The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling by Cope Stephen

The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling by Cope Stephen

Author:Cope, Stephen [Cope, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780345535689
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-09-25T00:00:00+00:00


A quality of “paradise lost” saturates much of Keats’s greatest poetry. In his work—as in his life—beauty and happiness appear as unearthly visitors, inevitably evaporating as quickly as they came, leaving him bereft on the empty shores of life.

From childhood onward throughout his short life, Keats had to grapple with the realities of impermanence—the realities so often emphasized by Krishna in his long talks with Arjuna. Keats discovered early on that he could hold on to nothing. And so his koan—the central question of his life—became how to live life fully without holding on to it. How to have it without possessing it. “Kiss the joy as it flies,” says William Blake. In order to become a great poet, Keats would have to work through the problem of grasping. The evidence that he finally did learn to live in the stream of impermanence is written—at his instruction—on his very tombstone: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

Precisely how Keats used poetry to work through this great existential problem—the problem of grasping—is for me an endlessly compelling story. He worked it all out through words.

As I have said, Keats’s mother died a gruesome death when he was only fourteen. This appalling event turned young Keats into a voracious reader. Through books he absorbed himself in the world of great men and daring deeds—the worlds of Julius Caesar and Brutus and of William Tell and William Wallace. Early on, one can see Keats’s attempts to master his difficult circumstances through imagination. Even at the age of fourteen he was beginning to gather together the skills of the poet. (“Poetry,” Cyril Connolly has said, “comes from the ferment of an unhappy childhood working through a noble imagination.”)

Soon, into his fifteen-year-old life, came the next essential ingredient of a great poet: a mentor. Keats’s world was vastly expanded when he met the most important friend of his youth: Charles Cowden Clarke. Clarke, just eight years older than Keats, was the son of the headmaster of Keats’s school, and he was an extraordinarily bright and generous friend to Keats. Clarke noticed that Keats seemed to devour books rather than read them, and he took an interest in this handsome, lively, and engaged boy. He introduced Keats to Chaucer and Shakespeare and Spenser, and challenged him in vigorous debate about the issues of the day.

Keats responded well to Clarke’s interest. His imagination and intellect came alive. The stories of their friendship—later told by Clarke—are compelling. At the drop of a hat, the two friends would walk the fifteen miles to London to see their favorite actor, John Kemble, on stage in Shakespeare’s plays, and then walk back, arriving home at dawn, having talked through the entire night.

Keats was a sensitive boy, and particularly sensitive to beauty. Clarke helped wake in him a latent love of nature, during what would become long, thoughtful walks in the countryside around the school. English poets, it seems, are forever walking. From Wordsworth to Auden. And as I read



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