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Michael Cherry
LITR 570
17 October 2007
"Now Warm and Capable of Earnest Grasping":
Nature, Imagination, and Sensual Truth in Blake and Keats

In his final hours, William Blake remained a mystic poet. After drawing a portrait of his wife
Catherine, Blake "began to sing Hallelujahs & songs of joy & Triumph which Mrs. Blake described
as being truly sublime in music & in Verse. He sang loudly & with true extatic energy and seemed
too happy . . . that he was shortly to arrive at the Goal, to receive the prize of his high & eternal
calling . . . . His bursts of gladness made the room peal again. The Walls rang & resounded with the
beatific Symphony" (Bentley Jr. 437). Though not conventionally religious, Blake engaged his life
through an intense though idiosyncratic mystic vision, in which the spiritual energy contained in
nature was liberated in imagination. In Blake's 1926 final poem, "Laocoon," he states that "Adam is
only The Natural Man & not the Soul or Imagination / The Eternal Body of Man is The
IMAGINATION. / God himself / that is / the Divine Body / It manifests itself in his Works of
Art (In Eternity All is Vision)." He had argued such ideas for much of his life, and he remained
true to them at the end, as is clear from his death-bed joyousness. Blake was about to enter fully
into that "Eternal Body" after a long, productive, creative life, and he therefore felt, even while faced
with physical extinction, only "bursts of gladness."
By 1927, when Blake died at age 69, John Keats had already been dead for six years, though
he was nearly forty years Blake's junior. Keats's death, was, of course, far different. When, after his
long, grueling illness, his death was finally imminent on the evening of February 23, Keats could
only say "thank God it has come" (Motion 566). But it was not only his death that differed from
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Blake's; Keats attitude toward life was very different, as well. Earlier that month, Keats had told a
friend, "The spring was always enchantment to me . . . perhaps the only happiness I have had in the
world -- has been the silent growth of flowers" (Motion 564). And almost a year and a half before
his death, in an untitled poem written in November 1819, Keats' very different attitude towards
death is already very apparent.
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed -- see here it is --
I hold it towards you.
This view is presaged in his 1818 poem, "[When I have fears]," in which he reveals his desire to keep
living in this world, in his own natural body.
Keats' sensitivity to mortality and to the beauty of the natural world are often attributed to
his own poor health and the death of many of his loved ones even before his own premature end.
But Blake also had the occasional health scare, and he, like everyone else in the period, also
encountered his fair share of death and dying. What we have here are two very different
temperaments. They did share a similar goal: According to Harold Bloom, "The immense hope of
Blake ... and of Keats, was that poetry, by expressing the whole man, could either liberate him from
his fallen condition or, more compellingly, make him see that condition as unnecessary, as an
unimaginative fiction that an awakened spirit could slough off" (Bloom xxiv). But they found very
different ways for pursuing that hope. Though Blake died after Keats, the latter serves very well as
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a marker for the end of Romanticism, with Blake as its beginning. And though Blake outlasted
Keats in the flesh, it is Keats' temperament that proved the more enduring and the more
characteristic of how subsequent poets and readers have envisioned poetry.
According to biographer G.E. Bentley, Jr., "[f]or Blake, the world is an alien environment, a
realm ruled by the Beast and the Whore. Natural causes and their effects are illusions" (11). Blake's
most famous work, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, communicates this attitude vividly. What Blake
seems to mean in this work (and elsewhere) is that the natural world, perceived merely as such, is
best viewed as the ground upon, or from which, the true man of Imagination is born. This is done
by liberating the senses so as to behold the divine Energy hidden behind the everyday marketplace
glut of ordinary appearances. He tells us "Energy is the only life" and is "Eternal Delight," and,
famously, "[i]f the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is:
infinite." Blake's self-hewn spirituality was not the ordinary life-denying variety seeping out from
mainstream Christianity, as is clear by his choice in Marriage to use the Devil as his own mouthpiece,
and Angels as villainous fools.
However, Blake did not entirely escape the Christian antipathy towards nature and the body.
In his four-stage model of the spiritual process humanity passes through, three stages are based in
natural, bodily experience. One of these, Beulah, is "an intermediary between Eternity and . . . this
world of Matter" (Damon 43). This is the world of sexual bliss and dreamy, moonlit sensual
pleasure, as well as "the realm of the Subconscious" (42). It is not fully material, but as it is based in
the passive receipt of sensual and imaginative pleasure, it is not actively imaginative, and therefore it
is a lower state out of which one must pass to reach the true "Eternal Body of Imagination." The
other two stages are Ulro and Generation. Ulro is imprisonment in matter without any presence or
awareness of spirit; Generation is the active sexual life-struggle with the physical world. Ulro
precedes Beulah, and Generation follows it. One moves from the passivity of Beulah into the
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conscious participation in life of Generation, and the combination of these two allow one to enter
the ultimate stage, Eden, in which Imagination's Eternal Body is realized. (Though it must be noted
that the stages are not moved through in a direct, linear path; there is some overlap, and there is
likely to be as much regression as progression.)
