Handyman
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by Roman Sympos
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This Living Hand
John Keats
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-calm’d–see here it is–
I hold it towards you.
“This Living Hand” first came to life on a manuscript page belonging to a much longer, unfinished poem that Keats began writing in November or December of 1819, The Cap and Bells; or, The Jealousies, a verse satire to which it has no discernible relation. There it remained, unpublished and presumably unread except by friends or archivists, until 1898, when it appeared in print for the first time in a collection of Keats’s poems edited by H. Buxton Forman (sixth edition, to be precise). It has since haunted the days and dreaming nights of numerous scholars, critics, and everyday admirers of the poet.
It's easy to see why. Lacking context or any statement from their author regarding his intentions, these seven and a half lines of blank verse seem to be inviting us to reanimate the dead poet's hand in a kind of transfusion of imaginative energy that threatens to leave us enervated to the point of death. The experience, writes Brooke Hopkins, is “uncanny,” an effect occurring often in Keats’s poetry whenever he “points to an object which was once alive, is now dead, and gives the appearance of coming to life again.” [1]
Hopkins is but one of many critics who've noticed how the poem’s allusions to dismemberment and vampirism heighten our frisson. The poet attributes to his posthumous reader an impossible wish to bring him back to life by draining their own heart dry of blood, in lieu of which the mere act of reading will have to suffice. “See, here it is—/ I hold it towards you.” Hold what? His (once living) hand? No, of course not. He’s holding out his handwriting, the paper covered with writing in his “hand." By reading the dead letter of the poet's writing, we reanimate it, in our imaginations, as a living voice. It’s easy to see how rich with uncanny implications, and how tempting for inventive critics, is our momentary lexical indecision—“hand" as extremity or script? Alive or dead?
This interpretation of Keats’s blank verse fragment is enhanced by reflections on the textual “dismemberment” that poetic fragments represent, as well as the poet’s well-known preoccupation with his posthumous fame and early premonitions of dying young. His mother and brother had both succumbed to tuberculosis by the time he wrote The Cap and Bells, and he himself died of the disease two years later, in Rome, at the age of 25. He was already showing the symptoms. Having been trained in medicine at Guy’s Hospital before deciding to devote his life to poetry, he recognized what they meant. His self-diagnosis was confirmed a few months later when he coughed up blood: “I know the color of that blood;—it is arterial blood,” he told his friend Charles Brown. “That drop of blood is my death-warrant.”
In short, the evidence for reading “This Living Hand” in the uncanny sense Hopkins and many others advocate seems overwhelming.
But it does pose difficulties. We, Keats’s posthumous audience, are not reading the poet’s “hand,” his handwriting. We are reading his poem via the medium of print, an eventuality that Keats himself would surely have anticipated, focused as he was on the vigor, amplitude, and longevity of his literary after-life. The only way in which “hand”—the “it” held towards us in the last line—makes sense as handwriting is if we imagine a solitary reader in the archive, or perhaps a surviving friend of the poet, reading the original handwritten text, perhaps while sifting through Keats’s literary remains. That’s a position almost no one who reads the poem today can assume, lacking access as they do to the original MS, and it’s contrary to the spirit in which the Uncanny crowd read the poem, namely, as an apostrophe to any reader, not the member of a privileged coterie.[2]
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To further confound us, there’s the baffling language of deixis. Keats uses the present tense and words like “this” and “now” to refer to the situation of the speaker, which includes a “thou” presumed (by Hopkins, et. al.) to be absent (the apostrophized reader), while the word “here” refers to the location of that absent addressee as though it were physically shared by the speaker after all.
How did the poet transport himself, in all his corporeal materiality, from that distant “now” to a present “here”? I don’t know about you, but the hand that holds my reading matter is usually my own. (I can also feed myself and brush my own teeth.) How, then, did the poet’s writing hand, “warm and capable” of “earnest[ly] grasping” his pen, become the hand that grasps and holds, “towards” me, the poem—printed or handwritten—that I’m reading in my own here-and-now? Through the uncanny transfusion of life brought about by reading it? Brooke Hopkins would say, “Exactly!” I say, “Hold on!”
Even conceding the powerful attraction of an uncanny reading of “This Living Hand,” which (it seems to me) doesn’t so much reconcile the poem’s temporal and spatial and lexical contradictions as emulsify them into a kind of supernatural smoothie, I can’t see how the phrase “conscience-calm’d” can be blended in, not to mention the creaking stage machinery of haunting and tombs and their “icy silence.”
Why would my “conscience” be agitated by reading a dead poet? How have I wronged him? By ignoring him? How could I, if I didn’t even know he existed until this moment, when I took from his dead (?) hand this specimen of his “living hand” and read it? Keats's hypothetical “if it were cold” just makes things worse. “If” the poet were dead, he’d be in no position “now” (then?) to write the poem at all. Does Keats mean “when”? When he is dead? Leaving aside the grammatical confusion (“if” is in this case strictly hypothetical and requires the subjunctives “would” and “were,” but “when,” indicating a real eventuality, would require the indicatives “will” and “is”), the hyperbole and presumptuousness of such an assertion are pretty hard to stomach. Really? I’d wish myself dead just so the poet could come back to life? Please spare me. And spare Keats, who, when alive, was often accused by dunder-headed critics of abusing the English language. Let’s not pile on.
