In search of the melodious plot

It's an online commonplace that changing the name of your blog is risky.  Links scattered around the Web will be rendered redundant the moment that 'Save Changes' is clicked.  And then there's the sentimentality and attachment to that initial choice of name, what it means to you and what it has come to represent through each subsequent post.  It's the simplicity of Only Connect that I love, a whole philosophy in two affirmative words.  E M Forster's epigraph to Howards End is inspiring, brave and beautiful.  So much so that it's the taken name of one of my favourite TV shows, the fiendishly difficult quiz presented by Victoria Coren Mitchell.  Which, of course, means that any online search for Only Connect is going to lead to one of two places, Forster's clarion-call or Coren Mitchell's lap.  More problematic are the dozens of other blogs that are called Only Connect.  A change is needed. 

I thought I had stumbled on a new name last week.  Ada Lovelace, mathematician and writer, collaborator with Charles Babbage on the concept of the computer, and Byron's daughter, coined the word 'gobblebook' to describe her feverish reading.  I loved it!  I put it out there to my Facebook and Twitter friends but I soon shelved plans to use it.  It reminded people - it even cursorily read that way - of Gogglebox.  I'd have been swapping one great TV show for another TV show that just hasn't been the same since Leon the Scouse socialist died.  Back to the drawing board.

Ada Lovelace - a lot more than Byron's daughter

It was quite obvious when I gave it more considered thought.  My Twitter handle 'Some Melodious Plot' was just what was required.  The phrase, taken from the finest poem in the English language, John Keats' 'Ode to a Nightingale', was perfect.  Conceptually that little bower 'of beechen green and shadows numberless' was a lovely way to describe the minuscule section of the internet that my blog occupies.  Do I drop the 'some' and replace it with the definite article though?  'The Melodious Plot'?  That would heighten the uniqueness, but it would also betray the ephemeral sense of Keats' phrase and the overall poem.  No, 'Some Melodious Plot' was perfect.   

It might also take care of something else.  If I loved Keats and this poem so much, why had I never blogged about it?  I certainly don't have the witty excuse that the band Half Man Half Biscuit had when they were challenged: "If you love Tranmere Rovers so much, why haven't you wrote a song about them?"  Their answer, "We don't do love songs!" might be the finest riposte ever.  

So, without further ado, let's write some 'mused' thoughts on Keats. Or rather Andrew Motion's wonderful biography of the poet.

Some Melodious Plot

I first read Andrew Motion’s biography of the Romantic poet John Keats back in the summer of 2006.  Half-heartedly toying with the idea of a PhD on Keats, one that made a case for William Hazlitt as the sovereign influence upon the poet's philosophy, it was a very singular and joyless read.  I felt rushed and under pressure to remain in the world of academia, but all of a sudden the motivation and, indeed, the finances that would facilitate my next move began to seem rather limited.  I cared little for Hazlitt, and also felt – an irony that escaped me at the time – that Keats' poetic message was elusive and unfinished.

John Keats - loafing in a bower

Over the course of the past few months, and long free from the shackles of a prescribed reading, I read Motion's biography again.  The intensity of the poet's final few years, the sudden outburst of creativity that resulted in some of the most astonishing poems that have ever been written, and the devastating final twelve months of his life as consumption tore through his lungs, was both startling and moving.  In particular, Motion's description of Keats' final days is almost unbearable.  We find Keats' friend Joseph Severn watching patiently over him.  Indeed, too closely at one point, as Keats summons energy enough to whisper "Don't breathe on me ... it comes like ice!"  In their irritation there's a real plausibility to these words.  In fact, and if we buy into Motion's assertion that Severn is occasionally unreliable and prone to dramatisation in his relating of Keats' last months - this account is almost the only evidence that we have - they have a greater ring of truth than Severn's reporting of Keats' final words. In a letter to Charles Brown:

"He is gone – he died with the most perfect ease – he seemed to go to sleep. On the 23rd, about 4, the approaches of death came on. "Severn – I – lift me up – I am dying – I shall die easy – don't be frightened – be firm, and thank God it has come!"  I lifted him up in my arms. The phlegm seemed boiling in his throat, and increased until 11, when he gradually sunk into death – so quiet - that I still thought he slept. I cannot say now - I am broken down from four nights' watching, and no sleep since, and my poor Keats gone."

