'Adieu! for Once Again the Fierce Dispute'

Among John Keats’ closest friends was the modestly gifted poet John Hamilton Reynolds (1794-1852). It was to Reynolds that Keats wrote in a February 3, 1818 letter: 

“We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.”

 

Keats briefly befriended others in the Reynolds family, including John’s sister, Jane (1791-1846), who would later marry the poet Thomas Hood. On this date, October 31, in 1817, Keats writes a letter to Jane, inquiring after her health and including five stanzas from “Endymion,” subtitled “A Poetical Romance,” the long poem he would complete a month later. The excerpts are drawn from what Keats calls in the finished poem a “roundelay,” including this:

 

“O Sorrow,

Why dost borrow

The lustrous passion from a falcon-eye?–

To give the glow-worm light?

Or, on a moonless night,

To tinge, on syren shores, the salt sea-spry?”

 

The poem was savaged by most critics when published in 1818. Keats himself came to see “Endymion” as an unavoidable step in his apprenticeship. Soon he would compose his finest verse, the odes. “Endymion” is often embarrassing to read. The opening line – “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever” -- is itself a thing of beauty though ridiculous as a statement of truth. We’re obliged to read the poem because Keats wrote it, and diligent readers will discover gems along the way, but it’s still a disappointing effort. Keats turned twenty-two the day he wrote this letter, though he doesn’t acknowledge his birthday to Jane Reynolds. He would be dead in little more than three years at age twenty-five.

 

The letter has a sad afterlife. Keats soon came to dislike Jane Reynolds and her sister. He corresponded with them, as he did with their brother. “[T]hey have displeased me very much,” he wrote in 1818. The sisters badmouthed Jane Cox, known as Charmian, who was much admired by the poet. The women strongly disapproved of Fanny Brawne, Keats’ fiancée and muse. In November 1821, nine months after John Keats’ death, Brawne wrote to Keats’ sister Fanny:

 

“My dear Fanny if you live to the age of the Methuselem [sic] and I die tomorrow never be intimate with the Reynolds, for I dare say they will come your way. . . . Every day I live I find out more of their malice against me.”

 

Keats writes in his sonnet “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again”:

 

“Adieu! for once again the fierce dispute,

   Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay

   Must I burn through.”