From this Blakean view, one might say that Keats never progressed beyond Beulah. Beulah
is "a place of night, lighted by the Moon of Love. It contains hills and vales and caves of sleep, also
streams and rivers. It is a land of flowers -- i.e., sexual pleasures" (Damon 43). Blake derives the
title from the Bible, in the Book of Isaiah; the term is also used in The Pilgrim's Progress, where it is
"Bunyan's Earthly Paradise, the happy land where the pilgrims live until it is time for them to cross
the River of Death" (42). Blake did indulge in imagery, of course; his canonical poems were
originally inseparable from Blake's marvelous etchings. But even in these, the sense experience
seems present primarily to illustrate the ideas. If his drawings were of Beulean origin, they served,
along with the poems, to propel the reader into Eden. For Keats, however, as for many people after
him, earthly paradise is the only paradise available, and the only one necessary.
Though Keats had displayed an undeniable attraction to certain aspects of Platonic
philosophy--best shown in his famous statement that "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty"--the sensuality
of his imagery and language reveal Keats' fundamental allegiance to this world. In this, he is the
most modern of the Romantics. Blake championed a revaluing of the body, but his imagination
always ran to prophecy and myth. Coleridge was always far more attuned to the visionary realm
than to the natural. Wordsworth was really more interested in his own relationship to nature than in
nature itself; his subsequent degeneration into tired moralism is result of the weight of this
fundamental humanism. Shelley was too interested in the future to ever really look at the world
around him; when he did look, it was typically up toward the sky. Byron was trapped so fully in the
physical world that he never really experienced it, lacking any vantage point--and his is a silly, lesser
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variant of Romanticism anyway. Despite the Romantics' vaunted appreciation of nature, only Keats
really lived close to it, in his writing as well as in his life. He kept his face pressed not against a
candy store window but, rather, up close to the living, dying earth.
His final ode, and the one regarded by many as his best, "To Autumn" is quintessential
Keats. In this poem, he moves from traditional discursive meaning into a more evocative,
suggestive style. In The Odes of John Keats, Helen Vendler refers to Allen Tate's assessment that "the
ode . . . 'is a very nearly perfect piece of style but it has little to say'" (Vendler 13). She continues,
I thought "To Autumn" said everything there was to say. It was clear to me that my
understanding of how a poem 'says' was different from Tate's. His understanding was
propositional; he liked the "Ode to a Nightingale" because 'it at least tries to say everything
poetry can say.' Tate did not entirely trust Keats' 'pictorial' nature (as he called it). . . .
Somewhat later I came to see that the autumn ode 'said' things . . . by the activities of its
imagery, by its overlapping structures, and by its exquisite explorations of suggestive diction.
(14)
This difference between propositional and sensual meaning separates Blake and Keats. This sensual
meaning is, of course, not absent in "Nightingale." Listen, for instance, to these lines: "But, in
embalmed darkness, guess each sweet / Wherewith the seasonable month endows / The grass, the
thicket, and the fruit-tree wild." And even when he is more abstract, the sound is pleasing to the
ear: "Darkling I listen; and, for many a time / I have been half in love with easeful Death." Such
sensuality is found throughout Keats's work, but it is brought to fullest fruition (no pun intended) in
his final ode.
In "To Autumn," Keats relies almost exclusively on image and sound, a huge departure from
the statement-making style found in Blake. Poems such as "Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian
Urn," however luxurious their language, do subordinate the imagery and sound to the "truth" being
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proposed. There is a thesis, and the other elements are there to support that thesis. The
relationship between idea and imagery is reversed in "To Autumn," or, perhaps more accurately, the
two are fused. The poem begins "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of
the maturing sun" and ends "The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; And gathering swallows
twitter in the skies." The only idea anywhere close to abstract in this poem is found in the speaker's
question, "Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?", which is subordinate to the imagery
found throughout the poem, not the main idea, such as there is one. By his use of image and sound,
Keats evokes autumn, rather than merely saying things about it. This is in clear contrast with Blake,
who mythologizes the body and says much about the senses and about nature, but never really
presents these things directly.
It is not too far a leap from this sort of writing to William Carlos Williams' statement "no
ideas but in things," or Archibald MacLeish's pronouncement that "a poem should not mean but
be." This insistence on "showing" rather than "telling" has become a truism in creative writing
workshops throughout the land. This reflects the general move in the culture overall, from
abstraction and books to the primacy of image and music. It also reflects the secularization of the
culture, and its reappraisal of the physical world. Unfortunately, we seem to have shot a bit too far
past Keats; where he still found nature and a sort of divinity to be fused, we have embraced the
former (insofar as no longer aspiring to a world beyond it), but we have lost the latter. According to
Harold Bloom, "To Autumn" serves to "let the warm love in, to resolve contraries, because there is
no further need for progression" (435). Though our culture has progressed, if one can cal l it that, it
is still possible to return to Keats and this state of perfect balance. Then, perhaps, it is possible to
fold in some Blakean ideas and move on, beyond these opposites, into less desolation.

Works Cited
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Bentley, Jr., G.E. The Stranger From Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven: Yale UP, 2001.
Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. New York:
Random House, 1988.
Bloom, Harold. The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell UP,
1961.
Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary. Hanover and London: U Press of New England, 1988.
Motion, Andrew. Keats: A Biography. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1997.
Vendler, Helen. The Odes of John Keats. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1983.