Keats: In Your Time of Pandemic

Abstract

KeatsIn Your Time of Pandemic Kathleen Driskell (bio) You remember in Rome you stood in front of a facsimile of a remarkably narrow sleigh bed, a suggestion of the actual bed in which Keats died from consumption when he was twenty-five. What caught your attention were the ceiling carvings over the bed, and you studied them a long while, fascinated by the idea you were looking at one of the last things Keats had seen before dying. [End Page 35] Each square held a carving, a relief of an articulated petaled blossom, a little dome in the center, a pattern repeated again and again, creating a grid. You felt its fine excess. You're a poet, that's what brought you to Keats's bedside. Now, quarantined at home, isolation your best weapon against the Covid-19 pandemic sweeping across America, you remember walking through the muggy crowded streets in Rome toward the museum next to the Spanish Steps. In your quarantine, you are exhausted by the rage you feel at the utter failure of your government. You want a plan. You want action. You want accountability. You don't want to keep coming back to Keats. You don't want to scuffle again with what the young genius called "negative capability." But what he's written keeps surfacing as if it's your Serenity Prayer: "God give me the grace to 'live with uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.'" He's calling for you to live fully within this liminal space, this place of half-knowledge. The trouble is that Keats's concept of negative capability is slippery. Each time you believe you can hold onto it, it mutates and becomes something else. Then it dissipates before you. It floats away like something writ on water. Nevertheless, it's a beautiful thing. An aesthetic philosophy that dodges and ducks and ultimately throws a knock-out punch to anyone trying to reason out its mysteries. Still you take the punch and get back up. You believe if you could understand more fully what Keats meant by negative capability, you would know how to be here, but also there, and all places in between. You would understand how to keep writing. You want to do as he says, to "let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts," open yourself freely to move among associations. But America's pandemic has made a swamp of your mind. [End Page 36] You brought some students with you to the museum. They milled around the rooms, placing their palms on the glass display tables, leaning in to read archival yellowed manuscripts of letters and old books splayed open, revealing Keats's poems on their brittle pages, while you continued to study the carved ceiling. You've somehow always known, even as a child, that the harvest of pattern is surprise. A gift bestowed by turning away from what's expected. You wonder had Keats lived another year what further would his mind have reaped? Would he have explained negative capability more fully? You wonder if Americans live through this pandemic, who will we be on the other side? How many will be on the other side? What will we understand that we hadn't before? The rooms upstairs in the Keats museum are dark but for a ray of glaring sunshine streaming through a window. When you glance back at your students they are shadows surrounded by golden motes in the air around them. You think, well, that's romantic. ________ You have recently entered the demographic who have a higher risk of dying from Covid-19. You reassure yourself that it won't come for you, not because you're in tip-top shape, but because you have only very slightly crept over the margin of that age group. Mostly you stay inside, wash your hands, work remotely, wear a mask when on rare occasion you venture out to the grocery or slip back to campus to pick up something you need to plan your hybrid courses for the fall. Covid-19 only slightly ups your thinking about mortality—which is to say you often think...