“The House by the Sea, Eriskay” by Niall Campbell

This is where the drowned climb to land.
For a single night when a boat goes down

soaked footprints line its cracked path
as inside they stand open mouthed at a fire,

drying out their lungs, that hang in their chests
like sacks of black wine. Some will have stripped

down to their washed skin, and wonder
whether they are now more moon than earth —

so pale. Some worry about the passage,
others still think about the deep. All share

a terrible thirst, wringing their hands
until the seawater floods across the floor.

Niall Campbell
Best Scottish Poems 2014

Saoirse from “Song of the Sea”

Read Full Post »

Poem from the Film, “My Afternoons with Margueritte”

It’s not a typical love affair,
but “love” and “tenderness,”
both are there.

Named after a daisy,
she lived amidst words
surrounded by adjectives
in green fields of verbs.

Some force you to yield,
but she with soft art
passed through my hard shield
and into my heart.

Not always are love stories
just made of love.
Sometimes love is not named
but it’s love just the same…

This is no typical love affair –
I met her on a bench in my local square.
She made a little stir, tiny like a bird,
with her gentle feathers.

She was surrounded by words,
some as common as myself.
She gave me books, two or three,
their pages have come alive for me.

Don’t die now,
you’ve still got time, just wait,
it’s not the hour, my little flower.
Give me some more of you,
more of the life in you.  

Wait…

Not always are love stories
just made of love.
Sometimes love is not named,
but it’s love just the same.

English translation given for a French poem
at the end of the film, “My Afternoons with Margueritte” (2011)

Donne moi encore un peu de toi,
donne moi encore un peu de ta vie.

Read Full Post »

Buen Camino

“Thank You“

by Alanis Morissette

The Way

(trailer)

You don’t choose a life —
you live one.

Read Full Post »

Rain

“The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.”

Gabriel Pacal

(qtd. in “My Fair Lady”)

Translated:

La lluvia en Sevilla es una maravilla!

Read Full Post »

“A Time for Everything” by Jane Beal

He invited plans.
Hers were wild.
He watched her move a pot.
She watched him.

He came into her private garden
and stood surrounded by candlelight,
and when she came down from her bath,
she had no idea what he was doing there.

His father, he said, told him we were meant
for Eden, and ever since the Fall,
we have been trying to re-make
the perfect garden.

“Is this your Eden?” he asked her.
My search for it, she said.
He touched the flowers with such gentleness.
Later, she knelt in the same place where he had stood.

She might be digging
when the wind would blow,
and the ghost of her lost child
would run by, laughing.

She sat with him another day and said,
You will tell me if I am mad,
and he said, “You are not mad.”
You do not know me completely yet, she replied.

There came a night when
they stood in one another’s presence,
dressed in white, like a wedding,
and then undressing, completely vulnerable.

Both of them had seen betrayal,
and so much pain and loss,
and yet they opened their hearts –
they opened their bodies to the future.

The king will come into his garden,
the water will flow over the rocks,
the seashells will glisten and shine,
and the music will play, it will play –

a song of hope and desire,
a song for being reborn,
for there is a time for everything,
a season for every matter under heaven.

Jane Beal

A Little Chaos

(soundtrack by Peter Gregson)

Read Full Post »

Link to Andy Goldsworthy “Time & Tide” Montage

There are no words to express how beautiful I think this is:

Time & Tide Montage

Read Full Post »

Paul’s Message in the Jesus Storybook Bible

“It’s not about keeping the rules!” Paul told the people. “You don’t have to be good at being good for God to love you. You just have to believe what Jesus has done and follow him. Because it’s not about trying, it’s about trusting. It’s not about rules, it’s about Grace: God’s free gift — that cost him everything.”

What had happened to Paul? He met Jesus.

by Sally Lloyd Jones w/ Illustrator Jago
The Jesus Storybook Bible

Read Full Post »

Girl-Samson: Reflections on Disney’s Rapunzel

Flower, gleam and glow,

let your power shine, 

make the clock reverse,

bring back once was mine —

what once was mine.

Disney’s 50th animated motion picture, “Tangled,” is a fascinating adaptation of the Brothers Grimm fairy-tale, “Rapunzel.” It features a little poem (above) as a song sung by Mother Gothel to a magical flower, created by a drop of sunlight, that has the power to heal and to keep her forever young. The flower, however, is one day taken by the King’s guards and used to make a medicinal drink for the Queen to help her recover from illness in her pregnancy. Later the queen gives birth to a beautiful baby girl, Rapunzel, with sun-bright golden hair. That hair, unbeknownst to the king and queen, has the same magical power as the sun-flower.

