The Immortal Evening by Stanley Plumly

Author:Stanley Plumly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

He began life full of hopes! Fiery, impetuous, & ungovernable, expecting the World at once to fall beneath his powers! Alas, his genius had no sooner began to bud, than Envy & hatred spat their poison on its leaves, & tender, sensitive, & young, it shriveled beneath their putrid effusions. Unable to bear the sneers of ignorance or attacks of envy, having no decision of character & not strength enough to buckle himself like a porcupine, & present nothing but his prickles to his enemies, he began to despond, flew to dissipation as a relief, which from a temporary elevation of spirits, plunged him into deeper & more inextricable despondency than ever. For six weeks he was scarcely sober, & once to shew what a Man of Genius does, to gratify his appetites, when once they got the better of him, he covered his tongue & throat as far as he could reach with Cayenne pepper, in order as he said to have the “delicious coolness of claret in all its glory!” “—O for a draught of vintage!”—The death of his Brother wounded him deeply, and it appeared to me from that hour he began seriously to droop. He wrote at this time his beautiful ode to the nightingale. “Where Youth grows pale & spectre thin & dies!”—alluded to his poor Brother.

Haydon now moves to an example and a complaint: “As we were walking along the Kilburn meadows, he repeated this beautiful ode, with a tremulous under tone, that was extremely affecting! I was attached to Keats, & he had a great enthusiasm for me. I was angry because he would not bend his great powers to some definite object, & always told him so. Latterly he grew angry because I shook my head at his irregularity, and told him he was destroying himself.” Haydon, in his way, is trying to encompass the narrative of their relationship, mostly—which is his habit—through judgment with the sometime support of illustration. Even in the terms of his friend’s assumed exaggeration, Keats comes across, in Haydon’s version of these final years, as extremely vulnerable, especially after the death of Tom and George’s second departure from England with most of what is left of the family money, or at least what the Keats children know of their inheritance. Haydon closes his memory of Keats with a last moment: “The last time I saw him was at Hampstead, lying in a white bed with book, hectic, weak, & on his back, irritable at his feebleness, and wounded at the way he had been used; he seemed to be going out of the world with contempt for this and no hopes of the other. I told him to be calm, but he muttered if he did not soon recover he would cut his throat. I tried to reason on such violence, but it was no use; he grew angry, & I went away very deeply affected.”

Haydon concludes, in a coda, his wish that had nature given Keats

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.