Even leaving matters of conscience aside, why would I wish the poet alive again when I have his “hand” right here in front of me, coming back to life as I read it? “Perhaps you’d like to read the poetry he might have written had he lived,” I hear Brooke Hopkins reply. Perhaps. Sacrificing my own life to do so, however, seems a bit over the top, not to mention counterproductive.
Eventually, the sheer amount of ‘splainin’ required by an Uncanny reading of “This Living Hand” becomes sclerotic, which is to say (technically speaking) that the proliferation of connecting tissue leads eventually to the dysfunction of the organ in question.
Of course, there’s always the option of reading “conscience-calm’d” in the most straightforward and obvious way, as implying that the person being addressed—“thou”—would somehow bear responsibility for the death of the speaker “if” he (along with his hand) “were cold/ And in the icy silence of the tomb.” Ghosts, entire or synecdochic, tend to haunt those who murdered them or, as with Hamlet and his father, those tasked with revenging their murder, which cannot apply in this case. Keats’s dead poet cries out for reanimation, not vengeance.
But, alas, that reading makes no sense in the framework constructed by the Uncanny School of Interpretation.
Perhaps, then, we should look elsewhere for a framework in which it can and does.
In 1917 Sidney Colvin, the great Keatsian critic and biographer, offered one. Cited often, Colvin’s speculation has never been taken seriously enough to pursue. “[F]rom a certain pitch and formality of style in them,” he writes in John Keats: His Life and Poetry, “I should take [these lines] rather to be meant for putting into the mouth of one of the characters in some such historical play as he had been meditating in the weeks before Christmas [1819].” [3]
Keats had already finished collaborating with Brown on a blank verse tragedy, Otho the Great, Brown contributing the plot and Keats the verse. It’s a rather blustery and ponderously static effort that never reached the stage in Keats’s short remaining time on earth, but it whetted his appetite for bigger and better things. “One of my Ambitions,” he wrote his friend Benjamin Bailey on August 14, 1819, while he was working on the play, “is to make . . . a revolution in modern dramatic writing." At his death, Keats left among his papers the opening four scenes of a new blank verse drama, King Stephen, set in the period of civil war and chaos following the death of King Henry I on December 1, 1135. Scholars following Colvin’s lead have speculated that “This Living Hand” could represent lines intended for that play.
It's not just the “pitch” and “formality” of Keats’s detached lines that should remind us of a verse tragedy, however. They're written in blank verse, the stock in trade of any serious, ambitious playwright in Keats’s day, when government censors restricted the performance of spoken drama to two gargantuan theaters in London, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, and Shakespearean drama still dominated pubic taste.
If we exercise our imaginations even slightly, it’s not hard to sketch out the kind of situation in which a speech like this would make sense, especially on a battlefield, and there were many to choose from in the time of King Stephen. We can almost assign the stage directions, line by line. What’s important is that we retain the sense of a stricken conscience at work:
Scene: Two warriors, blood relatives, the speaker lying defenseless on the ground and addressing his opponent, who is standing over him with his sword, about to kill him.
Speaker:
This living hand [he holds up his empty sword hand], now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping [closes hand to a fist, as though gripping a sword], 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-calm’d–see here it is– [opens his hand]
I hold it towards you. [extends his hand--to plead for mercy, to shake hands and be reconciled, to request assistance in rising to his feet, or all three]
The I and “thou” in this brief speech needn’t be blood relations, such as cousins, or brothers, or father and son. They could be two lovers, one of whom, the speaker, cheated on the other, who is now threatening to kill him. I invite my readers to use their own imaginations. (And to let me know, in the Comments section, what you come up with.)
As for my own solution, I confess, I find it less interesting than Hopkins’s uncanny interpretation, and on every level—less thrilling, less intellectually engaging, less relevant to the life of the poet who wrote it.
But at least it makes sense.
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Notes
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1. Brooke Hopkins, "Keats and the Uncanny: 'This Living Hand,'" The Kenyon Review, 11.4 (1989): 28-40. P. 34. See, for example, the sonnet “Lines On Seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair,” or Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, where a severed head is buried in the titular pot and nourishes, by its decay, the living plant.
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2. We could say that poem in print lacks what Walter Benjamin calls, in his seminal essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the “aura” that clings to anything handed down to us in a direct line from the living hand of its creator. By “aura” Benjamin has in mind not only the word’s literal Latin meaning—“a breath” or “atmosphere” or “divine emanation”—but also the word’s cognates and derivatives and roots, such as aurum--“gold”--and aureole--“halo.” There’s something about an original work of art that, like a gold coin, “rings true,” or that sanctifies it, like a halo, something akin to what we feel in the presence of a relic that once belonged to a world-historical figure or a saint. That something, which we also call “authenticity,” is missing from a reproduction like a printed poem or lithographed painting because only a true relic can make the past truly present, the “now” of then real in the “here” of now, and by so doing bring before us a physical trace of the tangible, embodied reality of the person who made or touched it.
Another way of saying all this is that the aura of its maker "haunts" any original work of art. A poem "mechanically reproduced" in print can’t do the job.
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3. John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics, and After-Fame, (London: Macmillan, 1917), p. 455.