
Author: Katherine
How can you lose a pair of crutches?

I am the doctor.
Can you tell me whether you’ve got AIDS?
I’ve got some crutches at home as well as these here. What do you mean
Why would anybody have two pairs of crutches?
Well I’m very prone to losing things.
Losing crutches is difficult. You can’t put them into a drawer
Well if you had my eyesight you would understand
I’m sorry,I didn’t realise you were blind
I think I’m going deaf as well.
So you can’t walk without crutches you can’t see much and now you can’t hear very well
How is your appetite?
I wouldn’t say no to meringue.
But you might be diabetic.
What does it matter now ? I could walk into the road not seeing that there’s a double decker bus arriving and then I could get killed or alternatively even with crutches my balance is not very good so I could go for the walk along the the White cliffs of Dover and fall into the sea so why should I worry about being diabetic?
Even having rheumatoid arthritis osteoarthritis and unstable angina there’s no protection against other diseases such as diabetes or cancer.
Well what do you want me to do, commit suicide?
That would not be easy in your condition unless you walk in front of a Lorry.
You couldn’t be sure that it would kill me
I might walk behind the lorry with my eyesight
In one way it’s good that it might not kill you but on the other hand if you really want to die then it will be disappointing to wake up with two broken legs two broken arms and a fractured skull but still alive.
It’s an interesting way to think about something that can be positive or negative depending on the mindset. There seem to be lots of adverts for the Samaritans.
On Facebook they’re also asking us to donate to Mind.
Everybody seems to be mentally ill now including me.
And that was thoughts for today
Roses and their thorns

Grass and daisies have no spikes nor thorns
So we can run barefoot across the lawns.
Why do roses hurt our hands, forlorn,
When sheep don’t hurt the shepherd as they’re shorn?
We could cut down roses in our rage.
Their own aggression might bring down their death.
Yet, beauty in their form does love engage.
So we ignore their useless,painful wrath.
Recklessly we love a spiky friend.
Enchanted by their learning or their face
But wounds unneeded bring this to an end.
Patience thins, we sever this embrace.
Roses have a beauty that beguiles.
Must we then endure their thorns and wiles?
Arnside
Where seashore with pale sand meets Arnside Knott
Where trees are shaped by western winds and sun
My childish view I have not yet forgot
Where seashore with its shells meets Arnside Knott
Oh place of light and vision, bring my cot.
Would that I could die here when I’m done.
Where seashore and pale sands meet Arnside Knott
Where trees are shaped by Western winds and sun
Boars hill Oxfordshire

I ate my words

I ate my words but could not them digest
The cruel hint, the sentence over -stressed
As if I tried to pierce another’s skin
Which was already dry, and too,too tthin
Better edit what we say with care
Even those we love we must not scare
Take for granted nothing we adore
But walk in that pale sand, by sea, by shore
Do not sink into the mud and dross
Despite we each must carry our own cross
For aid is near but cannot reach the deaf
The silence speaks, it does not cause distress
On the sands, we watch small children play
Bringing blood back to our faces grey
Finding Cartmel

Walking softly through the daisied wood
We stumbled upon Cartmel like a dream
Sensations filled our bodies like a flood
Walking softly through the new found wood
Oh happiness, oh joy, oh glorious good
Such treasures are not found by any scheme
Walking softly through the daisied wood
We entered Cartmel as one dreams a dream
Genuine mistakes by the voice to text

My husband was in the hospital and he tested positive for TV
That’s all right you can turn him on whenever you like
The surgeon drained my knee with a lozenge. Or was it a Syrian? I wish I’d learnt to read when I was blunder
Did they put a primula in the back of your hand first?
She said your knee is twice the normal size, are you in any discomfort?
I knew my stockings were too tight, so I said, no.
She said, you don’t seem to realize the toll this is taking on me.
So I suggested she should change her job.
I was having a problem distinguishing between myself and other people.
She said, all this pain is bad for you. Would you like a morphine patch on your shoulder?
I said, what about putting it on my bladder I would really like that better
She said I’ve never been so consulted in my satired life. You have to put the patch on your skin on top of some blood vessels
So I said, what about putting it over my heart?
Maybe you could inject it right into my heart directly.
That will be assisted dying and it’s not even legal yet so I will be committing murder.
I didn’t realise morphine was so dangerous. And it can make you feel depressed as well as killing you
Have you noticed now that nearly all the doctors are women and they work part-time and they tell you at 8:00 p.m. in A&E,
stop talking because I’ve got children working for me at home.
Is it my fault if they employ foreigners as underage slaves?
Anyway I think I might be going deaf when I recover from all my ailments I have to go to the doctor and say
I can’t hear you
And she will shout
What?
Modern slavery in Britain a serious things l
By the way there are people here we brought from Africa tempted by the offer of money and they are working as carers being paid the minimum wage and their own money to the company that brought them over claiming their needed it for their visas.
It’s a form of modern slavery in my opinion and it’s disgusting I have met some of them and they are lovely people some are qualified teachers and other professionals
The poverty in their home country is great and the life expectation is not very long but this is no reason to exploit them.
Lost

