7-8 August 1818: What Keats takes from the Northern Tour
From Staffa to Cromarty, Scotland
Where, 7-8 August, and at the end of a long northern walking tour, Keats (aged 22)
and his
good friend Charles Brown pause while Keats makes
plans to return to London via a 9-day voyage. Keats cuts the trip short by a month
or two
because of illness—he suffers nastily from chills, fever, and a very bad throat. Brown
stays
behind. In a letter to his grandson, Brown records that, with Keats, he has stumped
642
miles; because of Keats’s condition, Brown writes that it is a matter of prudence
that
Keats return as soon as possible, having taken advice from a physician that he might
not
recover if he continues the walking trip.
Beginning from Lancaster the last week of June, Keats and Brown began their excursion in the Lake District—in Wordsworth territory, where Keats finds the landscape astonishing and Wordsworth’s canvassing for the Tory party lamentable. By 1 July, they are in Dumfries, Scotland, to visit the tomb of the poet Robert Burns. A brief detour to Ireland as far as Belfast reveals poverty more striking than in Scotland. By 11 July, they are in Ayr, Burns’s birthplace.
Keats and Brown pass through Glasgow July 13-14,
and they arrive at Inveraray by the 17th. Within a week, they are in Oban and off
to the
Island of Mull. On the 24th, they see Fingal’s Cave on Staffa. They head northeast
through
some wet weather and reach Fort William on 1 August. Beginning very early the next
morning
they climb nearby Ben Nevis. Keats continues northeast and arrives at Inverness on
6 August.
On 8 August, Keats sails for London from Cromarty, and he arrives at London Bridge
on the
18th. Shabby and exhausted, by evening he is at Wentworth Place in Hampstead. Keats
jokes that
just to sit on a comfortable chair is heaven: punning from a line in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, Keats says, Bless thee, Bottom! Bless thee! Thou art translated.
Then
he goes on to Well Walk to see his younger brother, Tom, who, to Keats’s great distress,
is
very ill with consumption—Keats had left on his trip thinking that Tom was improving,
and now
Keats could no doubt see that there seemed little hope for Tom, aged 18. That Keats
is himself
not in very good condition could not have made his return anything less than fully
disheartening.
The tour is 43 days long; Brown and Keats cover something like 650 miles on foot.
What does Keats take from his trip?
In a condensed and continuous way, Keats for the first time experiences landscapes
and
natural features that truly impact him, and some of the grander features open up his
perception: lakes, islands, mountains and mountain ranges, seas of mist, waterfalls,
tremendous Glens
(letters, 17 July), caves, crags, and chasms. So too does Keats see
endless varieties of plains, cliffs, meadows, peat-bogs, hills and vales, woods, coastlines
and shores, rivers and streams.
In ways relative to the human condition and to his imagination, the meaning of nature
and
natural space challenges Keats. He also absorbs human history in new ways—often in
encounters
with ancient tombs, ruins, castles, cloisters, nunneries, monasteries, and graveyards,
as well
as through old, wretched cottages. He sees towns, villages, and hamlets—some vibrant,
many
impoverished, some forgettable. Significantly, he experiences the dirt and misery of the
human poor
(letters, 9 July) up close, and he questions if there are solutions to such
conditions. In Scotland he feels church oppression. He encounters everything from
rosy-cheeked
dancing children to joyless peddlers and belligerent drunks, from the hardy and stout
to the
feeble and ailing; and how could he ever forget the ape-like, pipe-smoking Duchess
of Dunghill
in his truncated trip to Ireland? He is greeted with kindness, confusion, and mistrust,
and he
often feels the station of a true outsider. That some of those they meet have not
even seen
spectacles (which Brown wears) reminds him of his
specific cultural station; that Scotland and Ireland are so very different from southern
England becomes utterly clear. Keats meets many who speak no English, and getting
directions
from them is frustrating, humbling, and comical. Keats and Brown are variously taken
as
French, as soldiers, Spectacle venders, Razor sellers, Jewellers, travelling linnen
drapers, Spies, Excisemen, & many things else
(6 August, to Mrs. Wylie).