But Mother Gothel suspects.

So she comes to the castle at night to cut a lock of the golden hair to keep it for herself. But she discovers that, once cut, the hair loses its power. So she kidnaps the baby and raises her as her own, singing the song over the little princess, brushing her hair and using her to keep herself alive.

This story is a little bit different from the Brothers Grimm version. In the fairy-tale, Rapunzel is from an ordinary family, not a royal one. Her father steals not a sunflower, but a vegetable called rampion (which, coincidently, contains precursors for synthesizing the hormones necessary to sustain a woman’s pregnancy) from the garden of a witch —  for his wife who craves it. The witch says that to pay for this theft the family must give him their firstborn child, which they do, and she locks up Rapunzel in a tower where her hair grows very long.

Changes made in the Disney version ennoble Rapunzel, free her father from the taint of wrongdoing, and create a different motivation in Mother Gothel for her actions: eternal youth, not revenge and the desire to enslave another person to her power. Still present in both versions is the problem of human trafficking and child slavery. Only in “Tangled,” Rapunzel’s imprisonment is made pleasant by painting, pottery, puppeteering, and playing guitar (among other things!). For Disney’s Mother Gothel needs Rapunzel to be manipulated, not man-handled, into sharing the life-giving power of her magical hair.

Making Rapunzel’s hair not only long but magical emphasizes not the amount of time she’s been locked in the tower but something divine: her ability to heal people who are hurt. The idea that cutting her hair causes some or all of the power to be lost looks very much like the biblical story of Samson in the book of Judges. Samson has superhuman strength when his hair is long, but loses it when it is cut — as Delilah discovered. In the Disney film, the awareness of this link is even alluded to in a conversation Rapunzel has with Flynn Rider (aka Eugene FitzHerbert) who asks, after she heals a cut on his hand with her hair, if he will now have superhuman strength “because that would be pretty cool!” (Agreed.)

In “Tangled,” Flynn Rider is actually the narrator of the story who begins it by saying “this is the story of how I died.” But as he is still speaking, we suspect upon hearing this that he somehow came back to life again — which proves to be the case in this version of the story. At the end of some wonderful adventures, in which Rapunzel leaves her tower to celebrate her birthday under the shining light of 1000 floating lanterns, she is recaptured by Mother Gothel and Eugene comes to rescue her. But the witch stabs him, intending to kill him. As he is dying, Rapunzel begs to be allowed to heal him with the magic of her hair. Mother Gothel agrees when Rapunzel promises to remain with her forever and never run away again.

But Eugene is against this damning covenant, and when Rapunzel is about to sing the song that would heal his wound, he cuts off her hair with a shard from a broken mirror. Rapunzel instantly becomes a brunette! And Mother Gothel, whose life has been utterly dependent on Rapunzel’s magic, ages rapidly, trips and falls out the window, turning utterly to ashes by the time she hits the ground. Then Eugene dies, too, but only after telling Rapunzel that she was his “new dream.” Rapunzel begins to cry. As she does, she sings:

Heal what has been hurt,

change the fates’ design,

save what has been lost,

bring back once was mine —

what once was mine

One of Rapunzel’s tears falls on Eugene’s face. In her tear is the power no longer in her hair. It baptizes Eugene with the same life-saving grace Rapunzel’s birthmother experienced when pregnant, and Eugene comes back to life. The light of the sun-flower shines through the wound and closes it.

I was watching this film for the first time on Easter, and I couldn’t help but be struck by the resurrection plot, the sun-flower symbolism,  and the spiritual themes:  our human need for healing, the imprisonment of our souls caused by deception and selfishness, our natural desire for freedom, and, above all, the power of love to motivate self-sacrifice for someone else. As my friend Professor Jerry Root pointed out to me and those members of the Root family watching the film with me on Easter Sunday afternoon, both Rapunzel and Eugene demonstrate Christ-like qualities at the moment when they’re willing to give up their lives for each other.

