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72 - I, Mary MacLane by Mary MacLane · I, Mary MacLane

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  Speaker 1: Chapter seventy two of I Mary mc lean by Mary
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  Speaker 1: mc lean. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain.
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  Speaker 1: Recording by Lynne Thompson, chapter seventy two, Food and Fire
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  Speaker 1: to Morrow. The first beauty in my life is John Keats.
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  Speaker 1: In John Keats's is my faith in some resurrection. Without
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  Speaker 1: John Keats's, human nature feels to be something broken, menacing,
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  Speaker 1: unspeakably despicable and lost, lost in the shade. With John Keats,
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  Speaker 1: the lights break across it and reflect the blazing yellow
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  Speaker 1: sun again. From eyes and foreheads and fingers and shining hair.
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  Speaker 1: There are world and human things which it thrills me
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  Speaker 1: to think about and dwell on. Nathan Hale on the
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  Speaker 1: British gallows, the charge of Pickett's Confederate infantry at Gettysburg,
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  Speaker 1: Henry the fifth Prince among King's men at Agincour, Charlotte
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  Speaker 1: Corday in prison, Columbus with his felon crews sailing westward.
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  Speaker 1: Susan b Anthony, a woman made in a strange, still
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  Speaker 1: heroic splendor, half incredible. Alexander Hamilton, Arnold Winklewride, the sea,
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  Speaker 1: worn pilgrim women disembarking into bitter Novemberness, those thraw me
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  Speaker 1: because they are brave persons and brave things, full of
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  Speaker 1: idealistic strife. But they still are made of very struggling,
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  Speaker 1: garbled world stuff. They are mere human fabric till I
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  Speaker 1: think of John Keats, and at once they grow informing
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  Speaker 1: and eternal in his light. The detailed world burns and
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  Speaker 1: glows John Keats. John Keats. Other poets have written nightingales
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  Speaker 1: and Grecian urns and sonnets, and mirth and passion things.
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  Speaker 1: But he wrote them in his glorious and wistful pain.
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  Speaker 1: He wrote the sweet headaches of his spirit into his delicate,
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  Speaker 1: beaten gold verse, the precious fevers of his mental veins,
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  Speaker 1: the bone aches and muscle aches of his thoughts, the
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  Speaker 1: darling skin damps and palm damps of his divine fancy,
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  Speaker 1: all in the song of his lilid youth. There is
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  Speaker 1: no poet but writes his poetry out of inner travails
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  Speaker 1: and immense wistfulness. But they all write just beside their travail,
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  Speaker 1: not in it, just beside their wistfulness, not with it.
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  Speaker 1: A poet who fills the throat of his soul, aching
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  Speaker 1: and swollen and inflamed, writes not just that astral diphtheria
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  Speaker 1: not till another time, but instead the fine smothering of
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  Speaker 1: a hope, perhaps the oblique suffocating of a love. A
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  Speaker 1: poet whose brain throb with some horrible, dulcettish tiredness from
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  Speaker 1: handling the heavy, bright tools of his craft, writes instead
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  Speaker 1: the throbbing of his brain, souls and brain insects, from
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  Speaker 1: walking small, odd, hard, rutted daily ways. It rouses me,
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  Speaker 1: It heats my eyeballs with salty, honeyed warmth as I read.
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  Speaker 1: But it is not John Keats who writes his own
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  Speaker 1: immediate magic sickness in perfect, sudden, obvious, blood, warm, golden.
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  Speaker 1: Now it is always old, old fashioned ailment, worn of ages.
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  Speaker 1: The drowsy ache of the nightingale goes a thousand years
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  Speaker 1: back and a thousand years to come, the restless ecstasy
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  Speaker 1: of a thousand thousand nightingales, one for each who reads
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  Speaker 1: in any age, all ages, long long after the dueled
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  Speaker 1: English language is gone dead, as home keeps, his nightingale
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  Speaker 1: will flutter lyric winged in a nervous, jeweled lovely Now
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  Speaker 1: weep for Adonus, wailed the differently lovely Shelley. He is dead,
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  Speaker 1: But He isn't dead. He is terribly living, passionately living.
