When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high grav’d books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to Nothingness do sink.
We are all caught up in the sticky webs of time.
We wear watches or check our mobile ‘phones, as well as our mirrors, in order to measure out our passage through time.
We experience ‘time’ perhaps in two main ways. First through ‘chronological time’ or linear time, where we have no control over what just ‘is’ the time and this time runs our schedules around work, school and any sort of time table.
The second experience of ‘time’ may be somewhat vaguely labelled ‘personal time’ and may sometimes feel more ‘spatial’ in terms of how we experience it. This time relates to how we experience time on an individual, subjective, idiosyncratically ‘personal’ level.
Both Carol Ann Duffy’s AQA poem ‘Hour’ (taken from her collection Rapture) as well as this late poem by the Romantic poet John Keats memorably recited in Jane Campion’s film ‘Bright Star’, reveal the very human preoccupation with the passage of time personally as well as chronologically. Both poems too explore time’s uneasy relationship with human mortality.
In other words our transient time on this planet earth.
For in Duffy’s poem , we hear the speaker celebrating almost a stolen, secret ‘hour’ away from the responsibilities and ties that perhaps make their love so very difficult. We can all associate with the preciousness of an hour; such a small yet ironically large slice of time where intense emotions are felt which may be later recalled in order to restore some sense of what has happened in our lives.
An hour may thus seem a long time or a short time because of these emotions. After all every moment within such an hour can be treasured and perhaps returned through recollection even when that hour is no longer available.
As T S Eliot so tellingly said in his long poem The Wasteland: ”These fragments I have shored against my ruins. ‘ We do need to ‘shore’ up our memories, our treasured ‘hours’ in order to support our psychological well being, especially where death and mourning are involved.
Time therefore may become symbolic of our own experience and in John Keats’ poem above, we get the strong impression of the poet facing the looming sense of his own mortality with so much he still wishes to accomplish, yet feels may escape actualisation.
Can anyone be more aware of the world with its beauty and possibilities when they are on the brink of their own disappearance? Even with faith, death can be deeply unsettling, and Keats’ youth(he died of tuberculosis at 25 in Rome) renders his fears tragically real.
He feared what, if anything, he would be able to ‘pass on.’
The description of his ‘teeming brain’ gives powerful expression to the almost febrile excitement of the poet’s imagination. This is a writer with a ‘teeming’ mind very much alive to his life with its experiences. and yet tragically aware that time is running away from him. He feels ‘alone’ on the shore of the ‘wide’ world’ as no one else can experience his feelings and no one else can die in his place.
Little wonder too that in one of his most famous poems and indeed one of the greatest poems in the English language, Keats’ Ode to A Nightingale the poet tells us: ‘For many a time I have been half in love with easeful death..’ Keats was a trained medical Doctor and had nursed his dying brother Tom through consumption. His own concerns around the manner of his own death are aptly testified to here.
How tellingly he uses the word ‘easeful’.
Loneliness pervades the Keats poem above poem as it does Duffy’s Hour, as intense intimacy contains within it the painfully certain knowledge that closeness is temporary. It passes away. Proximity cannot be sustained.
Yet our memories of it may restore our faltering equilibrium.
Yesterday the clocks went back and ironically I woke up extra early and then had a surge of bliss that I did somehow gain an ‘hour’ and subsequently spent an hour thinking about this hour!
Look at the revelation and strange synchronicity of Keats’ poem when he too mentions an hour!
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee no more
The ‘burning intensity’ and sorrow of Keats’ anxiety and realistic worry has a powerful relevance to Duffy’s precious pleasure at spending a stolen hour with her beloved. How much weight is here attached to the gaze? Why do we desire so much to ‘see’ our loved ones and what is it about the act of seeing that validates our experience? Is it because the gaze gives us validity and truth? And that when we look with love at someone we hope that they are looking back at us with love too?
”The look of love is in your eyes” so the wonderful song suggests.
Keats and Carol Ann Duffy would no doubt agree…
Keats and Duffy’s experience of time seem different in that Duffy’s hour is an eternity that cheats chronological time, whereas Keats thinks there isn’t enough time, and then decides to spend his time contemplating that sad fact! If he spent an hour as In Duffy’s poem, instead of an hour contemplating time’s insufficiency, he would have had a much healthier (ahem) outlook, and of course been a completely different poet! Professedly half in love with easeful Death, Keat’s has no desire to ‘Spin gold’, from time, or perhaps paradoxically does spin gold (creates the poem) from an eternal hour spent with his beloved, melancholy.
(BTW, I’m glad you had such a nice experience of expanding time! It is such a delicious feeling of expansive languorousness….)
Many thanks for your most interesting comment and glad you found the blog helpful. Perhaps you are a little cruel to Keats as he was dying of consumption and unlike Duffy, didn’t have the ‘time’ to fall in love.
Well, that does make the poem read differently!
Then where the voice speaks of thinking, such an action seems almost defiant of disappearing time, regarding existence in the light of mortality and contemplating whatever might be the truth of what is thought upon last things. ‘Thinking’ is cast as a stoic attitude, where the truth of mortality is regarded and thinking can encompass everything and perhaps all of Nothing. It’s a form of triumph, whose ultimate defeat still cannot deny the words ‘….and brave.’ A felt, emotional contemplation can be an boundless experience, and for its duration, as infinite as death.
What you say about the ‘loneliness’ of the poem, strikes me as true, Dr Lewison, it conveys an almost frightening awareness of apartness, born from the realization that ‘no one can die in his place’. Your phrase somehow makes me feel that also, no one can ultimately, at the final stage, prevent another’s death: hence, the loneliness, aloneness. In its different way, what you write about the gaze made me think of a self portrait by Picasso, which seems to look, to ‘Think’/feel on/at/of death. (Try ‘self portrait 1972’ in Google Images) Of course, the terrible thing is the disparity in age: Picasso was about 90 when he did the self portrait. There probably is no ‘proper’ age for death, but 25 is improper in the most extreme sense. I’m left with the impression of isolation and wonder at the thought of thought gazing at the implacable. (Thanks for your extra guidance and most thoughtful and deeply felt analyses!)
Lovely thoughts and rationalisation of the mind towards one subject that no human being on earth experiences more than once. never living to tell the tale
The other is birth…. Entering this world from whence they came. Arriving and leaving the unknown… Everything else is a shared experience of some degree and comfort can be found in understanding. But the unknown remains just that unknown….
Appreciation of the time we have is all we can do to see it through
Many thanks for your comment.
Perhaps we do end when we began? And the big question of faith is whether that is oblivion or enlightenment and learning. Larkin neatly suggested that ‘we shall see’. And T S Eliot very fond of the indissoluble connection between beginnings and endings, where everything depends upon perception. For surely we all spend much of our existence not fully ‘here’ or present to ourselves or to each other? Only when we are present are we alive to our lives.