The Double Refuge ❤️ Three Little Words

Keats’ Negative Capability

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Caspar Friedrich’s painting The Hiker Above the Sea of Fog (c.1817) might be seen as representing both Byron and Keats as Romantic poets, although it gets closer to Byron than it does to Keats.

Painted about a year before Keats wrote his poem on climbing Ben Nevis, The Hiker suggests an optimistic assessment of our ability to see the overall pattern of Nature’s vast sublimity. As much as I appreciate its optimism, I think Keats’ agnostic take on human awareness is more realistic:

Read me a lesson, Muse, and speak it loud
Upon the top of Nevis, blind in mist!
I look into the chasms, and a shroud
Vapourous doth hide them, — just so much I wist
Mankind do know of hell; I look o’erhead,
And there is sullen mist, — even so much
Mankind can tell of heaven; mist is spread
Before the earth, beneath me, — even such,
Even so vague is man’s sight of himself!
Here are the craggy stones beneath my feet, —
Thus much I know that, a poor witless elf,
I tread on them, — that all my eye doth meet
Is mist and crag, not only on this height,
But in the world of thought and mental might!

Keats’ poem ends with a diminished capacity to appreciate Nature, saying that all his eye meets is mist and crag and that he is a poor witless elf. And yet Keats is also the quintessential Romantic, with poems so rich with natural beauty that he becomes an inspiration for poets like Tennyson and aritists like Harry Clarke — as we see in these spectacular stain-glass windows into The Eve of St. Agnes (1819):

Keats’s poetry has also inspired musicians like Bryan Ferry, who was once asked about his use of Fitzgerald’s title Tender is the Night, at which point Ferry tactfully reminded the interviewer that the original source of the phrase was John Keats.

My point here (going back to The Hiker painting above) is that Keats is able to describe Nature in all its richness and awe, yet in his poem on Ben Nevis he doesn’t. He foregoes the awesome Manfred and Faust possibilities of surveying Nature from a god-like perspective. Instead, he points to the mist that clouds his vision, and he shrinks himself into a poor witless elf. He doesn’t do this because he can’t appreciate or describe Nature, or because he sees himself as a small idiot (or a mythical hallucination). Rather, he closes down the possibility of a grand vision of Nature because he understands that such a vision is a type of illusion, a type of dreaming which aggrandizes the ego at the expense of the power and immensity of the universe. It may seem like he’s denigrating his powers in the poem, but I would argue that he’s getting closer to what our powers really are: very little in the larger scheme of things. It takes a great poet to give us this humbling message while yet allowing us to retain a heightened vision of Nature’s mystery.

In this sense, Keats is like the epic figure from the extended version of “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” which I analyze in The Epic Heroine (in Existential & Then Some: The Mermaid). The heroine’s would-be seducer implies that she’s been around the block when he says, “You must be the mermaid / who took Neptune for a ride.” She doesn’t respond to his crass advance, but instead makes a bigger point about the inability to control the greater forces of Nature, represented by Neptune: she “smiles at [him] so sadly / that [his] anger straightway died.”

Keats’ ability to pare his vision to fit nature, rather than pare nature to fit his vision, is related to two concepts which he talks about in his letters: 1. the chameleon poet, who has no fixed self but instead identifies with his subject matter, and 2. negative capability, a psychological mode of openness that prizes experience over reason, the phenomenological over the empirical. This allows Keats to remain open to “Beauty,” which can’t be boiled down to “fact and reason”:

I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason — Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

It may seem that Keats is here aiming squarely at aesthetics, as he also seems to do in his “Ode to a Grecian Urn” when he states that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Yet Keats’ bent toward aesthetics comes largely as a result of his ability to maintain his intellectual respect for the Age of Reason yet open up a space for the experience of the Romantic Age. In this sense he may be like Camus, unwilling to let the existential facts crush the possibility of connection, beauty, and fascination. Like his contemporary Byron, Keats was a great fan of the classical, and both were heirs of the Enlightenment. Yet both were also Romantics, with a capital R, and refused to see the world only through the lens of Reason.

We see this phenomenological bent in even the most mythic and sensual of Keats’ poems. In The Fall of Hyperion. A Dream he highlights the crucial distinction between a poet and a dreamer — “The one pours out a balm upon the world, / The other vexes it” — especially when it comes to accepting the fact that systems never last. The fallen power system in The Fall of Hyperion is that of the Titans, yet the point can be extended to the political and cultural power of the Greeks, Romans, English, Americans, etc.

In The Eve of Saint Agnes (1819) Keats also does his best to bring poetry down to earth — as we see in Harry Clarke’s stain-glass version of the poem. In the first graphic below, I’ve juxtaposed separate panels so that Madeline walks from her mystic trance, her fantasy of love, to her bed, where Porphyro blends himself into her fantasies. In the second, Porphyro clearly takes advantage of her (and the poem might be attacked from this angle), yet Keats’ point is that Madeline’s dreamy spiritual vision is no match for the physical reality which Porphyro represents. In the final graphic, Madeline has risen from her bed and is walking with Porphyro out into the real world.

The poem is wonderfully sensual and highlights the beauty of Madeline’s religious vision, yet it also critiques her superstition and dreaminess, and in the end bolsters the type of skepticism which concludes “Ode to a Nightingale”: “fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.”

This process of disillusionment may be necessary, yet it also robs us of delightful fantasies. In a 1818 letter Keats writes,

I compare human life to a large Mansion of Many Apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me. The first we step into we call the infant or thoughtless chamber, in which we remain as long as we do not think. We remain there a long while, and notwithstanding the doors of the second chamber remain wide open, showing a bright appearance, we care not to hasten to it; but are at length imperceptibly impelled by awakening of the thinking principle — within us — we no sooner get into the second chamber, which I shall call the Chamber of Maiden-Thought, than we become intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere, we see nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of delaying there for ever in delight. However among the effects this breathing is father of is that tremendous one of sharpening one’s vision into the nature and heart of man — of convincing one’s nerves that the world is full of misery and heartbreak, pain, sickness and oppression — whereby this Chamber of Maiden-Thought becomes gradually darkened and at the same time on all sides of it many doors are set open — but all dark — all leading to dark passages. We see not the balance of good and evil — we are in a Mist — we are now in that state — we feel the burden of the Mystery.

I see the English Romantic poets, especially Keats and Byron, as very similar to double refugees today. They have the idealism of The Hiker, which allows them to remain open to capitalized Beauty and Truth, yet they also have a skepticism which allows them to accept the world as it is, with its struggle and pain. The Mystery is here, somewhere, but for the most part we’re surrounded by small m mysteries, far from the intoxicating Light.

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