Dedication to Keats
by Sarah Guppy
Although I don’t think the nightingale
Had sung especially for you
That time under the plum tree
Or indeed any other bird had warbled forth,
Upon the boughs, only to entrance you further
You took a moment, you flew with the birds
Why, at that moment, if I had observed
You lying on the heath
I’m sure I would have seen only the one:
One creature, one soul
Such was the intensity
Of the communication with nature.
I went in to the room
Where you met your love,
You never were the same man
After that meeting.
The very floor boards reeked of romance
Even the newspaper reading lady with the upper crust vowel sounds
Could not erase your power, your vision
One hundred and seventy years after your leaving.
But, in a sense, you never completely left and
I’m sure when every nightingale sings
And someone hears the song
Your essence hovers somewhere amongst the leaves
And in the air.
For who can ever say you died when your consciousness
Lives on forever?
How poignant your words seem now,
Your every utterance a precious perfumed flower
Oh, what would you think now
Of this green and pleasant land
Being so brutally trashed
Or the modern day troll-mobs
Munching their way through the pastoral?
I read your thoughts and
If “beauty is truth and truth beauty”
Does that now mean
That we live surrounded by lies and ugliness, the outer environment
Reflecting the crisis within;
The rejection and scorn of anything natural
Anything of the senses, of the unseen world
Of the inherent truth, beauty within us all.
The division of nature and technology
Reflecting the division of our own consciousness,
So that, disjointed as it were and disconnected
We gaze at you like numb automans
Being removed from you
Through time and space.
Tell me, which is the strangest
We voyeurs, observing the relics of your life
Self contained and stuffed
In one of those Victorian display cases,
Or our fear of the sensual feeling life
Our emotions disturbed by your selfless romance,
Our thoughts as stifled as the air within the case.
Now unable to tune in to your music,
A kind of mass blindness prevails across the land
This subtle numbing of the senses
So that eventually we become
As frozen and rigid as the figures on the urn
Our lives and consciousness frozen and disconnected
As the people on the Grecian Urn.
For in the disconnection of our selves
In the splitting off of our feeling, instinctual self
There is an immense loss
The earth’s poisonous yield
Being merely a barometer of the poison within of
This terrible poverty of the spirit,
So that your luminous august feasts
Ring resoundingly on now
Haunting us in our identity crisis
Reminding us of our real need
To reclaim Darien.
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