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John Keats, Letter to Fanny Brawne, 1819
In the autumn of 1819, John Keats was a young poet with almost no money and a great deal of unfinished work. He was in love with Fanny Brawne, the girl who lived on the other side of the wall.
I mean that literally. Her family rented the other half of the house he lodged in, in Hampstead, just outside London.
There was an understanding between them. There was no money to marry on, and everyone around them knew it.
That summer he had gone away, first to the coast and then to Winchester, to write. In October he came back to London and took rooms at 25 College Street in Westminster. He wanted inexpensive lodgings within reach of books, and some distance from Fanny. The distance did not help him work.
He sat down to make a clean copy of some of his poems. He could not do it.
This is what he wrote to her instead.
My dearest Girl,
This moment I have set myself to copy some verses out fair. I cannot proceed with any degree of content. I must write you a line or two and see if that will assist in dismissing you from my Mind for ever so short a time. Upon my Soul I can think of nothing else – The time is passed when I had power to advise and warn you again[s]t the unpromising morning of my Life – My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you – I am forgetful of every thing but seeing you again – my Life seems to stop there – I see no further. You have absorb’d me.
Look at the word he chose. Content.
He could not copy out his own poems with any degree of content, and he tells her so as plainly as he would tell her the weather.
I need you to understand what he is admitting. He had one job that afternoon, the same job I have done every evening for thirty years, and he could not do it because she existed on the other side of the city.
He does not pretend this is noble. He says it has made him selfish, and then he keeps writing anyway.
Now listen to me. We are told, quietly and constantly, that this is a thing that happens to the young.
That at a certain age a woman stops being the reason somebody puts down his pen. That she becomes the one who keeps everything running so that other people can be interrupted by love.
I have never believed it for one afternoon.
Read his dashes again. Every one of them is a place where he started a sensible sentence and it broke off into her.
Then come the four words that stop me every time I copy them out: I see no further.
Not a declaration, not a promise, not a plan. It is a man telling a woman that his whole life, all the poems and all the ambition, runs straight into her and simply stops.
You have carried a want like that, unsaid, at your own kitchen table. It is not a smaller thing because you are older than he was, and it is not a sillier thing because nobody ever wrote it down for you.
Somebody did write it down. In 1819 a man sat in a rented room, failed to do his work, and left behind the exact sentence for how that feels.
It has been lying there for two hundred years. It is yours the moment you pick it up.
Underneath it I wrote
I did not finish the page today, and I know exactly why.
Today. Copy his sentence about not being able to proceed, by hand and slowly, keeping every one of his dashes. Underneath it, write one line about what pulled you away from your own work this week. You do not have to name it. The line only has to be true.
From an old page
Twenty years ago I copied this from Walden, Henry David Thoreau, 1854: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
At the time I underlined desperation. I thought that was the word doing the work.
Now I think it is quiet. The desperation is common to all of us, but the quiet is a choice, the thing we agree to.
Keats did not agree to it. That is the whole difference between his letter and most of the lives I know.
