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Updated: June 26, 2025
I can understand the dislike of Fanny Brawne on the part of those who dislike Keats and all his works. But if we accept Keats and The Eve of St. Agnes, we had better be honest and also accept Fanny, who inspired them. Keats, it must be remembered, was a sensualist. His poems belong to the literature of the higher sensualism.
"The thought of leaving Miss Brawne," he writes to Brown from Yarmouth, "is beyond everything horrible the sense of darkness coming over me I eternally see her figure eternally vanishing." And when he reaches Naples he writes to the same friend: I can bear to die I cannot bear to leave her. O God! God! God! Everything that I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.
His doctor ordered him off, as a last chance, to Italy; previously to this he had been staying in the house of Mrs. and Miss Brawne, who tended him affectionately. Keats was now exceedingly unhappy.
The shocking intemperance of Burns was deplored in a paragraph, and passed over as though Burns were not as essentially a drunkard as a poet! The vulgarity of Keats's letters to Fanny Brawne did not escape the nice censure of Matthew Arnold who could not be expected to see that a man incapable of writing such letters would not have written "The Eve of St. Agnes."
Brawne from Naples is a touch of the old bantering Keats when he says that 'it's misery to have an intellect in splints. He was never strong enough to write again to Fanny, or even to read her letters. I should like to close this reading with a few sentences from a letter written to Reynolds in February, 1818. Never!
Had Sir Sidney fully grasped the part played by Fanny Brawne as, for good or evil, the presiding genius of Keats as a poet, he would, I fancy, have found a different explanation of the changes introduced into the later version of La Belle Dame sans Merci. Sir Sidney is all in favour and there is something to be said for his preference of the earlier version, which begins:
He was jealous, perhaps quite unreasonably so. Fanny Brawne was young, a bit coquettish, buoyant, and he misinterpreted her vivacity. She liked what is commonly called 'the world, and so did he when he was well; but looking through the discolored glass of ill health, all nature was out of harmony.
Those to his little sister Fanny are also charming in their way, though the peculiar and very happy mixture of life and literature to be found in the others does not, of course, occur in them. His letters of description, to whomsoever written, are, as one might expect, first-rate; and the very late specimen one of his very last to anyone to Mrs. not Miss Brawne is as brave as it is touching.
"Let him rest forever in the obscurity to which circumstances have condemned him." These were her words in the face of all these things. And so, reading these words of Fanny Brawne, my mind turned back to Mitch, and his life rose before me and took shape in my mind, and I wrote; just because he had had this boyhood love for Zueline and went through that summer of torture for losing her.
How are we to determine whether his sonnet, When I Have Fears, is great poetry or not, so long as it fills our minds insistently with the pity of his love for Fanny Brawne, and his epitaph in the Roman graveyard? Christopher North has been much upbraided by a hero-worshiping generation, but one may go too far in condemning the Scotch sense in his contention: Mr.
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