In William Wordsworth’s Lake District, where
the trip begins, the landscapes take Keats out of himself and to a theme that will
now more
deliberately brace his poetry and poetics: he experiences views that can never fade
away—they make one forget the divisions of life
(26 June). The physical countenance and
power of what he sees surpasses the powers of imagination; such views are, he writes,
beyond any means of conception
(28
June). Here, he declares, he will learn poetry
and write more than ever
in order
to add to that mass of beauty which is harvested from these grand materials
(27 June,
to Tom Keats).
Keats on his tour also confronts what he refers to as Burns’s misery, which in turn makes him confront his own poetic character and aspirations. But Burns is a complicated figure for Keats, and though he tries to capture the meaning or significance of the already legendary Burns in a few poems, Keats’s tone toward and understanding of Burns in both his letters and poems remain at the same time inadequate and confused. However, this state does allow Keats to profitably reconsider a topic that teases him out of thought: the relationship of the imagination to actuality—to real, lived life—within the context of human existence; yet, this also includes what for Keats dominates what Burns’s life means and represents: once more, that misery. Although Keats identifies with Burns as the independent outsider driven by his own creative goals, Burns, for Keats, is hardly the figure of the ideal poet. For Keats, Burns is a conflicted figure of poetic fame.
While no doubt all of this strengthens Keats’s experiential reach
in
poetry—especially, perhaps, in terms of understanding the range of human suffering
while
increasing the complexity of his own responses to various sights and conditions—it
also
weakens him physically. Drawing from his own wording, he comes to see that even in
the most
abstracted Pleasure there is no lasting happiness
(7 July), yet, he realizes, it is all
we have and what we must nonetheless pursue.
Keats writes quite a bit of poetry on the trip, though most of it occasional, light, or intended to please those to whom he is writing. Some seems to have been written just to pass the time, or just due to the obligation he feels that he should write something. No doubt being constantly on the road compromises qualitative aspects of the work; that is, compositional circumstances are hardly ideal. Revealingly, none of the fifteen poems he writes during the northern trip are selected for his last volume of poetry, the 1820 collection. When he does attempt serious poetry—as he does, for example, in addressing Burns, being at the summit of Ben Nevis, and seeing Ailsa Rock—the poetry mainly remains oddly stilted; perhaps the compositional circumstances are not conducive to deeper or accomplished verse, or perhaps he is not ready, and has other things on his mind. Perhaps the circumstances push too directly on him, rather than emerging from within him.
Keats is more changed than directly inspired by the experience of his northern expedition:
there is no way the trip cannot have widened his scope of nature, life, culture, and
history;
and no doubt the trip does, as it were, take him out
of himself before it takes him
back into himself—and when it does, it has to be with deeper senses and a widened
scope,
aspects of which will manifest themselves in his greatest work, the poetry of 1819.
In this
poetry, what we could call the third and final phase of poetic development, the power
and
limitations of the imagination will come to be maturely restrained and complicated;
human
mortality in the face of enduring ideas and objects will be explored with controlled
intensity; knowing will be subsumed by beauty; and, perhaps most remarkably, he will
evolve a
voice and poetic forms that reflect and sustain his subjects.
Keats began the trip by saying good-bye to one younger brother, George, departing to America from Liverpool—my greatest
friend,
he calls him (6 August to Mrs. Wylie)—and he ends the trip completely exhausted
and with a bad throat, and with the necessity to care for his other younger brother,
Tom, who
is sinking fairly quickly from the contagious illness of consumption (TB), the wasting
disease. This does not bode well, especially given Keats’s own lingering physical
weakness and
what seems to be a family pre-disposition to the illness. Keats no doubt carried a
little
guilt in facing Tom, since he left on his
walking trip believing that Tom was improving; it was probably a hope based on fear.