The Brothers Grimm fairy-tale ends very differently. When the young man goes to the tower to rescue Rapunzel, he finds the witch but not the girl. It is he who falls out the window and scratches out his eyes on long thorns at the tower’s base. For many long years after, he wanders until at last he comes to the place where Rapunzel has been living in the desert with the twins she gave birth to, their children together, and his heart is restored and healed by the sound of her voice — which he recognizes as her own.

This ending is much more complex. Evil is not destroyed, a good man is hurt, and a woman who was a slave struggles to provide for her children as a single mother until her blinded lover can come to her.  The theme in the fairy-tale is not resurrection of life, but the continuation of life from generation to generation —  not the magical power of Rapunzel’s hair, but the divine power of her fertility.

I love both versions of the story.

p.s. Eugene FitzHerbert is a fine name for the otherwise nameless man who comes to Rapunzel’s tower. The name means “well-born son of a glorious warrior.”

p.p.s.  “Rapunzel” is the German word for the vegetable rampion,  and Gothel means “godmother” in a dialect of southern German. The most fascinating name of the movie, however, belongs to Rapunzel’s pet chameleon: Pascal. This was the name of the 17th century French physicist and philosopher who came up with the idea known as “Pascal’s Wager” —  something worth reading about!

Read Full Post »

The Mythologies of “Tron: Legacy”

So I went to see “Tron: Legacy” the other night. It’s an interesting story about a boy, Sam, who loses his father, Kevin Flynn — because, unbeknownst to the world, his father digitally teleports into a computer game he created. The boy grows up as the owner of a fabulously successful tech company — Encom — and eventually, he follows in his father’s footsteps, quite literally, and takes the journey from this world to the Other World: cyberspace.

The basic story of “Tron: Legacy” is that of the Hero’s Journey from classical mythology. There are direct parallels between Odysseus and Telemachus, the father and son who face many trials and tribulations before being reunited in Homer’s epic poem, the Odyssey. There’s even a character named Zeus, the foremost Olympian god of Greek mythology.

But in the film, he initially calls himself Castor, which is startling and odd. That’s because Castor is most famous for being the twin of Pollux, both sons of their mother Leda, but Castor was the son of a mortal and thus doomed to mortality while Pollux was the son of Zeus and thus destined for eternal life. In the Greek legend, Pollux asks Zeus to let him share his immortality with his brother, and so they are turned into the constellation Gemini, forever shining over the earth, and they become patrons to sailors on the high seas. But in “Tron: Legacy,” I think the character who first calls himself Castor and then Zeus is on the one hand revealing his mortality and then his secondary status as a usurped god, for it is clear that Kevin Flynn is the “Creator” and Sam, as Zeus calls him in one dramatic moment when he revels in an attack on the young man, is “the Son of our Maker.”

The appellations given to Kevin and Sam create clear parallels to the Christian Creator God and Jesus Christ. Eerily, the “programs” of Tron who manifest as people with faces (often masked), often have the young face of Kevin at the age when he made them — they are “made in his image.” Further similarities to biblical stories emerge when the world of Tron is compared to a perfect place, invoking Eden before the fall, when Clu (“clue”), Kevin’s evil double and the arch-enemy of the story, handles silver apples like the snake in Genesis, and when the girl Quorra (like “cora” for “heart”), an isometric algorithim (or “iso),  accidentally betrays Sam like Eve betrayed Adam. So Sam bears a resemblance to the first Adam as well as the Second, but his name, Samuel, is actually that of a biblical prophet, a name which means “God hears.” And Sam does seem to be carefully listening to his father throughout this story, beginning in his childhood when his father first tells him the story of things that unfolded for him when he visited the gaming world of Tron.

Yet the use of mythology in “Tron: Legacy” is ultimately syncretistic. Kevin is like the Christian Creator God, but he is also an imperfect representative of a Zen Buddhist seeking enlightenment, learning to do nothing and wait when acting might destroy his digital universe. The concept of “yin and yang” comes into play when it becomes clear that Clu, a program with a personality whom Kevin designed to help him create a perfect digital world, is actually his designer’s evil opposite. Kevin even says to his son Sam, who is quite ready to take quick and daring action to get his father out of cyberspace, that he is “messing with my Zen thing.” In response to disruptions of his mental peace, Kevin meditates, a process that he refers to as “going to knock on the sky.” This alludes to a Zen proverb: “Knock on the sky and listen to the sound.”

