"Bright Star" - John Keats's quarantine poem



Where I live in Oregon we’re going on 10 weeks of “shelter-in-place,” an order from the governor that feels very much like quarantine. Movie theatres, dine-in restaurants, hair salons, shopping malls, parks, playgrounds – all are currently closed in an effort to stop the spread of the highly contagious coronavirus.

Like many of my friends, family, and neighbors, I‘ve been experiencing a range of emotions as the weeks drag on. At times I’ve felt anxious, depressed, confined, and even angry. That's to be expected, or so we're told. But what I didn’t expect was to feel a surge of creativity. 

Since lockdown I’ve worked on revising a novel, started another blog, planted flowers, tried new recipes, spackled and painted dings in our walls (that I’ve been meaning to get to for years), de-cluttered closets and crocheted a blanket, a wall hanging and an amigurumi cat.

Who knew that staying home could be so productive? Just about everybody, I guess. It should be no surprise that if you can’t get away from projects staring you in the face you’re eventually going to break down and work on them. It’s hard to procrastinate for long when there’s nowhere to go. 

This isn’t a new phenomenon. Throughout centuries artists and others have chosen quarantine to escape disease outbreaks, and in many cases, they’ve produced some of their best work while confined. 
 
For example, it's believed that Shakespeare wrote King Lear in lockdown during a bubonic plague outbreak in the early 1600s. And about six decades later in 1665-1666, Isaac Newton experimented in the field of optics, explored his ideas on the laws of motion and gravity, and developed calculus during the year he “sheltered-in-place” at his family estate because Cambridge University had canceled classes due to another plague outbreak.  

John Keats
However, there’s a well-known Regency figure who also got creative while in quarantine. It’s John Keats, a Romantic poet. He worked feverishly during the last years of the Regency, achieving a measure of fame during his lifetime that became even greater after his untimely death. 

Today he's one of England's most beloved poets. And when he was quarantined off the coast of Italy in 1820, he used his time in confinement to work on a beautiful love poem.

Keats was an unlikely literary prodigy. He was born in 1795 in Moorgate, London, the son of the head hostler of the livery stable attached to the Swan and Hoop Inn.  Keats's father married his employer’s daughter, and he later prospered by managing the inn. 

The oldest of four surviving children, John received a good education from a private school run by a clergyman. At that school, he was fortunate to find a mentor who encouraged him to read and introduced him to the arts, especially poetry.

But the boy's life started to change when he was 8 and his father died from a fall off a horse. Six years later his mother died from tuberculosis, which would prove to be a family curse. So at age 14, young John was put in the care of a guardian, who took him out of school and apprenticed him to a surgeon, putting him on the path to a medical career.

It was a pragmatic plan formed by a conscientious, business-minded guardian. For the next few years, Keats studied medicine and worked at a London hospital. By 1816 Keats had advanced far enough in his studies to qualify as an apothecary. But then, against his guardian’s advice, Keats abandoned medicine to write poetry.

Keats found literary friends and mentors in London, most notably Leigh Hunt, who was the editor of a radical journal. The young poet also joined a literary circle that included Hunt, the critic and essayist William Hazlitt, and the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and Charles Lamb, among others.

But despite the encouragement he received, Keats's life wasn't easy. Starting with the deaths of his parents, he endured many setbacks. 

He was supposed to get an inheritance, but the money was tied up in court throughout his life, leaving him financially strapped. A short man, barely five feet tall, Keats was bullied in school for his height. And his humble origins, along with his association with the controversial Hunt, caused class-conscious Tories to dismiss him once he got published as a “Cockney poet.” But Keats persisted, and his talent eventually got him ranked among the great poets in English literature. 

During his short career (he wrote from 1814 to 1820, and was only published after 1816)  Keats published 54 poems, including "Endymion", "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Lamia," "The Eve of St. Agnes," and many more. Though many of his poems aren't as well known today as they were to the Victorians,  his work still resonates. 

For example, the first line of his poem "To Autumn" gives us the classic, oft-repeated description of autumn as a "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness."

By the time he died, the prolific poet's literary output surpassed that of Chaucer, Milton, or Shakespeare when they were his age. 

Here are the first few lines of my favorite Keats poem, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci", detailing a wandering knight's strange encounter:

I met a lady in the meads
Full beautiful, a faery’s child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

The story of this meeting goes on, but if you want to know what happens, you’ll just have to read the rest of the poem!

