Terreson
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Keats

The young Endymion sleeps Endymion’s sleep;
The shepherd-boy whose tale was left half told!
The solemn grove uplifts its shield of gold
To the red rising moon, and loud and deep
The nightingale is singing from the steep;
It is midsummer, but the air is cold;
Can it be death? Alas, beside the fold
A shepherd’s pipe lies shattered near his sheep.
Lo! in the moonlight gleams a marble white,
On which I read: “Here lieth one whose name
Was writ in water.” And was this the meed
Of his sweet singing? Rather let me write:
“The smoking flax before it burst to flame
Was quenched by death, and broken the bruised reed.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

John Keats

Who killed John Keats?
‘I,’ says the Quarterly,
So savage and Tartarly;
”Twas one of my feats.’

Who shot the arrow?
‘The poet-priest Milman
(So ready to kill man),
Or Southey or Barrow.’

George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron

The Grave Of Keats

RID of the world’s injustice, and his pain,
He rests at last beneath God’s veil of blue:
Taken from life when life and love were new
The youngest of the martyrs here is lain,
Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain.
No cypress shades his grave, no funeral yew,
But gentle violets weeping with the dew
Weave on his bones an ever-blossoming chain.
O proudest heart that broke for misery!
O sweetest lips since those of Mitylene!
O poet-painter of our English Land!
Thy name was writ in water—-it shall stand:
And tears like mine will keep thy memory green,
As Isabella did her Basil-tree.

Oscar Wilde

To John Keats

Great master! Boyish, sympathetic man!
Whose orbed and ripened genius lightly hung
From life’s slim, twisted tendril and there swung
In crimson-sphered completeness; guardian
Of crystal portals through whose openings fan
The spiced winds which blew when earth was young,
Scattering wreaths of stars, as Jove once flung
A golden shower from heights cerulean.
Crumbled before thy majesty we bow.
Forget thy empurpled state, thy panoply
Of greatness, and be merciful and near;
A youth who trudged the highroad we tread now
Singing the miles behind him; so may we
Faint throbbings of thy music overhear.

Amy Lowell

For the Anniversary of John Keats’ Death

At midnight, when the moonlit cypress trees
Have woven round his grave a magic shade,
Still weeping the unfinished hymn he made,
There moves fresh Maia, like a morning breeze
Blown over jonquil beds when warm rains cease.
And stooping where her poet’s head is laid,
Selene weeps, while all the tides are stayed,
And swaying seas are darkened into peace.
But they who wake the meadows and the tides
Have hearts too kind to bid him wake from sleep,
Who murmurs sometimes when his dreams are deep,
Startling the Quiet Land where he abides,
And charming still sad-eyed Persephone
With visions of the sunny earth and sea.

Sara Teasdale

What Kisses Had John Keats?

I scanned two lines with some surmise
As over Keats I chanced to pore:
‘And there I shut her wild, wild eyes
With kisses four.’

Says I: ‘Why was it only four,
Not five or six or seven?
I think I would have made it more,–
Even eleven.

‘Gee! If she’d lured a guy like me
Into her gelid grot
I’d make that Belle Dame sans Merci
Sure kiss a lot.

‘Them poets have their little tricks;
I think John counted kisses for,
Not two or three or five or six
To rhyme with “sore.”‘

Robert W. Service

Keats

Writing a poem about sunset
in the burning ochre light
about the victory at twilight that
proves the value of our fight.
Unexpectedly, the light was gone
and I couldn’t see to write.
Then night, and I never finished
the poem.

Gary B. Fitzgerald

To John

“Who most inspired your poetry?
What poets were you influenced by?”

Well, I replied, I’d have to say
it was Jackson Pollock. And sea gulls.
Sailing ships and timber wolves
and everyone who ever died.

(Reality itself is not poetic,
just its origin and fruits)
The seed and the flower.

I don’t understand, you said.

Being, my friend! Being dead!
Just this. Who cares why?
That’s what inspires!
The physics of quantum,
the quality of light,
all the tears that were ever cried,
the emptiness and the power.
The beauty of the mystery.

I still don’t understand.

That’s it! Not understanding!
Negative capability.

Gary B. Fitzgerald
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“Bright Star seems to be a lot about very little, a miniature projected to Imax size. So much goes unspoken that what remains seems almost trite.”–Hollywood and Fine

“Writer-director Jane Campion approaches the tale with an artiste’s respectful solemnity, but it too often comes off like Twilight transplanted across oceans and centuries.”–TimeOut New York

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever, but a thing of plodding inevitability is just two hours of my time amiably wasted.”–A.V. Club
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There was something an editor said about Goethe that sticks to me like honey on the comb. Goethe, the great man, the scientist, the hydraulics engineer, the man who took on Newton’s theory about light, the inventor of the theory of biological morphology, the discoverer of the anatomical link between humans and other primates, the statesman, the one man Napolean tipped to, the novelist, the poet. In the end, the editor said, what saved Goethe (and I think he meant what saved the poet from his Faustian self) was his willingness to love. That is what I know.

Terreson
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If anybody from filmdom is here I got two other favorite stories involving poets and love. Abelard and Heloise is the first. Yes, Peter Abelard was a poet whose songs to her got sung in Parisian streets by Parisian students when the affair was ongoing, before he got castrated and shunned. And I’ve always thought the student became a greater, closer thinker than the teacher. Then there is Goethe’s last great, unrequited, love, when he was an old man, for a Polish-German 18 year old girl. A journalist would later ask Ulrike would she have married Goethe had her family, his duke, and society not stood in the way. She replied, of course. They say the poems that came from his love for her, his “Trilogy of Passion”, are Europe’s greatest lyric poems. What a notion, huh? Lyric poetry made by an old man, and not sentimental, grounded in the here and now. Come to think of it, Yeats was an old man too, and finally married and settled, when he made his best lyric poetry.

Yep. These are also stories I would take on were I a film maker. And with plot lines so rich and layered you can’t make them up.

Terreson
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