At the very end of the story, Kevin is reunited with Clu, so that, presumably, balance can be restored. This symbolic reunification only makes sense if we view Kevin, in the moment this occurs, through a Zen Buddhist world-view. If we try to continue to interpret Kevin and Clu from the perspective of Christian symbolism, things look wildly odd — as if the Creator is apologizing to the snake for setting him loose and demanding the snake make a perfect world (which does not happen in Genesis, though Romantic interpretations of Milton’s Satan may have influenced the “Tron: Legacy” script-writers here). Indeed, one of the key thematic messages of the film is that perfection is unachievable and the attempt to create it leads to imbalance, violence and psychological ill health. This, too, is more of a Buddhist idea than a Christian or classical Greek one.

Yet the film is powerfully drawing viewers into a meditation on creation and the Creator. In the digital universe of Tron, a star appears over the central city whenever the Creator — Kevin — enters from the outside world. It appears again when Sam makes his way there. The star lingers like the star of Bethlehem. At one point, Sam and Quorra are gazing at it, and Quorra — who has read books by Jules Vern, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky that Kevin has given her — asks if the star is anything like the sun that shines upon the earth in Sam’s world. Sam says “there is no comparison.”

He describes the sun as “warm, radiant, and beautiful.”

At the very end of the film, both Sam and Quorra escape the destructive intentions Clu has for them. We see them riding on a motorcycle together in the sunlight and going past green trees growing along the roadside. The contrast with earlier parts of the story is striking, for the events that happen in the digital world happen in the dark, as if in the underworld, but outside there is light.

.

Read Full Post »

Gandalf Hands Over the Map

In 1977, Rankin & Bass produced a cartoon version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, which instantly delighted many children all over the world. In the film, after the dwarves, the wizard Gandalf, and the hobbit Bilbo discover a stolen treasure amassed by trolls, Gandalf hands over a map of the Mountain to the dwarf-leader, Thorin Oakenshield. (In the book, Gandalf shares it with Thorin and Bilbo back at Bag End before their adventure ever begins — the story was changed a bit in the translation from the page to the animated performance.) In the Mountain, there is an even greater treasure, one that has been stolen and is being jealously guarded by the dragon, Smaug. It is why the dwarves and Bilbo are on their adventure: they are treasure-seekers.

You can see the scene on YouTube:

Gandalf Hands Over the Map

If you skip ahead in the clip linked above to 6:30, you will come upon one of my favorite exchanges between Gandalf and Bilbo about a secret way to the Mountain:

Bilbo: “If the secret door is hidden, how do we find it? The map doesn’t tell.”
Gandalf: “It does, and it doesn’t. You will understand in time.”

Jane Beal, PhD
sanctuarypoet.net

Read Full Post »

Winter’s Smiling Face

“… winter slumbering in the open air,
wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
from “Work without Hope”
… quoted in the movie “Groundhog Day”

Read Full Post »

The Accidental Husband

“The Accidental Husband” is a romantic comedy about a radio talk show host, Dr. Emma Lloyd (played by Uma Thurman), who insists that women find “real love” with a suitable man: a Responsible, Equal, Adult, Loving (REAL) man. However, it becomes clear in the course of the movie that her advice is motivated by fear of sparks that might turn into fires in the house of her heart. That’s because Emma grew up with a father, aptly named Wilder, whose parenting made her long for stability and security.

So, when she meets a man whom she finds powerfully attractive, she’s not ready for him–and she’s engaged to someone else anyway! It turns out that she’s also been “accidentally” married to him by a teenage hacker messing with New York City’s marriage license data base. Thus the stage is set, and the romantic comedy unfolds.

I like this film because it respects the humanity and fragility of each major character in it. No one is demonized. Real motivations for the actions each one takes–their impulses, their desires, their mistakes–have clear roots in what we learn about their personal histories. I think Emma’s relationship to her father, her desire to be safe, her intelligence and creativity, her usually hidden ability to tell stories and cut loose, and the real beauty of her unique face and personality all make this film better than most romantic comedies.

But it is not only Emma’s character who brings life to this movie. I enjoy the cast of Indian characters from New York who are the close friends of Emma’s husband, Patrick Thomas Sullivan (played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan). The authentic representation of a Hindu ceremony, the interweaving of multiple languages, and the music –the music!– is rich and beautiful. The music is beautiful all the way through, and Rahman’s “Swasame” at the film’s ending will awaken any sleeping heart. That song is a poem. It begins at the end of the story.

