1 July 1818: Robert Burns, Dirty Bacon, & the Irish Duchess of Dunghill
Dumfries, Scotland
With his close friend Charles Brown, Keats (aged 21) is in the early stages of an ambitious walking trip north.
Keats and Brown begin their trip 24 June from Lancaster. They have just parted with Keats’s brother, George, and his wife, Georgiana, at Liverpool, 23 June; like many British of the era, they are emigrating to the US in search of opportunity and land. This is a loss for Keats: he is very close to George, who, although younger than Keats, has to some extent buffered his older brother from, so to speak, the murky business of the world. Our gain is that Keats begins to write long journal letters to George and Georgiana that significantly broaden our understanding of Keats.
The expedition north takes Keats and Brown
through and around the Lake District, from Kendal and Ambleside and up to Keswick.
The
landscape genuinely astonishes Keats, so much so that it challenges his ideas about
the
relationship between reality and imagination; this will become important for Keats
as he
attempts to understand the imagination as a form knowing, and relative to rationality,
judgment, sensation, and experience. Keats attempts to express what exactly it is
that makes
him respond so profoundly. These elements of the landscape have a tone or intellect
of
their own, he writes. So too does the moment inspire future work: he hopes that from
the
mass of beauty which is harvested from these grand materials
he will learn and write
more than ever . . . for the relish of one’s fellows
(25-27 June). In a way, Keats is
responding to the landscape in the way he responds to encountering and attempting
to
understand great literature.
The two travellers then (30 June) head north to Carlisle on their way to Scotland, where, despite being tired, they spend some of the next day sightseeing. Keats is back in London mid-August. They often average between 15-20 miles/day (sometimes that much even before breakfast), and they travel on foot about 650 miles.
Another way to describe this moment: Having left Wordsworth country, Keats enters Robert Burns country. By late afternoon, 1 July, they are at St. Michael’s churchyard in Dumfries, where Burns (1759-1796) is buried.
Although Burns does not for Keats carry the
influential weight (or burden) of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, or even Spenser, the Scots poet represents the self-directed though tragic outsider—a
psychological and cultural positioning with which Keats no doubt identifies. Keats
composes a
sonnet—On
Visiting the Tomb of Burns—but he does so, he writes, in a strange mood
(letters, 1 July). The poem does, however, clarify something central to Keats’s progress.
Although it ostensibly honours Burns, the sonnet clarifies what Keats needs to poetically
confront: reality—brief human reality—that necessarily holds both beauty and suffering
in the
face of more lasting forms. All is cold Beauty,
he writes; pain is never done.
Nature is long; art is long; life is short. Keats is unsettled by what he feels, but,
importantly, he will later profitably engage these themes more fully in some of his
great odes
in 1819, in which he will articulate and explore the power of art and nature as reflections
upon and representations of knowing, consciousness, and imagination—and in view of
human
mortality. Burns’s fame, as well as his hurried, intense, and heroically ambiguous
life, does,
then, challenge Keats’s view of the poetical character. That this sonnet is stylistically
uncluttered with few tonal prettifications also anticipates new levels of accomplishment.
The journey into Scotland—this whiskey country,
he calls it (letters, 2
July)—continues west after leaving Dumfries. Keats and Brown head toward Kirkcudbright and Portpatrick, making their way through a few
villages. While they enjoy some natural beauty, they are also confronted with poverty
(wretched Cottages, where smoke has no outlet but by the door
[2 July])* and wildly
varying lodgings and food (dirty bacon, dirtier eggs, and dirtiest Potatoes,
[5 July]).
Keats is also strongly put off by what he sees as the church’s tyrannical hold over
the poor,
which is even apparent in the cultural ambiance. They take in a few sights—ruins,
abbeys,
castles—but Keats is generally not impressed, though he notes some beautiful areas
around
Kirkcudbright. Two things are constant at this point: he is always hungry and tired.
And he’s
rapidly falling deeply out of favor with the flavour of oatcake.
From Portpatrick, a very brief trip (6-8 July) is made to northern Ireland and to
Belfast via
a mail-boat. Their hope was to speak with the Paddies
and to see Giant’s Causeway on
the north coast, with its wonderful connection with Gaelic mythology. On their walk
to
Donaghadee, they pass through a large Peat-Bog,
where they see dirty creatures and a
few strong men cutting or carting peat,
and they also pass through a most wretched
suburb
(letters, 9 July). At the time, a large portion of the population live in mud
cabins with clay floors, many with just one room and without any windows—and often
shared with
livestock; disease, like typhus, is rampant. Keats finds the poverty more striking
than what
they have just seen in Scotland. What a tremendous difficulty is the improvement of the
condition of such people,
he writes; with me it is absolute despair.
Most
memorable for Keats, though, is the sight of a squalid, half-starved, pipe-smoking,
ape-like
old woman, squatting in something resembling a dilapidated doghouse, and carried about
on two
old poles by two ragged girls—the Duchess of Dunghill,
he names her. The trip into
Ireland, then, is a fail: the poverty, the high costs relative to Scotland, and the
landscape
cause Brown and Keats to basically turn around, and the Irish adventure amounts to
not much
more than a botched and disappointing day-trip.
