I would not have read Keats’s poems if I had not been avoiding adapting a book for the screen in which the protagonist was a creative-writing teacher. The thought was that before proceeding I should enlarge my knowledge of English poetry and literature. It was on this account that I bought a biography on Keats by Andrew Motion. It was a very big book and I really could not escape learning about John Keats and his poems.
I worked studiously through the first half of the biography, amazed by Keats’s emerging philosophy and reading and rereading Motion’s analysis of his early poems. Nothing prepared me for the second half. Here Motion outlined a love affair unparalleled for its touchingly detailed and weepingly tragic proportions. Almost all the evidence of the love affair came from one primary source, Keats’s own letters to the girl he loved. These were no ordinary letters, but the staggeringly honest outpourings from one of the youngest and greatest of the English Romantic poets.
I remember finishing the biography in the blue attic room I then used as a study. I remember reading as the afternoon turned into evening, then night, and sobbing pitifully as I came to the tragic end of Keats’s life and his love affair with Fanny Brawne.
For me, it was a story even more romantic and sad than Romeo and Juliet, for being true. She, 18 years old, “unformed, frisky and quick-tongued”, a diligent student of fashion; he, a 23-year-old orphaned poet. Many things were in their favour: depth of feeling, joined hearts, steadfastness and a shared house. But much else conspired against them: Keats’s lack of financial success and his tuberculosis. Fanny and Keats were engaged when he took his last chance for a cure in Rome. This last hope was unrealised and Keats, at 25, died in the arms of his friend Joseph Severn.
Intrigued, I bought and began to read Keats’s poems and his collected letters. I drifted into wondering if I could somehow tell his story on film, only to shake myself. Nobody really reads poetry any more, but the cruellest blow to my hope was simply that while I was reading the poems I didn’t completely understand them. In the case of the long poems, Endymion or Hyperion, I didn’t know the classical references. How could I make a film about Keats if I didn’t understand his poetry?
I didn’t give up, nor did my ambitions harden. Two years later, when I took a four-year sabbatical from film-making, I found myself daydreaming in a soft and wafty way of Keats and Fanny. I would sit in a paddock by the river with a ragtag collection of horses while I made coffee on a little burner. The sun’s warmth felt like a kiss. Life slowed down, a breeze coming across the paddock arrived as an event.
As I sat on a log sipping my coffee, the horses gathered around. One day a pregnant mare stayed after the others had drifted off and finally, with all the tenderness a hoof could afford, she carefully widened the opening of my bag and peered inside. I sat next to the mare and started to read Keats’s poems to myself. I read Ode to Psyche, with its vivid description of the open poetic mind, and Ode to Indolence, in which Keats championed and wrote of the dreamy drifty state I was enjoying: “Ripe was the drowsy hour,/ The blissful cloud of summer indolence/ Benumbed my eyes, my pulse grew less and less.”
Sometimes I read a poem and felt I had taken in the meaning, only to realise I had not understood it and would feel quite a fool. Fool or not, the seduction by words, rhythm, atmosphere and intimacy had begun. I loved that these words, sounds, drifts of meaning could be joined like daisy chains, like streams to rivers, like whispers that could, in Keats’s hands, describe me to myself and all the while have a sensuous and delicious presence.
As I read his letters — he spelt badly, as I do — I came across his theory of negative capability, an endorsement of mystery, of developing a capacity to accept mystery without “irritable searching after fact and reason”. I began to realise that perhaps poetry is not in need of understanding so much as loving it, or being enchanted, seduced, intrigued or awed by it. Like eating something delicious, you don’t need to know how it was made, just enjoy it.
My journey with Keats has been longer, deeper, more intimate and more sustained over the past few years than my relationships with even my best friends. I have read his life story, his poems and his letters, among which are the 32 surviving letters and notes he wrote to his beloved Fanny Brawne. I have read her letters. I have laid around on couches and beds, at a beach house, a river house and in a mountain hut, dreaming about the two-and-a-half years of Fanny and Keats’s brief but intense time together. Then I wrote the screenplay Bright Star, based on their love affair.
