Keatsiana: Melancholy Watch, the Downs (September 1820); with a selection from Deep Keats Scrolls

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Jetty: Margate: Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), 1840s, watercolour over graphite pencil on paper, 23 x 32.8 cm (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

My melancholy watch, mid-quarter-deck,
Drifting: I follow the play of gulls.
The sun is long gone down, the east darkling,
The ship drifts. In the west, some brightness remains.
Momently there are two flights of gulls moving
One to the east into the dark and one
Out of the west, in the last rays of the sun,
Left and right so entirely dissimilar
That the name gull quite falls from them
As I watch, and the chiaroscuro
Of the evening is torn open, altering
Everything: so that now everything is
Only itself: the gulls, myself closer
In nature than if I still knew their name,
Yet at the same time moving farther out,
Sinking deeper into a fading sky
Which soaks them up like ink accepting water,
Coaxing darkness out of reluctant night,
Bringing on the abolition of that false
Identity which made naming possible.

Melancholy Watch, the Downs (September 1820), from Tom Clark: Junkets on a Sad Planet: Scenes from the Life of John Keats, 1994

Landscape with a River and a Bay in the Background: Joseph Mallord William Turner, c.1842, oil on canvas, 91 x 122 cm (Musée du Louvre, Paris)

Deep Keats Scrolls: A Selection

I . Negative Capability

II . Want of an Object

III . On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

IV . Byron on Keats

The Deep Keats Scrolls (four of the full set of twenty-nine are exhibited here) were composed over a period of some twenty years (1987-2007) for the benefit of students in lectures on Keats given in our home, where they were displayed on a large easel. The inscriptions cover the verso sides of recycled 48" x 36" sheets of architectural drawing paper. (Given Keats's early calling to the medical profession, it's perhaps appropriate -- or ironic? -- that the unseen front sides of the sheets contain plans for the construction of a major urban hospital.)