Our book today is another whopper from the days of the old manilla-covered Modern Library era: The Complete Poems of Keats & Shelley, for those times when you want pages and pages of these near-exact contemporaries all running together, rather than hunting up your Oxford completes or your Penguin selects. Although the heft of this combined volume in the hand is also a sad thing, since it’s almost the entirety of what both these young men – the first dead at 25, the second at 29 – were able to write in the short span of their lives, and walking around with it, carrying it from parlor to bedroom while furious, unending snows blizzard against the walls of the house, it’s sad to realize that these 900 pages might not have accounted for either poet alone, if they’d lived to three score and ten instead of dying young, the first in exhausted misery and the second in drowning tempest.

Of course, both Keats and Shelley were well accustomed to thinking about dying young, despite how little I believe they actually believed it might happen to them. Consumption surrounded Keats on every side of his life, calling forth some particularly plangent notes when he wrote about another very early artistic death:

O Chatterton! How very sad thy fate!

Dear child of sorrow – son of misery!

How soon the film of death obscur’d that eye,

Whence Genius mildly flash’d, and high debate.

How soon that voice, majestic and elate,

Melted in dying numbers! Oh! How nigh

Was night to thy fair morning. Thou didst die

A half-blown flow’ret which cold blasts amate

But this is past; thou are among the stars

Of highest Heaven: to the rolling spheres

Thou sweetly singest: naught but they hymning mars,

Above the ingrate world and human fears.

On earth the good man base detraction bars

From thy fair name, and waters it with tears.

 

Although thanks to this big volume’s close-packed pages, we’re never far away from the deeper currents of Keats’s genius, especially in places where that current runs strong, as in my own personal favorite work by this poet, his great moon-poem “Endymion,” or in passage after passage from his “The Fall of Hyperion”:

Thus in alternate uproar and sad peace,

Amazed were those Titans utterly.

O leave them, Muse! O leave them to their woes;

For thou art weak to sing such tumults dire:

A solitary sorrow best befits

Thy lips, and antheming a lonely grief.

Leave them, O Muse! For thou anon wilt find

Many a fallen old Divinity

Wandering in vain about bewildered shores.

But as exquisite as it always is to revisit Keats (how silly now seem the long decades where I refused to feel that way!), the real star of this volume is Percy Bysshe Shelley – not only because we get so many of his works that so few casual poetry-readers (or Norton Anthology samplers) would know, strange, jaggedly beautiful things like Hellas, or The Witch of Atlas, or The Revolt of Islam, but also because the Modern Library editors decided to reprint the prefaces and notes through which Mary Shelley so consciously and so skillfully shaped the posthumous reception of her husband’s works. “Whatever faults he had ought to find extenuation among his fellows,” she writes in her 1839 preface to his work, laying it on with a trowel, “since they prove him to be human; without them, the exalted nature of his soul would have raised him into something divine.” And she goes on to elaborate this note of semi-divinity every chance she gets, all done up in her unmistakable passionate, vivid prose:

His extreme sensibility gave the intensity of passion to his intellectual pursuits; and rendered his mind keenly alive to every perception of outward objects, as well as to his internal sensations. Such a gift is, among the sad vicissitudes of human life, the disappointments we meet, and the galling sense of our own mistakes and errors, fraught with pain; to escape from such, he delivered up his soul to poetry, and felt happy when he sheltered himself from the influence of human sympathies, in the wildest regions of fancy. He loved to idealize reality; and this is a taste shared by few.

It’s a macabre, stunning performance of what we would nowadays call “spin,” and re-reading it all just recently, I was struck not only by how intelligently it’s done but by how manifestly sincere it all is. And naturally, as monumental counterweight to the commentary are the verses themselves, so much more shaped and polished than the work of his volume-mate – although often not a bit less attracted by the idea of mortality, caught so mesmerizingly, for example, in the final stanzas of “On Death”:

This world is the nurse of all we know,

This world is the mother of all we feel,

And the coming of death is a fearful blow

To a brain unencompassed with nerves of steel;

When all that we know, or feel, or see,

Shall pass like an unreal mystery.

The secret things of the grave are there,

Where all but this frame must surely be,

Though the fine-wrought eye and the wondrous ear

No longer will live to hear or to see

All that is great and all that is strange

In the boundless realm of unending change.

Who telleth a tale of unspeaking death?

Who lifteth the veil of what is to come?

Who painteth the shadows that are beneath

The wide-widing caves of the peopled tomb?

Or uniteth the hopes of what shall be

With the fears and the love for that which we see?

 

It’s curious that such borderline-morbid stuff should be so uplifting, especially in the dead of a particularly vicious winter month, but there it is. Something to do with mutability, I’m guessing.