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 wouldst 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” is one of John Keats’s last poetic efforts, written before his premature passing from tuberculosis in 1821. It was most likely written towards the end of 1819, a prolific year in his career as a poet, alongside the majority of his notorious odes. Yet the poem stands out from Keats’s usually ornate and rigorously elegant verse: more of a fragment than a complete poem, “This Living Hand” was composed in blank verse in the margins of the manuscript of another poem Keats was working on at the time, a lighthearted composition brimming with vitality and witticisms entitled “The Cap and Bells”. It is intriguing to try to envision that moment of accidental inspiration: Keats, weary with the effort of giving birth to his most serious works and rendered apprehensive by the acknowledgment of his imminent death is struggling to work on a more high-spirited piece that will hopefully earn him some very much needed income when suddenly he distractedly glances at his hand. His writing hand, his living hand holding the pen. And he thinks: this living hand that now pulses with red life and creates will soon be cold and inert. And all the trivialities of everyday life disappear; the thought of the unfinished poem soon dissipates; there remain the poet, the waiting page, and that hand – which almost appears to have a life of its own, severed from the finite physicality of a body –, warm with blood and unbearably alive. It is during such a moment and in such a peculiar state of consciousness, one is eager to imagine, that Keats feverishly jotted down the lines of “This Living Hand”.
The poem does not only set itself apart from the rest of Keats’s verse because of its fragmented nature; one of its most remarkable features is the surprisingly modern quality of its speaking voice. The directness of its final lines is so striking that it is almost disturbing to the reader, so much so that some critics have ventured to insert the poem into the category of confessional poetry. The transition from 'thou' to a more informal and intimate 'you' is chilling. Surely, the recipient of such a poem would find it hard to read without a heavy conscience. Some critics have pinpointed a specific addressee in Fanny Brawne, with whom Keats was hopelessly in love at the time of the composition. The ‘hand’ of the poem could thus lead to an understanding of it as a poignant offer of marriage – which would justify the more informal use of “you” in the final line – or as a bitter reprimand for a love that was doomed to be of an ephemeral nature and soon forgotten; Brawne would marry again and have children after Keats’s death, despite remaining fond of his memory for the rest of her life. Yet what I wish to examine more closely in this piece of writing involves a putting aside of this theory. The meaning of the poem obviously opens up considerably when that final “you” is seen as being directed towards a generalised reader of the poem. The reprimand – or desperate plea? – becomes one of a totally different nature, and the speaking voice of the poem loses its personal touch and is clothed again with the impersonal garments of the poet. The hand becomes something more abstract: it is not a physical hand offered in marriage. And yet it still retains an incredibly life-like quality; when we read the poem’s last line, there is no doubt that the speaker’s hand is in front of us, although it is obviously not there at the same time.
A dismal threat emerges from the lines of "This Living Hand": whilst the poet advances his flesh and blood to the recipient of the poem, his request has the exact same weight. The reader’s own life is demanded for that hand to be rejuvenated. The poem is not only a celebration of the stubbornness of life and of the way it dares to partially cheat death; it is also a memento mori. It is a tombstone, a relic, and yet it defies temporality; it is as if the poem itself has become the poet’s body, a body that fervently asks to be kept alive through a reading of the poem. The reader is burdened with the daunting task of hosting a life within death. Despite being threatened with a scenario of death he is also momentarily reassured of the fact that “this living hand” is “now warm and capable”; he is thus tricked into imagining and, consequently, into bringing back to life the poet’s blood in terms of bodily fluid and life’s sap – warm, vermilion, arterial blood, positively throbbing in a strictly physiological sense. The initially intricate and sinuous weaving of the syntax is in perfect contrast with the stark, hard-hitting simplicity of the final statement and that terrifyingly direct, almost unbearably human “you”. And even when the reader is hit with the necessary realisation that 'this living hand' is in the grave in that the poet who composed the poem is now dead, he can still perceive the maddening beating of a heart in those veins and arteries. The uncanny efficacy of the poem's last line successfully revives a dead hand from the grave.
Yet what kind of hand is it, the one that is outstretched towards the reader at the end of the poem? It abstractly inhabits a dimension between reader and writer, time and space. It is suspended between living words and the grave, where language suggests a body when there is none. Keats’s hand is still alive within the space of the poem, a space that is space-less and yet contains. The life of the poet is prolonged through the blood of the poem, injected into the reader’s veins. Keats’s own hand as a living body part is now reduced to ashes; yet his writing hand, his poem – we can feel it, without feeling it, extending towards us still, in the form of the trace of a body, a miraculous sign of the body, a breathing message. “This Living Hand” locks the reader’s eyes on the poem, so much so that he feels that if he were to turn his gaze from the page, the throbbing hand would decay into an unbearable putrefaction, and the written words turn lifeless and meaningless. The recipient of the poem is thus lured into becoming an active reader and feels the urge to translate that unbearable “icy silence” into a voice, the voice of the poem. Keats’s "This Living Hand" symbolises the passage of life from a dead body into a living one, from writer to reader. It represents a poetic blood transfusion, a touch-less touch in the white realm of the page, so flimsy and so powerfully vast. Through the act of holding Keats’s ‘living hand’ we both resurrect a body of work to life and shake hands with mortality. The 'living hand' that is the physical object of the poem is now just a handful of dust. Yet the poem both laments and defies the temporal structure of life. Keats's words are alive; his extended hand of poetry is both icy cold and full to the brim with red life. ♦
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