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Let me quote one of Keats' letters to Fanny Brawne: "When you were in the habit of flirting with Brown, you would have left off, could your own heart have felt one half of one pang mine did. Brown is a good sort of man he did not know he was doing me to death by inches.
"Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night, And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,..." The evening star made me dream of immortality and love my love for Fanny Brawne....
Three or four months after writing these words he must have begun his friendly relations with the Brawne family. This would be in October or November, 1818. Keats's description of Fanny is hardly flattering, and not even vivid.
He doubted." "Only when he was in love with Fanny Brawne." He paused abruptly. He was seized by an idea, a rushing irresistible idea that lifted him off his feet and whirled him suddenly into a region of light, tumultuous and profound. Keats was in love when he doubted. Could that be the explanation of his own misgiving? "That," he said hastily, "that's another thing altogether.
The impression left by the letters to Fanny Brawne, he declared, was "unpleasing." After quoting one of the letters, he goes on to comment: One is tempted to say that Keats's love-letter is the love-letter of a surgeon's apprentice.
At the house of the Dilkes, in the autumn of 1818, Keats made the acquaintance of Miss Fanny Brawne, the orphan daughter of a gentleman of independent means: he was soon desperately in love with her, having 'a swooning admiration of her beauty: towards the spring of 1819 they engaged to marry, with the prospect of a long engagement.
Then I turned back a few pages in my disconnected way of reading this book, and I found these words: Fannie Brawne to whom this agonized letter of Keats' was written wrote to a Mr.
His passionate love, his easily roused feelings of jealousy of Miss Brawne, and of suspicious rancour against even the most amicable and attached of his male intimates, the general indifference and the particular scorn and ridicule with which his poems had been received, his narrow means and uncertain outlook, and the prospect of an early death closing a painful and harassing illness all preyed upon his mind with unrelenting tenacity.
She and her mother tried to nurse him back to health. Few events in the history of English authors are tinged with a deeper pathos than his engagement to Miss Brawne. Some of the letters that he wrote to her or about her are almost tragic. After he had taken his last leave of her he wrote, "I can bear to die I cannot bear to leave her."
I haven't read them I thought I'd make a list of them first, and you can choose those you'd like to have me read to you. I brought this little one because I was sure you'd like it, after reading Endymion and The Eve of St. Agnes." "What is it?" "Keats's letters to Fanny Brawne."
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