, not to surrender either to the unhappy present nor a possibly illusory future, to hope while living in uncertainty (not unlike "negative capability"). As Keats writes in a letter to his friend James Rice Jr. on February 16, 1820: “I shall follow your example in looking to the future good rather than brooding upon the present ill.” Keats would die a year later at age twenty-five, and Rice in 1832 when he was forty. 

Keats’ empathy for Rice’s ill health is touching and unsentimental. He avoids the almost inevitable sense of self-pity that can accompany condolences. (We comfort ourselves while comforting others.) Though already sick with the tuberculosis that would kill him, Keats writes to Rice:  

 

“I have not been so worn with lengthened illnesses as you have, therefore cannot answer you on your own ground with respect to those haunting and deformed thoughts and feelings you speak of. . . . [F]or 6 months before I was taken ill I had not passed a tranquil day--Either that gloom overspread me, or I was suffering under some passionate feeling, or if I turned to versify, that acerbated the poison of either sensation. The Beauties of Nature had lost their power over me. How astonishingly . . . does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties upon us!”

 

As came naturally to Keats, he next alludes to Shakespeare: “Like poor Falstaff, though I do not ‘babble,’ I think of green fields; I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from my infancy—their shapes and colours are as new to me as if I had just created them with a superhuman fancy. It is because they are connected with the most thoughtless and the happiest moments of our lives. I have seen foreign flowers in hothouses, of the most beautiful nature, but I do not care a straw for them. The simple flowers of our Spring are what I want to see again.”

 

The reference is to a disputed line in Henry V. At the start of Act II, Scene 3, a character named Hostess (probably Mistress Quickly from Henry IV) recounts the off-stage death of Sir John Falstaff:

 

“. . .  after I saw him fumble with the sheets and play with flowers and smile upon his fingers’ ends, I knew there was but one way; for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and a’ babbled of green fields.”

 

The final phrase has been read as a mishearing of Psalm 23. Guy Davenport titled his 1993 story collection A Table of Green Fields. We know from Guy Davenport and James Laughlin: Selected Letters (2007) that Davenport approved the following passage for his book’s dust jacket:

 

“A constant theme in this book is the transmission of the past as an imaginative act; hence the title, Falstaff’s dying vision of ‘a table of green fields,’ probably a mishearing of his recitation of the Twenty-third Psalm, corrected by editors to ‘he babbled of green fields,’ a symbol of all fiction, an art that must be exact about the uncertain.”

 

Keats’ reading of the passage is an affirmation of life’s dearness and his love of greenery, flowers, the natural world. The poignancy of Keats’ words can make you weep but it’s the casual brilliance of his poetic linkages that remain astounding. He thinks of his beloved Shakespeare and seemingly the least Keatsian of his characters – “poor Falstaff.” Less than a year from his own death, Keats quotes Sir John’s final words and turns them into a vision of his childhood, then into a transcendent vision of eternal spring. I read “our Spring” to represent his years as a boy, our years as children. And behind that echoes the twenty-third Psalm.

 

I’m reminded of a brief essay, “Hegel and Keats,” in Adam Zagajewski’s Solidarity, Solitude (1990). As a Pole, Zagajewski had lived the consequences of Hegel’s odious legacy, and his first paragraph is a witty demolition of the philosopher. Then he turns to Keats:

 

“If one wants to find someone altogether different from the Prussian philosopher, one must go elsewhere. To John Keats, for example, the poet who died young. Keats believed things exist, that some of them are beautiful. He believed, or rather he simply knew, that the contours of objects are hard. If something is, then it is. Meadows [“green fields”] and forests really exist and our rapture is also no illusion although it cannot last forever. A nightingale concealed in the branches of a tree does not lead Keats to reflections of a theological or historiosophic nature. Keats does not contradict the nightingale and does not cast doubt on its sensual nature, because he hears its song, he is intoxicated and happy.

 

“Things exist, clouds move slowly across the sky, mountain streams fall in a light foam over the cliffs, the pines sway in the wind, their trunks creaking. Homage is due the world. The song of a nightingale is at once final and ruthless and cannot be undermined, but it also conceals the vague desire to have some other song respond, a poem by Keats, for example.”

 

Keats concludes his letter to Rice with another Falstaffian allusion: “I hope I shall sit under the trees with you again in some such place as the Isle of Wight. I do not mind a game of cards in a saw-pit or waggon, but if ever you catch me on a stage-coach in the winter full against the wind, bring me down with a brace of bullets, and I promise not to ’peach.”

 

In Act II, Scene 2 of Henry IV, Part 1, Falstaff says to Prince Hal: “Go, hang thyself in thine own heir-apparent garters! If I be ta’en, I’ll peach for this. An I have not ballads made on you all and sung to filthy tunes, let a cup of sack be my poison: when a jest is so forward, and afoot too! I hate it."

 

Peach, the OED tells us, is an elision of impeach or appeach and means “to accuse (a person) formally; to impeach, indict, bring to trial.”

[An erudite reader notes that Shakespeare would likely have been referring to the Geneva Bible, not the King James, when alluding to Psalm 23.]