John Keats and Romantic Scotland by Katie Garner;Nicholas Roe; & Nicholas Roe

Author:Katie Garner;Nicholas Roe; & Nicholas Roe [Garner, Katie & Roe, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780191899386
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2022-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

Keats at Burns’s Grave

Meiko O’Halloran

One of Keats’s most keenly anticipated pleasures in his walking tour of Scotland with Charles Brown was the prospect of visiting places associated with the great Robert Burns whose poetry he knew and loved.* As he neared Burns’s Cottage in Alloway, Ayrshire, on 11 July 1818, so confident was Keats of finding inspiration at the poet’s birthplace that he was already anticipating his cherished memory of it in years to come. This would be a momentous and rewarding experience, he felt, and he was excited to share it with his friends, much as he had when he visited Shakespeare’s birthplace with Benjamin Bailey the previous year. Having ‘made continual enquiries from the time we saw his Tomb at Dumfries’, Keats explained to J. H. Reynolds, he and Brown were reassured of Burns’s ‘great reputation’ among ordinary people and were now hastening to pay homage at another Burns site (LJK, i. 322). ‘I begin a letter to you because I am approaching Burns’s Cottage very fast’, Keats wrote excitedly:

One of the pleasantest means of annulling self is approaching such a shrine as the Cottage of Burns—we need not think of his misery—that is all gone—bad luck to it—I shall look upon it hereafter with unmixed pleasure as I do upon my Stratford on <and> Avon day with Bailey—I shall fill this sheet for you in the Bardies Country, going no further than this till I get into the Town of Ayr which will be a 9 miles’ walk to Tea—. (LJK, i. 322–3)

Part of Keats’s eagerness to reach Burns’s Cottage arose from a desire to dispel his lingering impression of the bard’s ‘misery’ from visiting his tomb ten days earlier. The idea of ‘annulling self’ may simply express a longing to be transported beyond himself as he sought poetic inspiration on his journey, but in the context of the letter, it also suggests that Keats had found his visit to Burns’s tomb personally disturbing and that he wanted to dislodge his dark thoughts about Burns and the implications for himself.

The sonnet Keats composed ‘On Visiting the Tomb of Burns’ on the day of his visit to Dumfries has long been seen as enigmatic and has been interpreted in various ways. For John Middleton Murry, ‘the main interest of the sonnet is psychological.…We feel that Keats, at this moment, was really suffering. And we should like to understand his suffering’.1 Shakespearean echoes in the sonnet have led some critics to draw parallels with Hamlet in the graveyard. Aileen Ward, for example, sees Keats as a Hamlet figure who fancies for a moment that ‘he stood not by Burns’s grave but by his own’,2 while George Yost, Jr. offers an interpretation that instead focuses closely on Dante and Spence as sources for Keats’s Minos.3 However, as Stuart Sperry emphasizes, Keats’s ‘pilgrimage to Burns’s memorials’ must also be understood as ‘an attempt to distil from a conflicting set of attitudes a just and fuller sense of that poet’s enduring greatness’.4 The

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