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  Speaker 1: Each day of my life, I feel him living. He breathes.
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  Speaker 1: He breathes close to me, pantingly, like a swimmer breasting waves,
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  Speaker 1: or a playing child in a summer day. John Keats
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  Speaker 1: just beneath my skin. He is my god of the world,
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  Speaker 1: my fetish, and my lover. He has been my lover
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  Speaker 1: for seven gold years. He is the first beauty in
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  Speaker 1: my flawed, futile life. He is the most beautiful thing
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  Speaker 1: in the living and dying world, John Keats, John Keats.
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  Speaker 1: In everyone else, I can feel mixed motives, tough, tangled
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  Speaker 1: silk threads of self woven into wonderful wets of days
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  Speaker 1: and deeds in everybody, from his Gariot to Toucsaint Luverture,
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  Speaker 1: from Jean Dark to Victoria Wutau, from Paul of Tarsus
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  Speaker 1: to Aaron Burr. Only John Keats stands out alone, a
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  Speaker 1: true breathing poet, an inmost heart bleeding outward. The lyric
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  Speaker 1: poet is the true poet. The lyric poet achieves no
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  Speaker 1: end in his art. He turns fragments of light and
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  Speaker 1: life into terms of beauty, and sends them, flying forth
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  Speaker 1: on flaming word wings which translate the small human flesh
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  Speaker 1: they brush by into delicious flesh of gold, flesh of petals,
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  Speaker 1: flesh of fire. But he makes no morals, teaches no lessons,
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  Speaker 1: finishes nothing. It's as it should be. Nothing is finished.
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  Speaker 1: The mixed world is all unfinished, a glorified mistake. The
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  Speaker 1: race is a millionfold mistake. Lifts it, breeds, it battens
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  Speaker 1: on it coarsely and finely, and lamentably, and musically and bravely,
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  Speaker 1: so that all poetry which wanders from the lyric is
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  Speaker 1: only a play or a picture, or an airship, or
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  Speaker 1: a cause which aims at fatal compli attaining an object.
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  Speaker 1: It is limited and man made. Its beauty is lopped
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  Speaker 1: off like boughs and branches after a storm. Its wings
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  Speaker 1: are clipped. Its distanceless spaces, little and large, are visibly
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  Speaker 1: engineered by mathematic hands. But the lyric poetry is the true,
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  Speaker 1: luminous and bloody interpreting of humanness. John Keats wrote by
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  Speaker 1: the lights of his living, and he lived all his
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  Speaker 1: days in joyous lyric anguish. Once he wrote, ever, let
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  Speaker 1: the fancy rome pleasure never is at home. It is
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  Speaker 1: a factful of himself, lawless, radical and non civilized, a
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  Speaker 1: gleam in the mixed world. It is everybody, poets, burglars, nursemaids, everybody.
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  Speaker 1: He wrote it in a hundred other ways, but it
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  Speaker 1: is all in that. It is the lyric epitome of
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  Speaker 1: every day pleasure. Never is at home. And hard melodies
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  Speaker 1: are sweet, he wrote, but those unheard are sweeter. There
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  Speaker 1: spoke the wild, delicate wiseness of his brain and the passionate,
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  Speaker 1: delicate wonder of his heart, John Keats, John Keats. But
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  Speaker 1: everything he wrote, the Grecian urn itself is immeasurably less
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  Speaker 1: lyric than himself. Writing it and being it. He is rich, bright, wet,
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  Speaker 1: living lyric for this me, in this now. Though he
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  Speaker 1: has lain dead in Rome nearly the full hundred years,
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  Speaker 1: my garbled life and my thinking hunger feed upon him.
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  Speaker 1: He was the one human one who walked on in
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  Speaker 1: the way before him, not around the jagged little stones
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  Speaker 1: and icy little pools that were in it, but straight
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  Speaker 1: on through them, all though his lyric feet were quivering, shuddering, sensitive, sensitive,
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  Speaker 1: beyond knowledge of commoner feet that walk around it. Fattens
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  Speaker 1: my leanest self to keep that in my constant remembrance.