I saw my house uprooted like a tree
Great roots were severed, how I ached to see
And all was tossed without my love and care
Bits of earth fell from the roots. now bare.
Barbaric in its weird intensity
I wept the tears of grief for you, for me.
Our home attacked,destroyed and I lie here.
Putting out the flames with profuse tears
Lamenting for my love who died within
The collapsing of my world now with no sun
The house a symbol of our marriage true
Cannot stand without a me and you
So my vision passed and I am here
My memories are my only souvenir
Enjoyment of life

For it is only through the enjoyment of life, through relating to others and Self, that the individual can be enriched and continue to develop and grow.
The mind needs just a hint to see the whole
The vital line was drawn with one brush stroke The way the back leant curving into space The dance and danger both are thus evoked Like a play, a drama, fire and smoke A dance performed so swiftly and with grace The vital line was drawn with one brush stroke The heavy bull is pounding,is provoked. A threat, a man, intrudes into his space The dance and danger both are still evoked See, the matador throw out his cloak A dash of black, and here we see his face The vital line was drawn with one brush stroke
The mind needs just a hint to see the whole We fill the present with our past distaste The dance and danger, mirroring dark smoke
Acting both dramatic and displaced
The artist may still love what she forsakes
The vital line was drawn with one brush stroke
he dance and danger ,life and death evoked
Your arm around me

You seem more real than I do now
Sitting with your arm around my shoulders your presence is bright
Mine is shadowy like a spirit
Yet it’s you who is the spirit
But you’ve got your arm around me and you seem strong
You seem full of light and gold
I’m grey and instubstantial with grief as if my whole body is just tears
But I can feel your comfort; you sit beside me your arm around my shoulders
You’re happy I can tell but I can’t come with you
You’ve gone over to the other side
You’ve missed a general election and the end of the conservative government.
You’ve missed seeing all these women in the Cabinet
But you won’t mind missing Donald Trump.
Nobody would mind if peace came to the Middle East but it doesn’t seem possible.
When things start off wrong can they ever become right?
Still although you are a spirit it’s our bodies that seem important
With our bodies we can hold and comfort each other
We can dance we can run and jump
It’s the body that matters and all the obsessions with IQ
With fashion beauty brilliance and brains
The simple fact is the body and its wisdom
The wisdom of the body is greater than the wisdom of the mind
But we have to tune in
I suppose you’ll have to go now
And I feel weak without you. I won’t hear your voice.
At the same time it feels permanent as if you always have your arm around me
Even in heaven it’s the body that counts.
Maybe the body is heaven.
Take this and eat.
Defiant flowers

Across the road I see a Tudor wall
In its cracks defiant flowers grow
The modern traffic sounds out a loud wail
From the East a freezing wind still blows
In between the natural world and man
The space provides a habitat,retreat
Ancient yew trees grow without a plan
And in each little bird a heart still beats
Concentrating on the green and ancient views
Ignoring the red buses as they pass
Ignoring strident music , find the clues
Down comes peace and joy, our Holy Mass
Reversal of the figure and the ground
Brings out a new world where love is found
Deep in the ground the worms drowse mixed with flowers
A day with my own self, such peaceful hours
The inner seas make music as they roll
And in the ground the worms air roots of flowers
The rain comes down in cold but gentle showers
Desiring to give moisture to all souls
A symbol of the value of quiet hours
In Northern hills we looked for Durham owls
They hunt by day to keep their bodies whole
While in the ground the worms air roots of flowers
My loved one was a native of those towers
Highcliff Nab and Hasty Bank called home
My days with him a-wandering there for hours
As he died , deep in my heart I howled
I held his hands, remembered , paid the toll
While in the ground the worms digest the sour
Lying in the heather we had roamed
May God have mercy on his homing soul
Now I enjoy in reverie our hours
Deep in the ground the worms drowse mixed with flowers
A little peace