I know as much about those two-and-a-half years of his life as almost anyone can. I have lent myself to imagining how things might have happened, how he might have first met her. By thinking about all the practical aspects of their relationship I realised that it was possible that Fanny may have actually slept in what was to become Keats’s bed while he and his best friend Charles Brown were away in Scotland. And that when Fanny’s family moved in to share the house with Brown and Keats, she and the poet may have slept only a wall apart.
I have been to Keats’s house — Wentworth Place in Hampstead — I’ve walked the Heath and the streets of Hampstead where Keats would have walked. I have also several times visited the room where he died in the house — now a museum to Keats, Shelley and Byron — next to the Spanish Steps in Rome. I’ve looked up at the ceiling above his deathbed and seen the painted daisies that, he joked to Severn, were already growing over him.
I got more confident with his poems, declaring Ode to a Nightingale my favourite poem in the world. It has the best of Keats’s immediacy, written in one sitting under a plum tree. It is a sustained, brilliant meditation on an actual nightingale in a spring garden. As natural as thought, it describes thought, but it is laced with links and soft rhymes of immense grace, delight and depth. It is full of his desire for happiness and his grief for its fleeting nature: “Now more than ever seems it rich to die,/ To cease upon the midnight with no pain,/ While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad/ In such an ecstasy!”
Five years later, Bright Star, based on Keats and Fanny’s love affair, has been filmed. I have heard nearly 100 little girls auditioning for the role of Fanny’s sister Margaret, reciting the opening lines of Endymion: “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:/ 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.”
I was afraid of how the girls would manage the poetry. I imagined that they would perhaps be intimidated by the meaning, the unfamiliar words, and that they would speed-speak or garble the quotes. But as each girl spoke the poem she became transformed, the words seeming to have found a gravity and force, a shape and clarity within each of them. When later they spoke of their pets, their brothers and sisters, the glow dimmed to good behaviour and cliché. It was similar when auditioning Fanny and Keats — all were mesmerising when reciting the poems, something I wasn’t expecting.
A friend told me that her mother, now in her nineties and diminished by dementia, quoted, “O what can ail thee knight at arms, alone and palely loitering?” and then asked repeatedly: “What is it I am saying, where is it from?” The poem was lodged inside her, happy as a bee, continuing to hum despite her confusion.
My film journey with Keats ended the day we finished shooting in Italy in June, 2008. We re-enacted a version of Keats’s coffin being carried from his lodgings, across the Spanish Steps and into the waiting funeral carriage before clattering along the empty morning streets,on its way to the Protestant cemetery. After we had celebrated the end of our shoot, a few of us made the journey to the cemetery and finally, after all this time, a century or two for Keats and six years for me, I was standing as near to Keats’s mortal remains as I ever could. Cats of all kinds strolled among the graves or along walls. An old tomcat curled his tail around Keats’s gravestone, rubbing his battered head back and forth. Someone had left a tiny souvenir bear with a red T-shirt on the grave and our designer scooped it up, explaining to the bear and to Keats that she would take it to her daughter in Australia. Behind the headstone was a bunch of Cellophane wrapped around rotting flowers.
I knelt and kissed the grave. I felt the sun on my back, the cool of the stone; I remember the bright, waxy new foliage in shadow and speckled sun, and all my many complicated human feelings and thoughts were all together there with me at Keats’s grave.
His poems were my portals into poetry, and his life and letters staged for me a revived creative relationship with myself — as well as faith in the Divine; there is no other explanation for his best poetry. The beautiful human Keats opened himself, he was “a bright torch, and a casement ope at night, to let the warm love in!” Perhaps I will be 93 and mumbling: “Darkling I listen; and for many a time/ I have been half in love with easeful Death,/ Call’d him soft names in many a musèd rhyme.”
If so, I hope I will savour it in my mouth and ear. I hope I will continue to enjoy the pathway Keats has opened into my senses, my soul and my imagination.
Jane Campion’s introduction appears in Bright Star: The Collected Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats, published by Vintage Classics (£8.99).
Bright Star is released on Nov 6
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