The Student Vagabond

There is so little about that love, and yet the little means so much. Keats was but recovered from a first futile infatuation, Fanny Brawne was just eighteen. Her blonde and statuesque beauty jarred harshly with her fondness for a ready retort; her inclination to bandy a flirtatious word with any young Hussar in gold-frogging and scarlet did shocking violence to her Janoesque grace. She startled her friends with an interest in politics, and even translated French and German, so proving herself a dreadful "rattle."

Keats loved her at first sight. "The very first week I knew you, I wrote myself your vassal," he recorded. It was not for her wit, for he had more; nor for her money, since he planned to win their bread as a surgeon; nor for her beauty--"her nostrils . . . a little painful," he wrote, "her mouth is bad and good, her Profile better than her full face . . . her hands bad-ish, her feet tolerable." He did not even love her for her guile: they had many a tiff over a ball-room brave, and he reproached her with being a minx, "calling people such names."

But the curse of Tantalus haunted their Romantic love. As Amy Lowell explains, "She kept Keats in a burning agitation of desire which, under the circumstances, she was powerless to gratify." Yet she waited out the long days of his illness, lonely in her cold virginity, never regarding the torment of delirious notes in which he accused her of unfaithfulness. She kept faith to the dying poet long after he coughed out his last feeble breath, holding her oval white carnelian in his hand. She had understood his request that her last letter be laid in his coffin. He died. "All that grieves me now," she wrote pathetically to Fanny Keats, "is that I was not with him, and so near it as I was."

TODAY

11 O'Clock

"Keats," Professor Matthiessen, Emerson A.