One damaged cell divides until it kills.
For in the end we pay the rich man’s bills.
The air polluted ravages and maims
Now it’s cruelly late to curse and blame
Oh sister how we played with our dolls’ prams
In our industrial town there were no lambs.
No sheep could safely graze in smokey streets.
No lark would rise amazed, the dawn to greet.
For you my sister breathed in that bad air
We hear the tread, the foot steps on the stair.
So patient still, I wish that you would shout.
From your eye I see one tear fall out.
My single sister I can see your pain
Your lips are dry you cough and cough again.
Your mouth is hurting so you cannot eat.
And on the telephone you barely speak
In the world some million others groan
Yes we’re fragile, merely flesh and bone
Even so the tears run in my sleep.
Into my face these tears will slowly seep.
I didn’t grasp at first that she would die
And leave me here alone to curse and cry
Hold me in your arms my kindly friends.
From your touch a little peace descends
My sister’s favourite garden

Arley Hall
More about eggs
Why do people boil eggs? They need to keep getting into hot water
Why do others fry eggs? They want to make sure there is nothing live in there
And furthermore, why poach? To annoy landowners. Why are eggs so popular? They can’t speak.
Eggs are used in baking, why? They need to be useful
Can one egg be enough? Yes, if your aim is good.
Can I live on eggs for a few days? If you are very small and light
Can I eat just a few eggs for all my meals Not the same ones.
Is bread a good idea for egg sandwiches? It’s essential for any sandwich regardless
Is an egg good for the old? The old what?
Can I polish the floor with eggs? Dropped them again?
How about the chest of drawers Who was he?
Why do people throw eggs at politicians? Because they look so underfed, I imagine
But it’s a waste of money! Views differ but rotten eggs will do or ones more than 5 weeks old
Can eggs last longer if coated in vaseline? Longer than what?
Do hens grieve for their eggs? I can’t take any more Anymore what?
Do you feel guilty and that all the chickens eaten in your life as in thousands and thousands of them
Inspired in Spain

Do you want to be content?
Schopenhauer said, “Man is [content] according to how dull and insensitive he is”
The light
When in such grief and pain my own heart cried
My eyes saw a dark tunnel drawing me
This might be my path as I felt dread
Near a slope as grave as ends can be
Hesitating. wondering what to do
When with such grief and pain my own heart cried
My eyes still saw the darkness drag at me
Shall I go or stay, what will it be?
Not the love entire my heart once craved
Rushing to unravel mystery
Then a fire, a cloud of gold I knew
My frantic rush had kept Love far away
My eyes desired the darkness beckoning me
Silent,warm , the Good caressed me
I recognised but had no words to say.
The warmth. the golden love from language free
A sheet of tears fell from my open eye
I felt the Love which saved me on that day
Rejecting the deep darkness and its plea
In despair we’re frozen , cannot play
In despair Love comes without our prayer
My eyes saw a tunnel beckon me
Down a slope as grave as earth might be.
Health: The dark side of the mood
What do you say to 21 eggs
What do you say to 21 eggs? Where are the other three?
Why do eggs come in boxes of six Because hens can’t count past six
Why do Sainsburys sell eggs in fifteens? Their hens are more intelligent than the others
Will egg boxes be decimalised? Hens don’t see the point
Why are eggs good for the hair? Because it takes longer to shampoo them out
How many eggs are in an omelette? None,they are on the outside.
Is it a sin to steal eggs? Yes, if they are human.
Are eggs used in warfare? Their atoms are.
Can we measure the velocity and position of eggs? No, but we feel it when they hit us
A favorite poem:As Kingfishers catch fire by G.M.Hopkins
Source: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985)
Demented people look like refugees
Like refugees demented people flee
They have no plans no place where they can be
In my nightmares I have felt like this
No surrounding arms to bring us bliss
The fear which seems irrational is not so
Would you be patient with no place to go?
Lucky refugees may find a home.
The elderly are lost, they scream and moan
Help me help me like a child they call.
There is no Eden after that great Fall
They long for death, the home they’re in appalls
Where is the Ark to rescue these lost souls?
They have nothing left to pay the toll
Mother father husband and young wife
Confusion takes the meaning from a life.
They do not pray because they are locked out
No church no Mass, no priest,no rites,but doubt.
The piteous hands held out for us to grasp
We turn away, unbearable the task
Improve your mind
Salmonella
A small female salmon
Hospital
The place where you learn hospitality.
Infirmary
The place where you learn to be infirm
The fracture clinic
The place where you learn to practise having fractures
The hip replacement clinic
You go here when you’ve lost your hip.
Please know which one it is left or right before you arrive at the clinic
A hat trick
You can wear a hat so that you can keep something under it
If you are on the verge of a nervous breakdown go to the psychiatric clinic where you can have a complete one under the psychiatrist
If you don’t know how to use a commode go to the geriatric ward. They’ll teach you how to be incontinent by refusing to take you to the toilet in a wheelchair when you have broken your leg
Happenstance
When something perfect happens seemingly by charice
A consultant
The head doctor in a unit not just not to be confused with s psychiatrist.
Psychiatrist
Used to be someone who dealt with the psyche but now we don’t believe in the psyche anymore but we still go crazy anyway
In fact it’s normal to go crazy from time to time. It’s just a total relaxation and refusal to bear any tension
Now just pay attention. It’s easy once you know what currency is used in Attention.
L
We’re having a mental health pandemic
Responsibility is love
“I will say this quite plainly, what truly human is -and don’t be afraid of this word- love. And I mean it even with everything that burdens love or, i could say it better, responsibility is actually love, as Pascal said: ‘without concupiscence’ [without lust]… love exists without worrying about being loved.”
― Emmanuel Lévinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind
Love without reward
Susanne K Langer: a snapshot – The Philosophers’ Magazine Archive
D

