One of the things I enjoy most about used books are the scribblings prior owners leave behind. Sometimes they are bland little comments and all that is sparked is the sense that here was a mind that, while moved to write, the nudge was only just enough to move the pencil and not enough to perturb, and others, well, that’s what this post is about.

I bought a school edition of Selected Poems and Letter by John Keats that some student of long ago (published in 1959) used in a term of reading John Keats – although I doubt the student was in class as long ago as 1960. (Some of the notations and comments suggest a more recent youth in class with a used text.) The book is marked by both pen and pencil, a woman I think because of the curvature of the script. I can tell what readings she was assigned by what poems and letters are marked. Read, for example, were “The Eve of St Agnes” and “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” “Endymion” of course, or at least parts of it. (Parts of that poem are suspiciously empty of notation.  It is rather long, I suppose.) “To Homer” “Ode to Psyche”  to Nightingale, Grecian Urn and Melancholy and lastly “To Autumn.” But not “Bright Star.” Imagine that, but I suppose the class was long pre-movie.

It is the odes that come in for the most attention. There is hardly a line that has not been noted, commented upon. Some of those comments are quite revealing. There is a comment, for example, against “Ode to Psyche” that says “Psyche: winged creature, moth, butterfly.”

I imagine this young woman looked her up or perhaps more likely, was shown a picture as part of the class and was told the story of Psyche and Eros.  There she was, this student, who was being fed the cultural background necessary to roll inside Keats’ poems, to feel the empyrean pull, the net of connotations that Psyche weaves in someone who reads widely. Yet her comment, “winged creature, moth, butterfly” tells me that irrevocably her mind fell instead into channels built in her own life – a life of imagined earthly transformations, of animal metaphor, of compound eyes and multi-faceted truths, of a world based profoundly in the post-Romantic.

This is the thing about students, they are of their own time. When Keats wrote to Bailey that

I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of imagination – What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not – for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty – in a Word, you may know my favorite Speculation by my first Book and the little song I sent in my last – which is a representation from the fancy of the probable mode of operating in these Matters – The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream – he awoke and found it truth.

he meant it literally. Truth is sought in the imagination, in the sensation Keats understood as Beauty, as the sublime. Not for us this. Truth is grounded at the moment. When we seek to understand we do not follow the pull of connotation into airy realms with earthly mirrors as Keats did. We link along more corporeal lines – Psyche – winged creatures – moths – butterflies.

Keats, his mind flew out to Milton  and the idea of the world he helped shape. The Imagination that is comparable to Adam’s dream is a reference to Book VIII of Paradise Lost, the stanza starting at line 452. “As with an object that excels the sense, / Dazzled and spent, sunk down, and sought repair / Of sleep, which instantly fell on me…” There I imagine Keats being pulled by the idea of overwhelmed senses, understanding as he did the intensity of feeling, of sensation, as the gateway to Truth. Not that I agree (nor would Milton have gone there with Keats either, I suspect), but regardless, I am not from either Milton’s or Keats’ time but from mine and so I think that truth is more usefully thought of as a multifaceted eye.

And then in Milton there is the dream itself and what Adam perceives while sleeping at god’s behest. Adam knows what goes on: he sees the wound in his side that presages Jesus’ own, Adam saw Eve grow from the rib, shaped by god’s hand. This ability, to perceive true in the divine sleep (imagination and/or death?) – Keats took this as reality. That is, there is another reality, a spiritual one if you like, in which truth is still perceived, still sensed but with less tempest. When he says (from the same letter to Bailey) that

we shall enjoy ourselves here after by having what we called happiness on Earth repeated in a finer tome and so repeated – And yet such a fate can only befall those who delight in sensation rather than hunger as you do after Truth – Adam’s dream will do here and seems to be a conviction that Imagination and its empyreal reflection is the same as human Life and its spiritual repetition.

he means it.

I see no evidence that the student who had this book before me understood that. It is clear from what she underlined that she was learning the rudiments of the Romantic Imagination but did she understand it enough to (temporarily) swim with Keats along his imaginative connections? I doubt it.

To be fair, I am much more likely to follow the winged creature-butterfly road myself. I am of now, just as the woman was who marked up the book with the sign posts of her mind. And to be even more genteel of spirit, I have to say that I am likely much older than the woman was when she studied Keats. This means, of course, that I have had more time to read, to think, to imagine the world as Keats knew it. I wonder if she still lives, and if she does whether she still reads Keats? And (my mean side rearing) does she know anything more about real winged creatures than she does about Keats? (I mean if you are going to base your connotative and metaphorical life (that is “meaning”) on something, it might be good to actually know something about that “something.”)

That’s the problem with now, I think. Most of us have lost the old links that allow Milton to speak about dreaming in our minds when we read Keats, but as of yet, we have not taken the material world seriously enough to understand reality as it appears from the compound eye of a winged insect. So we are adrift in life (as was Keats), but most of us (unlike Keats) are without a mental umbilical cord developed enough to keep us from drowning in such pools as existential nihilism. To be honest, most of me is really glad I no longer teach. I am no lifeguard and I strongly suspect one must first understand the “now” (for us that is the compound eye) in order to step off into the “then” with any chance of actual understanding. So what hope do young students of today have of understanding the ferocious richness of the past when they can’t even see the ground upon which they are standing?

Miserable old coot aren’t I?