1.
On a day in May, many years ago, I decided to rest, and
perhaps even meditate, in one of Christopher Wren’s fine churches—I forget
which one. I had been walking in London
for several hours, when body and spirit informed me it was time to sit
down. The church, aside from me and one
or two others, was empty. I appreciated
the silence, but it was not to last. A
voice over the church’s loud speaker soon announced that it was Pentecost, commemorating the day when, according to legend, the Holy Ghost descended upon the
disciples of Jesus. (A rather tasteless bit of
spooky music, which indicated, presumably, the advent of the Trinity’s third
person, accompanied the disembodied voice that informed the three or four of
us in the church that it was indeed Pentecost).
After a minute or so of information about the all-but-forgotten holiday,
the voice proclaimed the following prayer:
Almighty God, the
fountain of all goodness,
We humbly beseech
thee to bless
Philip Duke of
Edinburgh, Charles Prince of Wales,
And all the Royal
Family,
Endow them with thy
Holy Spirit;
Enrich them with
thy heavenly grace,
Prosper them with
all happiness;
And bring them to
thine everlasting kingdom
Through Jesus
Christ our Lord.
Amen
They’ve got to be
kidding, I thought to myself. Can
anybody take this prayer seriously anymore?
Poor Prince Charles, brought down to the level—or perhaps even below it—of
an average citizen by the scythes of the popular press! Perhaps some would
defend such claptrap with one word: tradition. But a tradition without
substance (regarding the royal family) reduces all those words about God to a
tradition without substance as well.
In Keats’s day, “Charles Prince of Wales” in the
above-quoted prayer would have been replaced by “George Prince of Wales,” who
served as Prince Regent (hence the term Regency England) from 1811 to the year
of Keats’s death, 1821, after which he reigned as George lV. (His father, King George lll, had been
declared incompetent, due to illness.)
If Keats, a liberal, sympathetic to the Whigs, had heard
that version of the prayer, or something similar to it, (which he probably did), he would hardly have sunk to his knees.
(He wouldn’t have been in church in the first place).
Royalty-bashing didn’t begin in the twentieth
century. When a conservative newspaper
declared the fat, fatuous, and philandering Regent to be “the Glory of the
People,” and an “Adonis of Loveliness.”
Keats’s good friend, Leigh Hunt, felt he had to set the record straight. He wrote in his influential journal, The
Examiner, that the Prince was “a corpulent man of fifty, a violator of his
word, a libertine over head and ears in disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties,
and the companion of gamblers and demireps.” For this Hunt received a two-year
jail term, albeit under such comfortable conditions that would enrage the likes
of the redoubtable Sheriff of Maricopa County, Joseph Arpaio, who, I doubt,
knows anything about Keats’s poetry or
the times in which the poet lived. (We
Americans can indeed be proud of the First Amendment, the strongest guarantor
of free speech in the world. Even today,
it is much easier to sue for libel in the United Kingdom than it is in the
United States).
Yes, the liberal Keats would have scorned the
aforementioned prayer. But what if the
references to the royal family were taken out?
What was Keats’s view of Christianity?
2.
The seventeenth century was the swan song of religious
dogmatism—at least among artists and scientists. (True,
the deeply religious Bach died in 1750, but he composed, largely unnoticed at
the time, in a cultural backwater, where Lutheranism was practiced in a more or
less unchanged way for over a century.
Bach, at the time of his death, was considered to be quite
old-fashioned; music had changed, as evinced by the compositions of his sons,
as well as the intellectual Zeitgeist, which had yet to trickle down to ordinary citizens. And trickle down it
did. Conventional religion has been
losing ground to reason and science ever since, a process which continues apace
in Western culture. Would Bach have
written traditional, albeit glorious, music if he had been born a century
later? A rhetorical question!
The Age of Enlightenment, which took place, roughly,
during the eighteenth century, emphasized two worthy adversaries of
conventional religion, reason and science.
One of the towering figures of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant declared
that one could never know the "thing in itself," since all our knowledge is
obtained through the senses. Our senses
could be wrong—therefore, we can never be sure of any revelation supposedly coming from beyond them. When the great scientist La
Place was asked by Napoleon whether God had any place in his world-view, he
replied, “I have no need for that hypothesis, Your Majesty.” Scientists and secularists, in increasing
numbers, have given variations on this response ever since.
Keats was hostile to the traditional religion of his
culture, The Church of England, for a variety of reasons. First, Keats, a liberal from the working
class, had little use for a church that was so strongly linked to the
conservative aristocracy. Second,
although Keats was a “monk of the Imagination” he was also grounded in
reason. He once wrote in a letter, “You
know my ideas about Religion..I do not think of myself more in the right than
other people and (I think) nothing in this world is provable.” Spoken like a true son of Kant! Why should Christian dogma be correct and not
the myths of Ancient Greece--a paraphrase of a quote from Keats. Third, as we have seen, The Church was
becoming increasingly out of touch with contemporary culture; it was, in Keats’s
mind, a harmful atavism that should and would be left behind.
Keats said it best in a sonnet of his from the year 1816:
Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition
The church bells toll a melancholy sound,
Calling the
people to some other prayers,
Some other
gloominess, more dreadful cares,
More hearkening to the sermon’s horrid sound.
Surely the mind of man is closely bound
In some black
spell; seeing that each one tears
Himself
from fireside joys, and Lydian airs,
And converse high of those with glory crown’d.
Still, still they toll, and I should feel a damp,--
A chill as from
a tomb, did I not know
That they are dying like an outburnt lamp;
That ‘tis their
singing, wailing ere they go
Into
oblivion;--that fresh flowers will grow,
And many glories of immortal stamp.