But back to Keats's life: in 1818 the family curse, tuberculosis, resurfaced. That year Keats and his brother George nursed their brother Tom, who sickened and died of the disease in December. (George would also die from tuberculosis years later.) Tom’s death fueled Keats’s premonition that he would die young as well, and it made him desperate to get as much work done as possible. 
 
And it didn’t help that earlier that year Keats had undertaken a strenuous walking tour of Ireland, Scotland, and the Lake District in England, an adventure that left him worn out and with an ulcerated throat due to the wet, cold weather he’d endured.

However, 1818 wasn’t all bad for the poet. In the fall he met a vivacious 18-year-old woman, Fanny Brawne. He fell desperately in love with her, a love she reciprocated, and they became engaged.

La Belle Dame Sans Merci,
painted by John William Waterhouse
But Keats was in no position to take a wife. He didn’t have much money, he needed to dedicate himself to his work to earn a living, and his health was starting to decline. To quote the introduction to Keats in my trusty Norton Anthology of English Literature, these factors “made marriage impossible and love a torment" for the young poet.

And then, in the early months of 1820 Keats saw the unmistakable signs of tuberculosis invading his lungs. 

And now we come to his stint in quarantine.

After enduring a miserable winter, Keats agreed to move to Italy in the autumn of 1820, hoping that a milder climate would improve his health. But when his ship got to Naples it was put in quarantine. There had been a cholera outbreak in England, and the Italian authorities wanted to make sure the travelers hadn’t brought the contagious disease with them. 

That's beginning to sound familiar, isn't it?

So, Keats and his fellow travelers were stuck on their ship for 10 days. It was November before Keats and his friend (the painter Joseph Severn) made it to Rome. The poet's condition worsened, and Keats died on February 23, 1821. He was just 25 years old. 

There's evidence that while quarantined on board the brig Maria Crowther Keats may have worked on revising a poem he'd started sometime earlier. Known as "The Last Sonnet" or "Bright Star," this poem is regarded as a final message and love-letter to Fanny. 

Here it is:

Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art —
    Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
    Like Nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
    Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
    Of snow upon the mountains and the moors —
No — yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
    Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel forever its soft fall and swell,
    Awake forever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever — or else swoon to death. 

Contagious diseases aside, Keats’s 10 days of quarantine in the beautiful Bay of Naples isn’t really parallel to the months of semi-quarantine that we are experiencing during this COVID-19 pandemic.  After all, I can put on a mask and go to the pharmacy and the grocery store, get take-out food and take long walks – things you can’t do when you're quarantined on a ship.

And while most of us might not be composing timeless poetry while we hide from a virus, any creative endeavor we undertake gives us something in common with Keats, Newton, and Shakespeare – or so I’d like to think!



Sources
  • Abrams, M.H., General Editor, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Third Edition, Vol. 2, (section on John Keats, pages 633-717) W.W. Norton & Company Inc., New York, 1974.
  • “A Letter from Quarantine by John Keats", Lapham's Quarterly, Monday, April 13, 2020.
  • Debczak, Michelle, "Five People Who Were Amazingly Productive in Quarantine," Mental Floss, March 19, 2020
  • Dickson, Andrew, "Shakespeare in lockdown: did he write King Lear in plague quarantine?", The Guardian, March 22, 2020 


Images courtesy of Pixabay and Wikimedia Commons

Riddles, Rebuses and Jane Austen




Jane Austen must have had fun writing her fourth published novel, Emma. In addition to sparkling dialogue, funny situations, and comic misunderstandings, she included a couple of riddles. 

If you have the book handy, these riddles appear in Chapter IX. They are also featured in the movie adaptations. 

Here's how the riddles appear: Emma is attempting to improve her protégé Harriet’s mind with reading and conversation, but the only literary pursuit that interests Harriet is collecting riddles, which she is compiling into a book. 

Emma sees an opportunity to further her misguided scheme of matching Harriet with Mr. Elton. She asks the vicar to contribute a riddle to Harriet’s collection. He replies with this convoluted gem:

"My first displays the wealth and pomp of kings, Lords of the earth! their luxury and ease. 
Another view of man, my second brings, Behold him there, the monarch of the seas!
But ah! united, what reverse we have! Man's boasted power and freedom, all are flown; 
Lord of the earth and sea, he bends a slave, And woman, lovely woman, reigns alone. 
Thy ready wit the word will soon supply, May its approval beam in that soft eye!"