The ending of the film is my favorite part. All the troubles Emma and Patrick face, especially the ones they themselves put between them, get resolved. (This is a romantic comedy afterall!) But instead of ending the film with a kiss or a wedding ceremony or a romantic, honeymoon-like get-away, as most films in this genre do, “The Accidental Husband” ends … with Patrick adoring his wife’s nine-months’ pregnant body. The joy of the faces of these two people at this moment is wonderful!

Why don’t all romantic comedies end this way?

To see the ending of the movie, check out YouTube: The Happy Ending

To listen to “Swasame” in its entirety, check out: Tamil Song

To read a translation into English of “Swasame,” see: Translation

… and enjoy the poetry of a love-song sung in Tamil.

Read Full Post »

Robert Lowell on the Scarlet Tanager

The other day, I watched the film, “Finding Forrester.” The reclusive novelist featured in the film and played by Sean Connery happens to be a bird-watcher. At one point, he quotes the poet Robert Lowell, saying:

“Thy duty, winged flame of Spring,
is but to love and fly and sing.”

The lovely couplet occurs in two versions of the poem by Lowell and refers to the scarlet tanager, a brilliant red bird with a lovely voice. To hear the scarlet tanager’s song, visit the scarlet tanager page of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Read Full Post »

“Vermeer” by Tomas Tranströmer

It’s not a sheltered world. The noise begins over there, on the other side of the wall
where the alehouse is
with its laughter and quarrels, its rows of teeth, its tears, its chiming of clocks,
and the psychotic brother-in-law, the murderer, in whose presence
everyone feels fear.

The huge explosion and the emergency crew arriving late,
boats showing off on the canals, money slipping down into pockets
— the wrong man’s —
ultimatum piled on the ultimatum,
widemouthed red flowers who sweat reminds us of approaching war.

And then straight through the wall — from there — straight into the airy studio
in the seconds that have got permission to live for centuries.
Paintings that choose the name: “The Music Lesson”
or ” A Woman in Blue Reading a Letter.”
She is eight months pregnant, two hearts beating inside her.
The wall behind her holds a crinkly map of Terra Incognita.

Just breathe. An unidentifiable blue fabric has been tacked to the chairs.
Gold-headed tacks flew in with astronomical speed
and stopped smack there
as if there had always been stillness and nothing else.

The ears experience a buzz, perhaps it’s depth or perhaps height.
It’s the pressure from the other side of the wall,
the pressure that makes each fact float
and makes the brushstroke firm.

Passing through walls hurts human beings, they get sick from it,
but we have no choice.
It’s all one world. Now to the walls.
The walls are a part of you.
One either knows that, or one doesn’t; but it’s the same for everyone
except for small children. There aren’t any walls for them.

The airy sky has taken its place leaning against the wall.
It is like a prayer to what is empty.
And what is empty turns its face to us
and whispers:
“I am not empty, I am open.”

Tomas Tranströmer
trans. by Robert Bly
in The Winged Energy of Desire (2004)

Commentary: Jan Vermeer was a seventeenth-century, Dutch Baroque painter justly famous for his use of light in his works depicting interior scenes from middle class life. His extraordinary accomplishments have recently come to the attention of the American public because of the novel-turned-film, “The Girl with a Pearl Earring.” In addition, poet Marilyn Chandler McEntyre has written a book of ekphrastic poems on a selection of the painter’s works, In Quiet Light: Poems on Vermeer’s Women.

In our poem, Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer imagines Vermeer’s studio sharing a wall with an alehouse … the chaos on the alehouse side, the light and life on the art-studio side … and the open attitude of the artist to whatever may come through the wall or from the airy sky.

As I read, I couldn’t help but remember the story from the Gospels of how Jesus appeared to his disciples, walking through a wall when the door to their hiding place was locked. C.S. Lewis has written that to Jesus in his resurrected body, the wall was as ephemeral as mist is to us when we take a walk on an autumn morning. Another human being could not have done it, because “walking through walls hurts human beings,” but Jesus did.

Then he said, “Peace be with you … receive the Holy Spirit.” (John 20:19, 22)

Read Full Post »

Bright Star

Last night, I went to see the film “Bright Star” directed by Jane Campion. It is the love story of the 19th century, Romantic poet John Keats and the muse who inspired him, Fanny Brawne. The film gave me a whole new vision of Keats, a different perception of his poetry, one which is based more on empathy than on judgment.