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  Speaker 1: The thought of his brave, radiant loveliness reassures me to
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  Speaker 1: myself by the hour. I am futile, but he is
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  Speaker 1: mysteriously omnipotently useful, and I catch some of it from him.
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  Speaker 1: I am half full of vanity, but he is of illustrious,
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  Speaker 1: priceless vanity himself that justifies mine and all the world's.
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  Speaker 1: I am fearing and false, but he is so brave,
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  Speaker 1: so true to infinite form, that by it he leavens
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  Speaker 1: the lump of the whole world's mendacious cowardice. My brain
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  Speaker 1: is full of wilding darknesses, snarled and knotted gifts and ponchance.
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  Speaker 1: But into his strong brain, the strong, fresh, yellow, rainwashed
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  Speaker 1: sun shines straight down through the wide, twin brightness of
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  Speaker 1: his eyes. I look down into his eyes twin public wells.
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  Speaker 1: He belongs publicly and privately to all this mixed, mad world,
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  Speaker 1: and any one may look. I look into that titanic,
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  Speaker 1: vibrant brain, and mine catches some of it. A blessed
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  Speaker 1: and precious disease, oh, a rare disease. My heart. My
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  Speaker 1: heart feels strange and tired and dead, a bit of
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  Speaker 1: dead sea fruit. But his heart, warm and real and
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  Speaker 1: boundlessly unsatisfied, is always the deep, quick, fragrant rose of
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  Speaker 1: this world. A hero, a poet at arms. John Keats,
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  Speaker 1: he has outside the shadow of our night, wrote that Shelley,
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  Speaker 1: and wrote no truer word. I have read so many
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  Speaker 1: of the strange and splendid things, bits of them Virgil
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  Speaker 1: and Homer, and Vilan and Girta, and all the English
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  Speaker 1: poets and prose writers like Carlyle who in places out
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  Speaker 1: poet poets and moderner ones, and the new poets, imagists
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  Speaker 1: and others. John Keats feels a noticeably braver thing, and
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  Speaker 1: always always a little way beyond. He is purely lyric.
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  Speaker 1: When he loved a woman, he loved the dubious, fascinating
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  Speaker 1: Fanny brawn sordid, brained worldly to him, a mixed, living, devilish,
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  Speaker 1: glowing goddess. A higher sold woman would neither have so taught,
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  Speaker 1: should not so held him. He was purely lyric. He
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  Speaker 1: cared truly nothing for the verdicts of critics and reviewers,
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  Speaker 1: and in the sweet lipped, boyish beauty of his youth,
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  Speaker 1: they truly and easily killed him. It would be like
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  Speaker 1: that it had to be. He was so purely lyric.
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  Speaker 1: He died in the sweet, fierce, dazzling cause of beauty.
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  Speaker 1: I have so many thoughts, and my thoughts are always
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  Speaker 1: my own. There are endless written thoughts deeper than mine, finer, stronger,
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  Speaker 1: anything you like, but mine answer for me. No written
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  Speaker 1: thoughts affect them, though they thrill my reading hours. Only
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  Speaker 1: John Keats's thoughts can enter in and crush and cripple mine.
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  Speaker 1: Because everybody is a little bit like John Keys. I
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  Speaker 1: have a starry, thin edge of faith inside me. He
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  Speaker 1: is food for my hunger of thought, fire for my
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  Speaker 1: passion of life. Heats. He is the resurrection and the life.
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  Speaker 1: From my desk, he gazes at me in a frame
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  Speaker 1: of old gold. Every day. The sunset on the glass
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  Speaker 1: blurs his large, mournful, joyous eyes, which strangest agonized sunset tears.
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  Speaker 1: He shows me the sweet, sweet intoxication of his lyric grief.
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  Speaker 1: He died young, unfinished, And oh but it's a shivering
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  Speaker 1: ecstasy to think of all those lyrics in him. He
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  Speaker 1: never wrote the sweeter melodies unheard. End of Chapter seventy
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  Speaker 1: two