11 July 1818: Burns’s Cottage & Heading North
Ayr, Scotland
Keats and his friend Charles Brown are in Alloway, by Ayr, the birthplace of the famous Scottish poet, Robert Burns, who died in 1796 at the age of thirty-seven. They are a few weeks into a challenging walking tour that starts in northern England and takes them into Scotland. Keats, exhausted, is back in Hampstead by mid-August, only to find that his younger brother’s (Tom’s) consumption has worsened. Keats departed with the belief that Tom was improving; perhaps it was more like hope.
The first leg of the trip begins at the end of June: Keats encounters astonishing
landscapes
in the Lake District—a mass of beauty
that cannot be pre-apprehended by the imagination
(letters, 25-27 June). They continue to Carlisle, and by the late afternoon of 1 July
they are
in Scotland. They make it to St. Michael’s churchyard in Dumfries, where Burns is buried. Keats recognizes that Burns is greatly honored by
his countrymen, but the tomb is not, Keats writes, very much to my taste
(1 July).
After travelling east through villages that are, for Keats, more impressive for their
poverty
than for natural or historical elements, Keats and Brown take a very short detour into northern Ireland as far as Belfast, where the
poverty is even more striking and everything more expensive. They return to Scotland,
landing
at Portpatrick, 8 July. They continue north and take in the dramatic landmark of Ailsa
Rock
(or Craig), a granite island about ten miles from shore, and over 1,000 feet above
sea level
and about 2.5 miles in circumference: they view the landmark from some large hilltops.
Keats
finds the conflated perspective of sea, land, and sky fairly startling—he’s never
seen
anything like it. Keats will write a sonnet about it a few days later—one which he
thinks has
some merit (To Ailsa
Rock). (Keats writes five sonnets on the trip.) The poem, however, does not do
much more than predictably personify and ponder the rock’s nature and its dual existence,
being partly in the sea and partly in the air—one existence with the whales and the
other with
eagles. That the rock is a like a craggy ocean pyramid
somewhat recalls the influence
of Leigh Hunt’s overly poeticized style.
Keats and Brown then head northeast along the
coast, through Ballantrae and Kirkoswald, on their way to Alloway, Burns’s birthplace. As Keats gets closer to Burns’s cottage, he is
determined to forget Burns’s misery,
and he will therefore look upon the cottage with
unmixed pleasure
(11 July, to Reynolds). When they actually reach Burns’s territory, Keats is unexpectedly struck by
its natural beauty; he imagined a desolate
scene. Keats has a few drinks in the cottage
(it was by then partly a whiskey house, and Burns already a legend); he characterizes
the
proprietor as a boring, almost incomprehensible, mahogany-faced old Jackass.
Keats feels obliged to write a sonnet (This mortal body of a thousand
days) under Burns’s roof, but it is
so bad that he destroys it, though not before Brown makes a copy. This is not altogether a different Keats than a few years
earlier, when, within Leigh Hunt’s circle, such a
poem (often on-demand) was valued simply in the spirit of marking occasion and sociability.
The poem is indeed an indifferent effort: he mentions that his pulse is warm
with a
couple of drinks of old barley-bree.
The drama is minimal, and can be reduced to
something quite bland: Burns was here; now he is not; now I am. Not surprisingly,
given the circumstances, the sonnet ends with a reference to the vague irony of poetic
fame
—Keats’s usually unproductive subject for his early poetry.
Keats, though, while in Ayr, still cannot separate himself from thoughts of Burns’s personal misery,
which he mentions on a
couple of occasions; in terms of inspiration, Keats finds that misery a dead weight
upon
his own writing. And he is also perplexed that, with the black Mountains on the
isle of Arran,
Burns was not inspired to write some grand epic
(13 July, to Tom Keats). Keats wonders about and weighs two
things: while he partially identifies with Burns as a poet-outsider with political
values and
an independent drive not unlike his own, he wonders why Burns’s energies took him
in poetical
directions so unlike his—as well as to personal drunken, philandering irregularities
(Burns
fathered seven illegitimate children). Burns’s work strikingly represents his own
traditional
and nationalistic culture. While Keats, too, consciously (and often proudly) ties
himself to
the English tradition, this attachment does not act to tie or limit him so strongly
to what we
might call identity politics. Keats is, for example, just as likely drawn to Italian
or Greek
writers and artists for their larger, deeper values and aesthetics.
Burns, then, is not an influence on Keats in the way of Wordsworth, Milton, or Shakespeare—poets
whose depths and poetic character Keats purposefully and profitably studies. Yet the
idea of Burns—from his modest origins to his place as enduring poet—does stir and
confound Keats. It also upsets him: how sad it is when a luxurious imagination is obliged in self-defence to deaden its
delicacy in vulgarity, and riot in things attainable that it may not have leisure
to go mad after things that are not
(7 July, to Tom). At this point, even with stirring material conditions that surround
him and that Burns himself drew upon, the pursuit of broader imaginative capabilities,
precarious though they may be, still direct Keats’s progress.
Today, the Burns cottage is a part of a significant museum that celebrates the poet.