John Keats

Literature Project

John Keats

Letter to Fanny Brawne

March 1820

By: Abdulkader Melhem

Teacher: Mr. Ozturk

Literature Class

Word Count: 1920 (excluding passage)

PASSAGE

March 1820 (?)

Sweetest Fanny

You fear, sometimes, I do not love you so much as you wish? My dear Girl I love you ever and ever and without reserve. The more I have known you the more have I lov'd. In every way - even my jealousies have been agonies of Love, in the hottest fit I ever had I would have died for you. I have vex'd you too much. But for Love! Can I help it? You are always new. The last of your kisses was ever the sweetest; the last smile the brightest; the last movement the gracefullest. When you pass'd my window home yesterday, I was fill'd with as much admiration as if I had then seen you for the first time. You uttered half complaint once that I only lov'd your Beauty. Have I nothing else then to love in you but that? Do not I see a heart naturally furnish'd with wings imprison itself with me? No ill prospect has been able to turn your thoughts a moment from me. This perhaps should be as much a subject of sorrow as of joy - but I will not talk of that. Even if you did not love me I could not help an entire devotion to you: how much more deeply then must I feel for you knowing you love me. My Mind has been the most discontented and restless one that ever was put into a body too small for it. I never felt my Mind repose upon anything with complete and undistracted enjoyment - upon no person but you. When you are in the room my thoughts never fly out of window: you always concentrate my whole senses. The anxiety shown about our Loves in your last note is an immense pleasure to me: however you must not suffer such speculations to molest you any more: nor will I any more believe you can have the least pique against me. Brown is gone out - but here is Mrs Wylie - when she is gone I shall be awake for you. - Remembrances to your Mother.

Your affectionate

J. Keats

31st of October, 1795 John Keats was born in Finsbury Pavement, near London. He was the eldest son of a sister and three brothers. In 1803, John’s father died in an accident and his mother followed after seven years. John was taken out of school to be an apprentice to a surgeon. After four years time John left his master to be a student in the Hospital of London, where he sacrificed his medical ambitions to devote himself into literature. In 1816, a famous artist Leigh Hunt helped Keats publish his first poem in a magazine where then he published about thirty poems and sonnets.

Unfortunately in 1817 he got negative feedback from the people where in 1818 he traveled to Hampstead Heath, in Scotland, where he lived in the house of Charles Brown. Mrs. Brawne and her sixteen year old daughter were lent the house of Brown where John fell in love with Fanny Brawne and exhausted himself mentally into love and poetry. In 1819 Keats tried to gain some distance to literature through an ordinary occupation.

February 1820, Keats got ill with tuberculosis and his plans for the future were broken. He was discomforted while publishing his famous poems “Lamia & Isabella”. Due to his illness John traveled to Italy in the summer of 1820 after being asked by his doctors. Keats unfortunately died in Rome on the 23rd of February, 1821. “Here lies one whose name was writ in water” was a quote requested by Keats to be carved in his tombstone. After his death people started reading his poetry again and his paintings he did where then he became a celebrity. Fanny Brawne, his fiancйe, started to show off who she was engaged to.

In our age letters are not sent that much due to the high technology in the World, like the internet, mobile phones, SMS…And if people wanted to send letters or post cards it would take one day to deliver the letter if its in the same country and five days internationally. In John Keats era, things were way different. They had messengers that would take letters from city to city or village to village where it would be delivered the next few hours. That’s why in some of the letters that John Keats writes he specifies whether it is in the morning or night or evening. This means that he used to write to Fanny, his fiancйe, more often in the day.

Why are we very attracted with such