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. 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. A gain for us: 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 becomes important as Keats attempts
to
understand the imagination as a form of knowing, and relative to his developing sense
of
rationality, judgment, sensation, and experience—and, dare we say it—reality. Keats
attempts
to express what exactly it is that makes him respond so profoundly. These elements
of the
landscape seem to 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 his encounters with great literature. This all connects to the questions
of the
age: Does the landscape (or nature) have its own independent power, or does the mind, via
the capable imagination, constitute or create this power? Or is it some deeper intermingling
of the two? Where, exactly, does the sublime exist?
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]).
On 3 July, Keats and Brown breakfast at the tiny village of Authencairn, where Keats writes a short ballad that, on the surface, both memorializes and sentimentalizes a homeless old woman of the heath: Old Meg she was a gipsey. He writes it into a letter for his sister, Fanny. The poem’s inspiration is drawn from the human landscape that Keats is witnessing, but the subject—old Meg Merrilies, a gypsy—is nominally lifted from the very successful 1815 novel, Guy Mannering, which Brown much later tells us Keats had not read (like the other Waverly novels, it was originally published anonymously by Walter Scott). Keats, though, likely heard about the character from accounts of the book as well as its popular cultural figuring via a London stage adaptation over December 1817 into early 1818. However, Keats’s figure, given her intimacy with the landscape’s simple boon, derives something more from the naturalized sublimity of Wordsworth than from Scott’s somewhat supernatural (and somewhat meddling) gypsy. Keats’s poem would not have looked out of place among Wordsworth’s in Lyrical Ballads. The poem’s accomplishment is decent and subtle: its styled understatement perhaps anticipates another short ballad to come in April 1819, the more powerfully allusive La Belle Dame sans Merci.
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, and so would consumption. 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.
[See here for an interactive, annotated map with a timeline of Keats’s Northern Walking Tour with Charles Brown.]