https://archive.philosophersmag.com/susanne-k-langer-a-snapshot/
O
In her Philosophy in a New Key (1942) her intent was to authenticate a new notion of the “rational,” but how she does it is of fundamental importance. The classical tradition, Langer claimed, generally identified the rational with the “logical,” with discursive thought and objectivity. It then had the difficult task of explaining, or explaining away, such important human concerns as art, ritual, myth, and religion. Langer showed that these forms of meaning-making were embodied in vast sets of symbols and symbolic practices with their own distinctive “logic,” a non-discursive logic, quite different from the discursive logic of language and mathematics. They belonged to the domain of “presentational forms,” not “discursive forms,” a key distinction of her work. Presentational forms, Langer showed by an examination of their logic, are not mere effusions of an irrational subjectivity but articulations of the felt sense of things to which they give us unique access. They orient us in the world in the deepest existential manner, effecting participation in vital values and giving us visions, embodied in symbolic images, of our place in the cosmos. Langer, prior to extensive developments in semiotics, showed that they are worthy of philosophical study in their own right. Her work compares favourably in heuristic power with, and complements, C S Peirce’s great attempt to avoid logocentrism. We are a symbolic species at every level and not just language-endowed animals, although Langer held discursive symbols in the highest regard, as did her intellectual companion, Ernst Cassirer.
Langer was a devoted lover and practitioner of the arts, especially music, which she had studied in detail in Philosophy in a New Key. In 1953 she published Feeling and Form, a masterful generalisation and application to all the arts of the theory of music elaborated in that book. Its key idea was that feeling had a distinctive “morphology” that is exemplified in different ways in the different genres of art. Art works, she claimed, give us knowledge of or insight into ways of feeling the world in every shade of its expressiveness. They articulate feeling and are not mere expressions of personal feeling. They are presentational symbols and their meaning-contents are the “primary illusions” peculiar to each art form: virtual space in the pictorial and visual arts, virtual powers in dance, virtual experience and virtual memory in literature, virtual time in music, the ethnic domain in architecture, and so on. Langer showed art to be an authentic symbolic form and her notion of a “morphology of feeling” exhibited in the artwork is a permanent contribution to aesthetics.
In the last twenty-five years of her working life Langer attempted to develop the notion of feeling as a term to cover all the manifestations of minding. The result was Mind (1967-1982), published in three volumes over a fifteen year period, and which remained incomplete, due to her advancing age. It anticipated many of the current concerns in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of mind. Its central idea is that feeling is an emergent property of natural processes but that its paradigmatic manifestation is the rise of symbolisation and the proliferation of cultural forms and their attendant conflicts and permutations. Central chapters in this book carry out and reformulate Langer’s central insight and claim: symbolisation and the power of abstraction are the keys to what it means to be human. In a return to and deepening of her initial proposals in her first philosophical work, Langer distinguished between generalising abstraction and presentational abstraction, the two fountainheads of all those frames of meaning in which we live out our lives. It was the working out of the implications of this distinction, present at the beginning of her intellectual journey, that forms the connecting link of her whole remarkable philosophical career.
Robert E Innis is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and author of Susanne Langer in Focus: The Symbolic Mind (Indiana University Press).
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Come along we need a psychoanalyst now
I’m really sorry to hear that your sister has died again. Will it ever stop,? Someone needs to get to the bottom of this before it becomes an infinitely repairing decibel. I know I’ve always preferred fractions myself but not everybody is as rational as I am.
Please accept our deepest infinity for your cross
Please be aware of our deepest symphony when we hear sure sad news.
I am sorry your sister is enjoying eternal pests. I pray it will be soon be over. Who else is there in purgatory?
I couldn’t wait to write to you when I heard your sister lied. I hope she makes a good recovery when she gets to heaven if you guess what I scream. I only wish I was illiterate I know you both went to Oxford. What for? I never like the railway station there myself and the Marks and Spencer store is far too small there I suppose Oxford Cons do not shop there.
I hope your mourning goes well. Sending our bugging timpani
When you said your sister spied I wondered if you were on the spectrum. But we don’t have a chemistry lab over here. Should you ask professor Fearrack
What did you say was the spectrum of the Duraglit operator. Did this affect your sister’s health and ultimately her life? I know you were worried about nuclear plumbers at Oxford. We lost contact so I never got to have that explosion that we were all waiting for in 1969
More likely it was a rest in eternity.
I really don’t know what I’m talking about but I am very sad on your behalf because you’ve had too many deaths in your life so far so I hope that you will have no more for the rest of eternity or should that be we will have arrested eternity? In any case eternity is inconceivable
William Blake could see eternity in a grain of sand
How did it feel on the beach when you were with him?
The Paris Review – The Vale of Soul-Making – John Keats