Campion has done a beautiful job of creating a script with language taken from the poems and letters of the poet. The imagery of the film alludes to Keats’ poetic imagery constantly. How beautiful Campion’s snapshots of the bee in a red flower or the latch of the door turning between the wings of a blue butterfly! Keats wrote the words that directed Campion’s attention to these ordinary, extraordinary moments:

“It has been an old comparison for our urging on — the beehive! However, it seems to me that we should rather be the flower than the bee. For it is a false notion that more is gained by receiving than giving — no, the receiver and the giver are equal in their benefits. The flower I doubt not receives a fair reward from the bee … its leaves blush deeper in the next spring … and who shall say between Man and Woman which is the most delighted?” (Letter to J.H. Reynolds, 19 February 1818)

“For myself i know not how to express my devotion to so fair a form: I want a brighter word than bright, a fairer word than fair. I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days — three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.” (Letter to Fanny Brawne, 1 July 1819)

The whole film is radiant with desire.

The memory and the fear of death intensifies love’s longing in the story. Fanny’s father’s death and Keats’ brother’s death, remembered at the beginning of the film, foreshadow the end when Keats dies of complications of tuberculosis in Rome. After Fanny learns of the poet’s death, we see her cut a black thread that she has stitched into a white cloth. The image, so powerful in its simplicity, recalls the Greek myth of Atropos cutting the thread of a man’s life.

Throughout the film, as Fanny and Keats converse, they quote some of Keats’ most famous poems, beginning with his claim that “a thing of beauty is a joy forever — its loveliness increases! It will never pass into nothingness, but still will keep a bower quiet for us, and a sleep full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing” (from “Endymion”). As the film goes on, they speak verses that Keats wrote after he met Fanny, and it becomes clear, so clear, that she was a great source of inspiration for him. His poetry was not coming from some abstract place, but from the center of his being responding to the center of hers.

I’ve read Keats poems many times — he and Coleridge are my favorite Romantic poets — but somehow I never grounded my understanding of the poet’s work in his relationship to the love of his life. Only a college education could have blinded me to something so obvious. The film cuts through academic preoccupations to the heart of the matter. Never a word do we hear in it of “negative capability” because that philosophical idea was not the main focus of Keats’ emotional life or poetic inspiration. But after watching the film, no one will never forget that he wrote things like:

“Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
to feel forever its soft swell and fall,
awake forever in a sweet unrest,
still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
and so live forever …” (from “Bright Star”)

or

“All my thoughts, my unhappiest days and nights have I find not at all cured me of my love of Beauty, but made it so intense that I am miserable that you are not with me … or rather breathe in that dull sort of patience that cannot be called Life. I never knew before what such a love as you have made me feel was. I did not believe in it, my fancy was afraid of it, lest it should burn me up. But if you will fully love me, though there may be some fire, it will not be more than we can bear when moistened and bedewed with Pleasures.” (Letter to Fanny Brawne, 8 July 1819)

Fanny was a real, beloved person to Keats, and Campion makes her and her poet real to us. Campion does this in a new, fully-alive, sensuously rich way. Her film is like a living poem speaking from the past into the heart of the golden present.

I went home after watching the film and read dozens of letters and poems by Keats: sonnets like “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again,” “When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be,” and “Bright Star” as well as odes like “To Psyche,” “To a Nightingale,” “On Melancholy,” and “To Autumn.” How different to meditate on the romances “Eve of St. Agnes” and “Lamia” with Keats’ relationship to Fanny Brawne acutely in mind! For these songs came from Keats’ secret life, the one he revealed in letters to Fanny, letters that he covered from the sight of his friends even as he wrote them in their houses.

Of course I admit that the film is a love story that simplifies some of the uglier jealousies and misogynies Keats sings out in his letters to male friends and even to Fanny herself sometimes. But it still gives us something important to remember. Love gave Keats life.

p.s. In the film, Keats says, “Craft is a carcass … If poetry doesn’t come as naturally as leaves to a tree than it had better not come at all.” This made me laugh! Yes, Keats made his metaphoric comparison between poetry and tree-leaves in a letter to Benjamin Bailey, but did he therefore mean that poetry comes easily? I’ve watched the leaves split open twigs to emerge after winter, and I think the growing process is neither painless nor easy, though the revivification of the tree is, of course, a wonder to behold.

Read Full Post »