1996 film
Emma solves the riddle right away but has to explain it to Harriet.

It’s a two-syllable word, she tells her friend. "My first” or the first syllable signifies “court” (the wealth and pomp of kings) and the second (monarch of the seas) is “ship.” Put together, the answer is “courtship,” during which a man “bends a slave” and “woman, lovely woman, reigns alone.”

Emma is convinced that the riddle is a compliment to Harriet, announcing Mr. Elton’s wish to court her. But Emma is clueless, of course. She doesn't get that Mr. Elton meant the riddle for her. 

In any case, riddles were a popular pastime in Regency England. Here’s another riddle, well-known in her time, that Jane Austen also mentions in Chapter IX:

"My first doth affliction denote,
Which my second is destin'd to feel 
And my whole is the best antidote 
That affliction to soften and heal."

Once again the answer is a two-syllable word. The first syllable, a synonym for affliction, is woe. The second syllable refers to who feels the pain – man. So the answer to the riddle of what is the best cure for man’s pain is woe-man or woman. 

Though this riddle is discussed by Emma and Harriet the answer isn’t spelled out in the text – probably because the author figured everybody already knew it.

Oedipus and the Sphinx

But perhaps the best-known riddle of all time is the classic Riddle of the Sphinx. Jane Austen would almost certainly have been familiar with it. It’s in Oedipus Rex, a play written by the Greek dramatist Sophocles approximately 430 years BCE.

In the story, Oedipus has to get into the city of Thebes. But he has a problem: the entrance to the city is guarded by the Sphinx, a mythical creature that has the face of a woman, the body of a lion, and the wings of a bird. 

The Sphinx amuses herself by demanding that anyone who wants to enter the city answer a riddle first. If they don’t get the right answer – and, spoiler alert, no one does – she eats them. That's why the Sphinx is often depicted in art with the skulls of her victims at her feet. 

Here’s her riddle: “Which creature has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?" 

Do you know the answer? Oedipus did, so the Sphinx went hungry that night. 

The answer is man – as a baby he crawls on all fours, as an adult he walks on two feet, and as an old man he walks with a cane - the cane is the third foot. 

Riddles were a popular brain teaser in the 18th and 19th centuries. One form of entertainment was a riddle menu, where you had to figure out what items were on a menu by solving a riddle. 

For example, would you care for some “counterfeit agony”? You might turn that offer down until you realize it’s a riddle: “counterfeit” means “sham” and rhymes with “cham,” while “agony” is “pain” and rhymes with “pagne.” Now, how about that glass of champagne?

In addition to riddles, a bit of wordplay known as a rebus was another popular game, not only in the 18th and 19th centuries but going back as far as the  Middle Ages. 

A rebus is a word puzzle that uses pictures combined with letters to illustrate a word, a phrase, or even a whole sentence. It’s like a code you have to decipher. 

During the Middle Ages, rebuses were used in heraldry. A rebus often represented a surname in a family crest. 

And here’s a Victorian example of a rebus on an "escort card" (also known as acquaintance or flirtation cards) that a 19th-century man might give to a woman he's interested in courting:

"May I see you home, my dear?"


Rebuses are still popular today. Sometimes they’re designed for children, like the rebus page in Highlights Magazine that tells a simple story using sentences sprinkled with pictures in place of words. 

And sometimes you can see a rebus on television. Ellen Degeneres has contestants solve a rebus in her current TV program, Ellen’s Game of Games

A rebus may have been difficult for Jane Austen's publishers to add to her manuscripts, even if she wanted one in her stories. But at least we have proof in Emma that Jane enjoyed a good riddle! 


Sources

  • Riddles, Charades, Rebusses, from the British Library Collection
  • Decoding (Most of) an 18th-Century ‘Riddle Menu’,” by Anne Ewbank, Atlas Obscura, October 26, 2018
  • Emma, by Jane Austen, published December 23, 1815, by John Murray, London

Images courtesy of Pixabay and Wikimedia Commons

Emma.





Last March, just before COVID-19 caused most of the world to go into lockdown, I actually went to a movie theater. That’s how I got to see Emma. in all its glory on the big screen, just like God and Hollywood intended.