overlook, for instance, that Keats spent six years studying medicine, successfully earning a license to practice in London from the Society of Apothecaries—hence Lockhart’s insult about the “plasters, pills, and ointment boxes.” To think that he was “snuffed out by an article” trivializes the intense pain he experienced as his lungs were slowly consumed by tuberculosis, robbing him of his work, his love, and his life at the age of twenty-five.
The myth of the frail genius is attractive, even to contemporary readers, because of its quintessential Romanticism. But the truth is that Keats’s writings—especially when they seem fanciful or escapist—are grounded in real-world concerns. And nowhere is this more evident than in the letters and poems of his that deal with feverish suffering.
During the early nineteenth century, London had fallen into the grip of fever mania. The city was working to combat a host of diseases associated with the colonies: yellow fever, typhus, influenza, smallpox, child-bed fevers, agues, and St. Anthony’s fire, among many others. With almost a million people living in the city in the early 1800s, including more than ten thousand prostitutes, disease spread quickly, inducing public panic. Between 1816 and 1817, the number of admissions to the Fever Hospital spiked from 124 to 781, and the fever epidemic remained a major news story for the duration of Keats’s life. Whereas some historians have viewed the fever as a foreign invader, striking from the colonies upon the homeland, Keats would have recognized it as a recurrent, intimate presence that followed him throughout his life.
The patients whom he attended at Guy’s Hospital haunted him, as did the memory of his mother’s fatal consumptive fever, which he would relive as he nursed his brother, Tom, throughout 1818. Because of his family’s history of illness, his own medical training, and the epidemic of fever that spread throughout London, Keats was intimately familiar with feverish suffering; he used his writing to make sense of a pain for which there was no reasonable explanation. Two letters—one written before Tom’s death and one after—outline Keats’s philosophy of suffering as a creative force.
* * *
On May 3, 1818, Keats wrote a letter to his friend, John Hamilton Reynolds, comparing a human lifespan to “a large Mansion of Many Apartments.” He imagined two rooms in a mansion through which one must pass before confronting a vast number of potential third rooms. For an unspecified length of time, one remains unthinkingly in the first apartment, in spite of the fact that the doors leading to the second are wide open. Eventually, the impetus to think moves one from the first chamber into this second, called the “Chamber of Maiden-Thought,” which is full of intoxicating delights and thus initially very pleasing. But time spent within it leads to a “sharpening [of] one’s vision into the heart and nature of Man … convincing ones nerves that the World is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression.”
One becomes aware of one’s own fever and the suffering that afflicts humanity—which were present all the while, even amid the delights. Keats thought he’d only made it to the end of this second room. He saw nothing but darkness and mist in the hallway beyond it. He told Reynolds that he wished to explore the dark passages to seek out some form of salvation by way of his poetry, though he offered no compelling evidence that any of the unexplored rooms might contain something redemptive, or even pleasant.
Surrounding this philosophical discussion are the details of Tom’s illness. The letter begins with what appears to be good news: “After a Night without a Wink of sleep, and overburdened with fever, [Tom] has got up after a refreshing day sleep and is better than he has been for a long time,” and ends with restrained melancholy: “Tom has spit a leetle [for little] blood this afternoon, and that is rather a damper.” But insofar as Keats was hoping to justify the purpose of suffering to himself, both of these statements are heartbreaking. Because of his extensive experience with ill patients, Keats surely knew that his brother’s condition was grim, even in May 1818. His reactions hint at a kind of denial—an insistence that there be an identifiable purpose to justify the trauma he continued to witness and endure. And once he has convinced himself that there is a purpose to suffering, it is only another small leap to start thinking of the fever as something constructive. Indeed, as odd as it may seem, it was his brother’s grim condition that prompted, even forced, Keats to expand his philosophy of suffering to embrace fever as beneficial. The search for the third room, undertaken in the midst of suffering, had to lead to the creation of something meaningful and redemptive, as Keats would try to convince himself after Tom’s death in December 1818.

