by Hendley Badcock
A few weeks ago, I got a phone call from my mother. Her voice, strange and strained, carried grave news—our friend had passed away. The charismatic, disarming 25-year-old I had known for most of my life was suddenly gone, taken from his family and his friends.
On the topic of death and dying young, I gravitate toward Keats, another man who died at the premature age of 25, a year after he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Anticipating death, Keats’ ticking mortal clock haunted him and infected his poetry. His illness stoked a morbid obsession about which he composed beautiful, profound, distressed, regretful, and frustrated lines. Through his art, Keats produced some of the most revered meditations on leaving the material world before he might have been ready.
When I read “To Sleep,” for instance, my own fears about death’s power to take life are somewhat calmed. In the sonnet, Keats both praises a tender, romantic portrayal of eternal sleep and confesses his psychological unrest about his own mortality. In a form traditionally associated with love, Keats’ sonnet dedicated to death plays off an idea of adoration and suggests that perhaps, at the moment of composition, Keats was more comfortable with confronting his own passing:
O soft embalmer of the still midnight, 1
Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleas’d eyes, embower’d from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine:
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close 5
In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes
Or wait the “Amen,” ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities.
“O soft embalmer” (1), Keats addresses death. “O soothest sleep!” (5), he says. The poets’ calls symbolize his viewing death as a friend or at least an approachable force near enough to which he can speak intimately. In the octave Keats commends sleep’s powers and asks to be overtaken by them; however, in the sestet he reveals the mental tormentors that inspire his request to die:
Then save me, or the passed day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes,— 10
Save me from curious Conscience, that still lords
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul. 14
While explicitly embracing death, the speaker simultaneously awaits his final slumber with anxiety. Each time he lies down “upon [his] pillow, breeding many woes” (10), his mind races with fear, with wonder, with sadness. Nevertheless, this is a moment for Keats to be “save[d]” (9) from earthly worries for the sake of “forgetfulness divine” (4). Not only can sleep expel man’s physical, material issues, it also constitutes a divine state which graces all beings upon death.
Although Keats was not granted a long life, he was given time to reflect, contemplate, and compose. How gratifying (or agitating) was this opportunity for him? Clearly, Keats had conflicting emotions about his impending death. Who wouldn’t? But surely writing such poems helped him process what was happening to him physically, mentally, and emotionally. In “Sonnet to Sleep,” Keats’ implies that he has grown tired of resenting, fearing, and maybe even cursing death and now has grown to accept its inevitability. There’s a great deal of hopelessness in the poem but also real understanding of what is out of his control. The poet works through all of these feelings in just fourteen lines. Keats’ poetry had to have empowered him through his darkest times. After all, if the act of writing about his death was not therapeutic for him in some way, then why did he compose so many poems like this? What was the point?
I want to press further and ask what’s the point of reading these poems. When Keats’ friends and family read them, did they help them cope and mourn? Did they feel like they could understand Keats’ emotional and mental processing of his death through his lyric chronicles? I feel like they must have. So then, if my friend had had the chance to scribble down a few lines, pen a letter, or, heck, write an entire book, what might he write in it? Would it provoke us to think about the memories of our loved ones, the value of our own lives?
Audiences, I believe, do get a therapeutic affect from literature on death. Why would it have sustained as a subgenre otherwise? Kevin Henkes’ Olive’s Ocean I read for fun when I was hardly twelve. Mitch Albom’s Tuesday with Morrie was required reading when I was in high school. And I just started reading Paul Hardy’s Tinkers earlier this year. These books all contemplate death and dying and appeal to a range of ages. All of them drew me to meditate on the impressions people make on one other throughout their lifetimes and even after their deaths. “Sonnet to Sleep” is no different. Any reader can relate to Keats’ feelings and fears about her own mortality just by reading it.
I do not think it’s a vain attempt to try to hear my friend’s words—or you any late friends’ words—in the poetry of someone who, like Keats, had the opportunity to write down some thoughts about his own death. I believe that Keats can speak in retrospect for those of whom death sneaks up on and takes quietly, suddenly, and unexpectedly. I truly hope to find consolation for myself and others who grieve unexpected deaths in his words. Whether Keats’ warning was, to him or his friends, a blessing or a curse, he nonetheless has given us tools with which we can try to process death’s untimely taking of a truly loved and missed young man, my friend. As Keats puts it, death took my friend and “[shut], with careful fingers and benign, [his] gloom-pleas’d eyes,” but this divine sleep has undoubtedly transferred him to someplace better than he knew here.