John Keats: To Fanny Brawne

 The Lasting Heart: John Keats' Love in "To Fanny Brawne"

Such a poem, written in a time when John Keats is witnessing an eruption in his own life, is "To Fanny Brawne." It vividly describes the attachment of John Keats for a lady known as Fanny Brawne. In fact, she seems to have stolen from him more than just his heart; she captured it with her artistic soul itself. Yet epic tension between passion and life marks the frailty of their bond-it speaks of a fragile beauty, an inevitable sadness in love. Keats writes of love, yearning, and the bitter-sweetness of desire with rich feeling.

Keats, from the very first page, swims readers into an intimate world of longing. His words drip with an aura dripping of seething, overdraft one's senses, in expectant overwrought quest, overreaching tears, yet closer to beyond-bounds-to that low side: blur; for then as for a blur is however also even the line then the very under-division, it is covered and in that under-capture lies, rolled the nature: like an ascending roll down and as falling down- into sudden, the low crunch-crashing the fall. Keats' word beauty represents this paradox to swing between ecstasies and sadness when love is viewed as a moving yet fragile passion. With this soulful exploring of such passion by Keats, he even allows the reader to share those thrills as well as those pains accompanying it.

In addressing the time bounded and inevitability of losing, Keats thereby brings urgency towards the whole exercise that brings much more emotional intensification. It only deepens his love for Fanny now that he knows he's mortal and that he has failed in art already. It's poignant at reminding one that life is neither permanent nor predictable with the imagery of fading moments and brief beauty. Knowing this, Keats finds inspiration in unloading all of his emotions all the more seriously as he thinks people view him to be putting an effort at collecting all those moments of gold as they drift with Fanny when they would soon leave him to disappear before their eyes. This is because, through it, he, however, hallowed his love for very long time intervals after it fades away without coming back ever again.

It is then, in "To Fanny Brawne," a poem that speaks for love and for the human situation in a universal sense. What the true passion, more than the recording of time-is called upon to keep alive and lovely-that which itself withholds, out of love-from going its own separate way-what Keats describes here cannot be so trivially classified as sentiment, but a deeper form: human experience in to identity and existence. Fragility bleeds through Keats's words. This is a celebration to entrench the feeling Keats shared for Fanny but, far more importantly, the truth remains all the world in its rich complexities: it's very human and there is as the seasons of years become just a tale to be, there is pain to befall.