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larryhammerFor Poetry Monday, might as well get in a posthumously published short from the third of the three great 2nd Gen Romantics:
“This living hand, now warm and capable,” John Keats
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.
Written in November 1819 beneath the draft of stanza 51 of The Cap and Bells; or, The Jealousies: A Faery Tale (final title still TBD when he abandoned it after almost 800 lines) and first published in an 1898 edition of his collected poetry. The initial romantic-with-a-small-r interpretation was that this was a complete poem addressed to his fiancée, Fanny Brawne, but current consensus is that it’s a fragment he jotted to reuse in a later work, possibly a drama. What is certain is that it was written around the time he recognized undeniable symptoms of the tuberculosis that would kill him (as it already had his mother and youngest brother) fifteen months later.
---L.
Subject quote from Pictures of You, The Cure. Which, yes, plays into the Great Romantic Myth of Keats, but tonally fits the poem.
“This living hand, now warm and capable,” John Keats
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.
Written in November 1819 beneath the draft of stanza 51 of The Cap and Bells; or, The Jealousies: A Faery Tale (final title still TBD when he abandoned it after almost 800 lines) and first published in an 1898 edition of his collected poetry. The initial romantic-with-a-small-r interpretation was that this was a complete poem addressed to his fiancée, Fanny Brawne, but current consensus is that it’s a fragment he jotted to reuse in a later work, possibly a drama. What is certain is that it was written around the time he recognized undeniable symptoms of the tuberculosis that would kill him (as it already had his mother and youngest brother) fifteen months later.
---L.
Subject quote from Pictures of You, The Cure. Which, yes, plays into the Great Romantic Myth of Keats, but tonally fits the poem.
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Date: 19 May 2025 02:43 pm (UTC)Typing that made me wince. Been there. It's in the same smoothly flowing Spencerian stanzas he used for The Eve of St. Agnes, and would have been an Excellent Thing if he hadn't lost the thread of the story halfway through.
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Date: 19 May 2025 05:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 19 May 2025 07:22 pm (UTC)It's not one of his, say, top-10 hits, but I've seen it in anthologies a few times.
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Date: 20 May 2025 02:10 am (UTC)I learned it from
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Date: 20 May 2025 03:40 am (UTC)I’d forgotten that — haven’t read it since it first came out.
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Date: 5 June 2025 07:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 5 June 2025 11:16 pm (UTC)