A 'manly' death, indeed, and one that Severn could certainly have embellished, conscious that, not only the poet's enemies, but even some of his friends, regarded him as weak and lacking real fight.  The autopsy alone should have been proof enough that Keats did not lack for fight, with the doctor declaring that both of the lungs were almost completely gone and it was staggering that Keats had hung on as long as he had.

'Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water' - Keats' unnamed grave in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome

Immediate emotional responses on finishing a biography naturally weight themselves towards the death-bed.  But after the dust has settled, you begin to recall the moments of genius that give the subject their right to a biography in the first place.  Turning the page and lighting on the full text of the sonnet 'On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer', and the frisson that declares that you are just about to read of the moments when Keats scribbles down the lines of his first great poem, are a real joy.  What appealed to me here was not so much Motion's accounting of Keats' visit to see his school friend Charles Cowden Clarke, and the all-nighter that they pulled thumbing rapturously through the two-hundred year old translation of The Iliad and The Odyssey that was the subject of the poem, but rather filling in the gaps on Keats' journey back to his digs south of the river.  

I imagine the journey that Keats takes between Clerkenwell and Borough, and the by now well-known lines that are feverishly forming in his mind.  That I speculate is forgivable – any biography that is removed by even a generation is speculative by necessity – and I wonder, did John Keats pause halfway across London Bridge, gazing downriver towards the east as the first flickers of sunrise begin to add a glow to the sky, and imagine himself a 'stout Cortez' staring at a larger body of water?  Inspiration from his journey home, just as much as the book that he had read, perhaps?  

'On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer'

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, 
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; 
Round many western islands have I been 
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. 
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told 
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne; 
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene 
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: 
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies 
When a new planet swims into his ken; 
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes 
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men 
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise — 
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

The view from London Bridge at dawn - although you'd need to take away Tower Bridge and HMS Belfast to get Keats' view

I also love the detail that Motion provides us with, as Keats on arriving home needs to jot down, like an A Level English Literature student embarking on a close-reading, the Petrarchan sonnet rhyme scheme in the margins of his poem. His technical learning may have lagged behind that of more financially secure contemporaries such as Byron and Shelley, but his creative genius was ready to eclipse them.  

The drama heightens as we move into 1819, the year when Keats, in an astonishingly creative period, wrote not just his greatest poetry, but some of the greatest poetry in the English language.  Which brings us back to 'Ode to a Nightingale'.  It is the casualness that astonishes.  The details I know well, but when they are placed into the context of a life, they carry a weight and a poignancy that is striking. Stanzas scribbled on scraps of paper that are then passed carelessly to his landlord and friend Charles Brown, who sorts them into some kind of order.  It's as if Keats didn't really rate these lines and wanted rid of them.  Bizarre, as in the sixth stanza of the poem, Keats surpasses all of his hero Shakespeare's death soliloquies (was praise never so faint?)  The tragedy, and of course the irony, is that he would never realise it.      

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time 
I have been half in love with easeful Death, 
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, 
To take into the air my quiet breath; 
Now more than ever seems it rich to die, 
To cease upon the midnight with no pain, 
 While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad 
 In such an ecstasy! 
 Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain— 
 To thy high requiem become a sod.

Whenever I reach for this poem – not that I need to reach, as it's one of the few pieces of literature that I have committed to memory – I recall F Scott-Fitzgerald's observation that "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." Keats’ poem does this and then some, breezing between the desire to disappear from and to engage fully with the real world, the conclusion, like the elusive bird, always a step ahead.  It's probably no accident that Scott-Fitzgerald lifts the phrase 'tender is the night' straight from this poem for the title of his fourth novel. 

'My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sense ...'

And if Keatsian allusion is good enough for Scott-Fitzgerald it's certainly good enough for me.  So long then 'Only Connect' and welcome 'Some Melodious Plot'.  I might not do that phrase justice but I'm certainly going to have a lot of fun trying.  And apologies to Ada Lovelace for rejecting 'Gobblebook', and to Andrew Motion for taking so long to appreciate his wonderful biography.



Postscript: The Half Man Half Biscuit anecdote did strike me as a slightly jarring addition to this post, but I felt that I'd never have a better chance to use it.  Imagine my surprise, then, on listening to their latest single 'Knobheads on Quiz Shows' to find that Nigel Blackwell, the band's genius lyricist, directly quotes Keats: "Truth is beauty, beauty truth ... All you know on earth, all you need to know."  Wonderful stuff!