And what a treat it is! Emma. is a confection of a movie, whipped up in pretty candy color hues of yellow, blue, and pink. This visual sweetness is offset by Jane Austen’s tart observations. The story is further embellished with lush scenery, beautiful costumes (I don’t think Emma wears the same gown twice), and a soundtrack featuring Mozart and Haydn as well as traditional English melodies.

Emma was the fourth novel Jane published, and by 1815 when the book came out she was a successful author writing under her own name. Her fame was such that even the Prince Regent was an admirer. Through an intermediary, he invited her to dedicate Emma to him.

The Prince Regent in 1816
That request must have bemused Jane. She was no fan of Prinny; she sided with his estranged wife Caroline of Brunswick. Writing about the royal couple in 1813 to her friend Martha Lloyd, Jane said: “Poor woman, I shall support her as long as I can because she is a Woman, and because I hate her husband.”

But Jane must have realized that when the future king asks a favor, it’s best to grant it. So Jane wrote a rather fulsome dedication anyway, calling herself “His Royal Highness’s dutiful and obedient humble servant.” I like to think she wrote it tongue-in-cheek.

What sets Emma apart from Austen’s previously published novels is that the young heroine is immature and not very likable at the outset of the story. Unlike Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice or Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, Emma lacks self-awareness.  She’s good-hearted but basically self-centered.

 “Handsome, clever, and rich,” Emma is a big fish in a small pond and occupies the top tier of her local society. Immune to her own privileged circumstances, she can be surprisingly insensitive and even carelessly cruel to people of lower rank.

And she is quite full of herself. She thinks she knows what’s best for everyone, and doesn’t scruple to manipulate people and situations to achieve her aims.

So it’s not surprising that Emma decides to conduct a social experiment. She takes a less fortunate school friend under her wing and decides to play matchmaker.

Harriet Smith doesn't know who her parents are, but she does know that someone is paying her tuition. It's assumed that she is "illegitimate," the offspring of unwed parents, and in those days illegitimacy was almost always an insurmountable barrier to social acceptance. But Emma arrogantly believes that her friendship and guidance will be enough to elevate Harriet from her inferior rank into a higher social stratum.

Jane Austen 
So Emma convinces Harriet to reject a humble farmer’s proposal and set her matrimonial sights instead on the local vicar. 

And as Emma counsels her protégé, she also meddles in the lives of several people in her social circle. All the while Emma is oblivious to what’s really going on beneath the surface. Wealthy and wise local landowner Mr. Knightley tries to warn Emma, but she refuses to listen until it’s almost too late.

Emma’s saving grace is that she matures throughout the book. She’s sincerely contrite when she realizes her mistakes and she does her best to make amends. And of course, there’s a happy ending for everyone involved.

Austen described Emma as a character that no one other than herself would much like. But history has proved Jane wrong. Emma is one of Austen’s most popular novels. It’s comical, light-hearted, and fun. 

Plus, there’s something rather endearing about Emma that shines through all he machinations. After all, she means well, even though most of the time she has no idea what’s going on.

In recent years Emma has been in vogue, with four mostly faithful adaptations of Austen’s novel. In 1996 there was a television movie starring Kate Beckinsale in the title role. That year also saw a lavish big-screen version of Jane’s tale with Gwyneth Paltrow in the lead.

Fast forward almost a decade and you have a four-part BBC miniseries in 2009, starring Romola Garai. And of course, just this year there’s Emma. with Ana Taylor Joy. (The period in the title is intentional – the director wanted to stress that this is a faithful adaptation of the novel, a real “period piece”).   

But my favorite adaptation of Emma is 1995’s Clueless, a sparkling modern take on Jane’s classic story.

In Clueless, Emma is portrayed by Alicia Silverstone as an entitled but sweet Beverley Hills teenager. The setting is about as far away from the early 19th-century English countryside as you can get, but somehow this film captures the spirit of Austen’s story better than the other adaptations, in my opinion.

But you can judge the best adaptation for yourself. Even though cinemas remain closed for most of us, you can still see the theatrical release of Emma. For $15 you can download it on YouTube, Amazon Prime, or Google Play. 

Take it from me, this movie is a great way to sink into Jane Austen’s world and forget about the present, at least for a couple of hours.

Do you have a favorite Emma adaptation? Tell us in the comments.

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