Not so fast, John Keats! Like many of your contemporaries,
you believed that reason would solve all our problems—albeit only eventually. It didn’t turn out that way. In addition, although the Church of England
is a moribund institution in Great Britain, Christianity remains a potent force
in Africa, the United States, and elsewhere. Its traditions might be waning in Great Britain and elsewhere, but other
religions, notably Islam, are thriving. Scientists are overwhelmingly secular,
true—but most of the rest of the world’s population, especially those of us who
are less educated or use religion as a means to gain political control, are
not.
Keats, like ever-increasing numbers of Westerners of all
classes, was not religious—at least in the conventional sense. What about in a non-conventional sense? That is the question we shall attempt to
answer in the next section.
3.
A friend of mine once told me that what is bad for the
Jews is good for Judaism, and, conversely, what is good for the Jews is bad for
Judaism. In other words, during periods
of persecution and resultant stress, one often turns to one’s religion for
consolation; one also tends to ignore one’s faith during good times. Did Keats become religious in a conventional
sense when confronted with death? Let us
examine this possibility now.
Keats rarely talked about his early life, and it is easy
to see why. His father died in an
accident when Keats was six; his doting mother abandoned him shortly thereafter
only to return years later, dying from tuberculosis. Keats, her eldest child, was the caretaker of
the family; he took care of her until she died.
Keats was only fourteen at the time of her death. After that, Keats and his siblings lived with
their grandmother, Alice Jennings, where they remained until she died at the
age of seventy-eight in December, 1814, several weeks after her grandson, John,
had completed his twenty-fifth year. She
was a good woman, and provided much needed stability and love. Her passing affected the young poet deeply, as
is demonstrated by the following sonnet which he wrote shortly after she died:
As from the darkening gloom a silver dove
Upsoars, and
darts into the Eastern light.
On pinions that
naught moves but pure delight,
So fled thy soul into the realms above,
Regions of peace and everlasting love;
Where happy
spirits, crown’d with circlets bright
Of starry beam,
and gloriously bedight,
Taste the high joy not but the blest can prove.
That thou or joinest the immortal quire
In melodies that
even Heaven fair
Fill with superior bliss, or, at desire
Of the
omnipotent Father, cleavest the air
On holy message sent—What pleasures higher?
Wherefore does
any grief our joy impair?
Did Keats return to the arms of “the omnipotent Father,”
having had a conversion experience after his beloved grandmother’s death? If he did, it certainly didn’t last. It is more likely that, confronted by the death of
a loved one, Keats was in desperate need of consolation and wrote a poem in
which death is not final, the finality of which he simply couldn’t accept at the time. “And then an awful leisure came/Belief to
regulate” is how Emily Dickinson referred to the time of intense mourning after
a loved one’s death. After his “awful
leisure,” Keats’s “omnipotent Father” once again disappeared.
Keats didn’t share this poem with anyone; he undoubtedly
read this deeply personal poem of poetic consolation many times when the loss
of his grandmother was acutely felt. It
is not one of his best sonnets; I find it deeply moving nevertheless.
Among Keats's siblings, the ardent bibliophile, Tom, Keats’s younger brother, was
closest to him in temperament. Dying from tuberculosis, the family curse,
Tom was lovingly taken care of by the poet, until the former died
at age 19, when the later was 21. Keats
was reported to have been desperately seeking a spiritual consolation as the “awful leisure”
returned, but couldn’t find one.
Four years later, Keats lay dying from the same disease;
he was far away from family and his betrothed, sent abroad in a futile attempt to stem his
illness by a sojourn in sunny Italy. Although
no one knew the nature of tuberculosis at the time, Keats by now was all too
familiar with what lay before him.
Desperate for a consolation that didn’t entail magical thinking, he
asked for several books, namely Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying,
Pilgrim’s Progress, and a translation of Plato's works, but his friend and companion,
Severn, could not find any of them in Rome, a little over two and a half
centuries before one click on the internet could have provided Keats with these
books, and many more as well. As told by Aileen Ward, in her excellent biography of
Keats, John Keats, the Making of a Poet, (page 392), Keats was in despair: “In
his anguish he groaned against the 'malignant being' which denied him
faith—that 'last cheap comfort, which every rogue and fool may have."' His friend, Severn, was appalled by these
words.
Keats directed that his tombstone should contain an image
of a broken lyre, under which these words were to be chiseled in stone: Here
lies a man whose name was writ in water. He did not want his name to appear on it. He died a terrible, painful death, slowly drowning in his own secretions, without loved ones to ease his mental suffering and without any drug to ease his physical pain.
Who could have expected anything else but despair from a
very ambitious young man, who feared that he might cease to be before he wrote the great
poems that were in him? How poignant—and
completely wrong—was his summation of his life as he lay dying: “I have left no
immortal work behind me—nothing to make friends proud of my memory—but I have
lov’d the principle of Beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have
made myself remembered.”
But his understandable despair at his impending death
certainly did not reveal his true attitude toward life. For him the experience of beauty had been a truly
transcendent experience. As he had
written earlier: “What the imagination discovers as Beauty must be
Truth—whether it existed before or not.” This belief is best expressed by the immortal words that end a famous ode written in 1819: “'Beauty is
truth, truth beauty,'—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” God could no
longer be found in prose; in poetry, however, the God-like transcendent reality of Beauty
was very real for him, and did not need any dogmas to confirm its existence. In this sense, Keats was very religious
indeed.
If Keats had been old at the time of his death; having lived a life
dedicated to Beauty, I am convinced that a Spanish proverb would be very
applicable, which I now paraphrase: When you are born, you cry while everyone smiles; if you die after a full life, everyone cries
while you smile.
Keats, a deeply spiritual person and a great poet, was
denied that smile. I really hope he is
smiling somewhere now; I doubt it, but I undoubtedly hope it is true.
