The Luniferous Gazette #39: Keats and the Kindred Fear

 To All Fair Creatures of an Hour

* 

*Lunar sliver of light from 2015

 

Recently, I was perusing my very first writing blog, three blogspots back, that I had started in my twenties. I was so hopeful, and happy, not yet whittled to syllabic smithereens by all the pains time would teach me—ah. I feel rather silly waxing nostalgic! Especially when there are those who never ever get that chance in life. I found a post there that I wrote about the poet John Keats that I still really love. Even more so, now. 

So I’ve updated my homage to that vivid Romantic so I can reshare it today . . . 

John Keats is one of my favorite poets, in part because I know the supernal ache in his poetry is tied to the brief urgency of his life. His father died in a horse-riding accident when he was only eight, and later his mother and younger brother died of tuberculosis. He also caught the disease and died at the young age of twenty-five in 1821. Yet what Keats accomplished still dazzles the minds of starry-eyed writers everywhere.

But beyond the lust for life, there is also a very familiar fear threading some of his lines; the fear of failure, of never finishing, of a blank emptiness haunting Keats as his time on Earth dwindles and draws to a swift close: 

 

When I have fears that I may cease to be

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

I would daresay that every writer—every human—has known this same, kindred fear at some point. Somehow, knowing that Keats felt that yawning pit of despair, but still inked his heart out to the last stroke of the quill gives me courage to keep on inking on. I've lived almost nine seventeen years longer than Keats so far, and I want to make each precious additional year on this spinning marble count for something shiny.  

But whether I catch the “magic hand of chance” or not, I will sink into oblivion one day, too. 
For in the end, aren't we all just fair creatures of an hour? Time doesn't let us keep anything. 
Yet we still reach for each other, sharing tales, passing hearts and tracing ink symbols like sparks against so very much “nothingness.”

Quasiflora

I strip the stalk bare
Every chance like a petal
Takes to the breeze

Whatever wishes are
What dreams might be
Open air accepts them all

Mindless of regret, these quasi
Flora float light as seed
Filaments on page of wind.

Alate ink spells out bluest
Sky even while rooted
Deep in dead stars’ dirt.

Sources:

Keats, John. “When I have fears that I may cease to be.” Poetry Foundation.org.
<https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44488/when-i-have-fears-that-i-may-cease-to-be>

Page, S.E. “Quasiflora” (2019). Isacoustic. <https://isacoustic.wordpress.com/tag/s-e-page/>

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