The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (29 page)

Keats and his friends and associates alike all assumed he had died without realizing his potential. And yet. Read his story, and you will see that he
did
bring forth what was within him. Not in great volumes, but in marvelous intensity. Poetry had, finally, saved John Keats. Just as the Civil War had saved Walt Whitman. Just as painting landscapes had saved Camille Corot. And did Mark’s writing save him?—I wondered as I sniffed out Keats.

Keats did not achieve fame until many decades after his death. Indeed, it would be a century after his death before his reputation was really established. I don’t expect Mark to achieve fame—or at least any more than he already has. But that is not the point. Did Mark, in his short life, have a fulfilling experience of bringing forth what was within him? Did Keats’s lessons help Mark live an exuberantly full life? Had Mark already learned—through Keats—what I am only learning now? And had Mark actually tried to share with me, even as an undergraduate, his excitement about dharma?

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After studying Keats’s life closely for many years, Keats’s biographer, Aileen Ward, concluded that “
He was not one of those rare poets who are born, not made. He lacked the endowments or opportunities with which the other great poets of his time started … He was to rise above
his own narrow background by stubborn ambition and hard work, making himself a poet by studying the best examples of poetry he could find and absorbing what he could from them.”

Stubborn ambition and hard work
. Just like the rest of us.
Not a genius
. A product, rather, of deliberate practice. Keats’s story is one of strong determination. It is a story of desire for the realization of dharma. And, most important for our purposes now, it is the story of the transmutation of this desire into aspiration, of the transmutation of desire into determined action, and finally into realization. Keats’s self-realization required effort, yes—but a particular kind of effort. Precisely the kind that Krishna prescribes to Arjuna: “Do your dharma passionately, but let go of the fruits.” This is, for me, where the story of Keats’s life becomes truly exemplary.

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John Keats was born in London to a working-class family. He had an apparently happy childhood. But disaster struck in his early teens. His father died in a riding accident at the slim age of thirty, and his mother died not long afterward at age thirty-six—when Keats was only fourteen—succumbing to what Keats would later call the “family disease”—tuberculosis.

Much of Keats’s poetry seems to have been an attempt to work through the almost unbearable losses of his early life. From its rough beginnings, his poetry is saturated with a sense of the fragility of life and love—and the transience of beauty. He wrote repeatedly about

A quality of “paradise lost” saturates much of Keats’s greatest poetry. In his work—as in his life—beauty and happiness appear as unearthly visitors, inevitably evaporating as quickly as they came, leaving him bereft on the empty shores of life.

From childhood onward throughout his short life, Keats had to grapple with the realities of impermanence—the realities so often emphasized by Krishna in his long talks with Arjuna. Keats discovered early on that he could hold on to nothing. And so his
koan
—the central question of his life—became how to live life fully without holding on to it. How to
have
it without possessing it. “Kiss the joy as it flies,” says William Blake. In order to become a great poet, Keats would have to work through the
problem of grasping
. The evidence that he finally did learn to live in the stream of impermanence is written—at his instruction—on his very tombstone: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

Precisely how Keats used poetry to work through this great existential problem—the problem of grasping—is for me an endlessly compelling story. He worked it all out through words.

As I have said, Keats’s mother died a gruesome death when he was only fourteen. This appalling event turned young Keats into a voracious reader. Through books he absorbed himself in the world of great men and daring deeds—the worlds of Julius Caesar and Brutus and of William Tell and William Wallace. Early on, one can see Keats’s attempts to master his difficult circumstances through
imagination
. Even at the age of fourteen he was beginning to gather together the skills of the poet. (“Poetry,” Cyril Connolly has said, “
comes from the ferment of an unhappy childhood working through a noble imagination.”)

Soon, into his fifteen-year-old life, came the next essential ingredient of a great poet: a mentor. Keats’s world was vastly expanded when he met the most important friend of his youth: Charles Cowden Clarke. Clarke, just eight years older than Keats, was the son of the headmaster of Keats’s school, and he was an extraordinarily bright and generous friend to Keats. Clarke noticed that Keats seemed to devour books rather than read them, and he took an interest in this handsome, lively, and engaged boy. He introduced Keats to Chaucer and Shakespeare and Spenser, and challenged him in vigorous debate about the issues of the day.

Keats responded well to Clarke’s interest. His imagination and intellect came alive. The stories of their friendship—later told by Clarke—are compelling. At the drop of a hat, the two friends would walk the fifteen
miles to London to see their favorite actor, John Kemble, on stage in Shakespeare’s plays, and then walk back, arriving home at dawn, having talked through the entire night.

Keats was a sensitive boy, and particularly sensitive to beauty. Clarke helped wake in him a latent love of nature, during what would become long, thoughtful walks in the countryside around the school. English poets, it seems, are forever walking. From Wordsworth to Auden. And as I read the stories of Keats becoming a walker, I could not but think of my walks with Mark in the hills around Amherst. We walked constantly, vigorously, in all seasons, but almost always talking as we went, about literature, music, art, love, life’s vicissitudes.

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Keats had little interest in poetry until he was almost eighteen. One afternoon, probably in the summer of 1813, Clarke read Edmund Spenser’s “Epithalamion” aloud to Keats, and as he was reading, Clarke looked up to see Keats’s face positively “alight with pleasure.”

The encounter with Spenser’s poems was a turning point. That night Keats went home with the first volume of
The Faerie Queene
. The next time they met, Clarke “
discovered that he had gone through the book like a young horse through a spring meadow, ramping.” By Clarke’s account, it was as though Keats had fallen deeply in love—overnight.

The first encounter with dharma is very often described as falling in love. When we see our dharma—smell it, feel it—we
recognize
it. It is chemical. Undeniable. Keats was smitten. At the beginning, he did not have any apparent genius for poetry. Just a love of it. And he knew—in the way that we know these things—that poetry was just the right vessel for him. Clarke introduced Keats to the principles of poetry as they had been held in England for the previous hundred years, and together, Clarke and Keats began to read the standard authors, from Milton to Gray. In his spare time, Keats began to write poetry, though he withheld his early efforts even from his mentor until much later.

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