Joseph Severn’s drawing of Keats on his deathbed.
* * *
In the spring of 1819, Keats was at the height of his genius; within the next few months he would write his finest poems. In a letter from April 21, 1819 to his other brother, George, who had emigrated to America, Keats revisited his philosophy, unveiling the “system of Spirit-creation” that he’d been designing and testing for more than a year: the world as the “vale of Soul-making.”
Keats argued that any attempts to improve one’s life still end in death—a fate that he acknowledged as unbearable without some notion of redemption. And yet he rejected the idea of the afterlife or religious salvation—those, in his view, devalue the act of suffering, because they serve no creative purpose and teach nothing to the human individual.
Instead, he referred to the raw material of a soul as an “intelligence.” All humans have (or are) an intelligence, but they’re not considered souls until they develop an individual identity. Soul creation takes place over the span of many years and requires two components—the human heart and the world of feverish suffering—comprising a process that Keats likens to an education:
I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read—I will call the human heart the horn Book used in that School—and I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that school and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!
The “vale of Soul-making” celebrated the fever that had followed him through his life. And yet what Keats could not, or refused to, see is that the irrationality he perceived in religious salvation is present in his own system, too. There’s no ultimate purpose to the suffering that he, his family, and his patients have had to endure; it’s not as if the fever of tuberculosis consciously, benevolently struck Keats’s mother and brother to help them shape their souls. But Keats went to great lengths to convince himself of just that.
While the fever had surrounded him for most of his life, it consumed Keats during the months following Tom’s death, insisting that he find some way to rationalize its irrational effects. In fact, compared with other medical terms, Keats uses the word fever sparingly in his poems: blood is explicitly referenced forty-seven times (and implicitly in at least a dozen other instances), and there are 157 variations of heart, but only twenty-three instances of fever appear across the body of Keats’s poetry.
This shouldn’t mislead us into thinking that it’s a less potent image for him. His prudent use of the term demonstrates its importance—it’s loaded with personal significance. All but five of these uses of “fever” occur after Tom became ill, the most poignant of which comes in “Ode to a Nightingale,” written only a few days after the “vale of Soul-making” letter.
The feverish heart overwhelms the speaker of the “Ode to a Nightingale,” who suffers a heartache as he listens to the nightingale’s song, hoping to mirror the bird’s ability to transcend real-world circumstances. The speaker describes the world as
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs.
Keats must have had Tom’s death in mind when he composed these lines; every phrase is loaded with the common suffering of humanity from which the nightingale’s song seems to escape.
Less than two years later, Keats died of tuberculosis in Italy, where he’d traveled in the hope of recovering, accompanied by the artist Joseph Severn. Even as he grew shorter and shorter of breath in early 1821, Keats repeatedly rejected his dear friend Severn’s belief in the afterlife, suggesting that he was committed to his philosophy of Soul-making until the end. Severn wrote in mid-January: “this noble fellow lying on the bed—is dying in horror—no kind hope smoothing down his suffering—no philosophy—no religion to support him.”
When the end came, it was the fever, and not an article with obvious political motivations, that killed Keats. The pleasures of his life—beauty, love, poetry—had always been bundled up with suffering and death, and we may empathize with him in his desire to articulate a purpose to it all. He was not too frail for the world: his devotion to making the most of his mortality drove his creative process. He was a man who had a deep need to create meaning where there was none.
Jeffrey C. Johnson is a writer living in California. His writing can be found on his website, and he is on Twitter.
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https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/07/25/the-vale-of-soul-making/



