Keats and the Hands of Petrarch and Laura
Mary Anne Myers
Keats-Shelley Journal, Volume 62, 2013, pp. 99-113 (Article)
Published by Keats-Shelley Association of America, Inc.
For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ksj/summary/v062/62.myers.html
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Keats and the Hands of Petrarch and Laura
MARY ANNE MYERS
K
eats’s late poetic fragment, “This living hand,” initiates one
half of the connection that Petrarch wants so fervently to
achieve with Laura in the Rime sparse: the moment when the
inviting hand of the lover meets the accepting hand of the beloved.
With this salute, the beloved transforms from object to subject and the
lover from subject to object, a reciprocal recognition that creates the
intersubjectivity that is the ideal of love.1 Which half of this mutual
gesture Keats’s poem performs is ambiguous, however: “This living
hand” could represent the lover’s plea or the beloved’s response. The
poem creates similar ambiguities in its dramatic setting and mood.
In Keats’s poem, the plea for intersubjective recognition crosses an
imagined boundary between life and death as in a liberating dream or
a chilling nightmare. “This living hand” imagines its speaker’s death
but also compels its addressee to do the same, in what Jonathan Culler
has called a “sinister reciprocity.”2 In the Rime sparse, too, Petrarch
usually imagines his hand meeting Laura’s only when one of them
is dead.3 Keats’s poem implicitly contrasts its imagined deaths with
a vitalizing touch, so that the proposed meeting of the hands carries
both meanings of “salutare”: to greet and to save.4 As is also true for
the Rime sparse, the connection initiated by the poet within the verse is
contingent on the reader’s response in the poem’s afterlife.
“This living hand” has long fascinated critics. Due to its textual history—the lines were found within the manuscript of Keats’s unfinished
1. Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality (New York: Verso, 1995,
2005), pp. 103–4; Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60, trans. Dennis Porter, vol. vii
in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, gen. ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, 27 vols. (New York: W. W. Norton
& Company, 1992), vii, 152. Lacan and Žižek discuss the salute as a convention of medieval courtly
love. See also Richard Terdiman, “Can We Read the Book of Love?” PMLA 126.2 (2011), 472–82.
2. Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1981), pp. 152–54.
3. Aldo Scaglione, “Petrarchan Love and the Pleasures of Frustration,” Journal of the History of
Ideas 58.4 (1997), 571.
4. Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World (1940), trans. Montgomery Belgion (1956;
rpt. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 105.
[ 99 ]
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1819 satire, “The Cap and the Bells”—early critics conceptually severed
“This living hand” from most of Keats’s poetry, identifying the poem as a
scrap of character-specific dialogue in an unwritten play, as Keats’s threat
against his harsh reviewers, or as his anxious rebuke to his beloved Fanny
Brawne.5 In other readings the fragment becomes like a saint’s relic, exemplifying the dead’s supernatural power to affect the living.6 In most readings, the strange poem seems harder to love than other poems by Keats.
While respecting the poem’s Gothic quality, I read it as the capstone
of subtle but pervasive Petrarchan affects that Keats absorbed from his
literary culture and transmitted through his career-long, conflicted plea
for recognition and through his “ambivalent attitude toward gender.”7
Keats encountered the late eighteenth-century characterization of
Petrarch and Laura as “heroes of sensibility” and the sonnet as sensibility’s preferred poetic form.8 With its highly wrought expressions of
alienation and unfulfilled desire, Petrarch’s Rime sparse—first circulated
in Britain during the Tudor period—again became a target for English translation, imitation, and debate by readers and writers who also
appreciated the poet’s republican and humanist themes. As the first poet
since antiquity to be crowned with the laurel by the people of Rome
in 1341, Petrarch modeled for later poets the possibility of achieving
both contemporary popularity and immortal fame. In contrast to the
first wave of Britain’s Petrarchan revival by male courtiers, however,
the second wave during the late eighteenth century had women writers
such as Susannah Dobson, Charlotte Smith, Anna Seward, and Mary
Robinson in the vanguard. Although conservative critics began to denigrate Petrarchan-style sensibility and women writers in the late 1790s,
Petrarch remained prominent enough in British literary and visual culture to have been part of Keats’s reading in the early nineteenth century.
Critics who have noticed Keats’s engagement with Petrarch—for
5. For a review of early readings, see Lawrence Lipking, The Life of a Poet: Beginning and Ending
Poetic Careers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 180–84.
6. See, for example, Culler, Pursuit, pp. 152–54; Brooke Hopkins, “Keats and the Uncanny:
‘This living hand,’” The Kenyon Review, New Series 11.4 (1989), 28–40; David Ferris, “Fragments
of an Interrupted Life: Keats, Blanchot and the Gift of Death,” in The Meaning of “Life” in Romantic
Poetry and Poetics, ed. Ross Wilson (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 103–24.
7. Anne Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 181.
8. Edoardo Zuccato, Petrarch in Romantic England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 2.
For an earlier reference to Petrarch as a “hero of sensibility,” see Roderick Marshall, Italy in English
Literature 1755–1815 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), p. 125.
Keats and the Hands of Petrarch and Laura 101
example, Walter Jackson Bate, Helen Vendler, Susan Wolfson, and
Edoardo Zuccato—generally stress the poets’ formal affinities and pay
little regard to thematic connections. The exception is Wolfson, who
addresses Keats’s Petrarchism in the late love sonnets and “This living
hand” in the context of feminist readings of the misogynist Petrarch.9
Building on Wolfson’s observations, I find Keats engaging the androgynous Petrarch reconstructed in the late eighteenth century and claimed
most noticeably by female poets of sensibility. After foregrounding
Keats’s encounters with Petrarch and Laura in texts, in conversations
with Leigh Hunt, and in Thomas Stothard’s visualizations, I will demonstrate that Keats’s “Ode on Indolence” manifests Petrarchan affects in
its speaker’s ironic refusal to recognize the gendered trio of Love, Ambition, and Poetry. Finally, I will return to “This living hand,” a text that
enlists Petrarchan affects to invite recognition, to confound gendered
stereotypes, and to analogize the poet-reader and lover-beloved relationships through a mutually significant image: the meeting of hands.
Keats encountered Petrarch as mediated by Spenser, Shakespeare,
and Milton as well as in the original Italian and in Romantic translations
and images.10 He owned two volumes of Petrarch—the Italian Rime di
Petrarca and Petrarch’s Sonnets & Odes—although his copies do not survive.11 The latter volume, according to Hyder Rollins, was an abridged
version of the Rime sparse published anonymously in 1808 by a Bristol
physician, John Nott. This book contains translations of seventy sonnets
and ten longer-form songs re-numbered by Nott, printed side-by-side
with the original Italian, and supplemented by scholarly annotations.
Although Nott’s translations sometimes sacrifice meaning to rhyme
9. Bate, John Keats, 2nd. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 497–98; Vendler,
Coming of Age as a Poet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 44–45; Zuccato, p.
141; Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1997), pp. 187–92. For a feminist critique of Petrarch’s Rime sparse, see Nancy Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” Critical Inquiry 8.2 (1981), 265–78.
10. On Spenser and Shakespeare’s engagement with Petrarch, see Heather Dubrow, Echoes of
Desire: English Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).
On Petrarch and Milton, see Ilona Bell, “Milton’s Dialogue with Petrarch,” Milton Studies 28
(1992), 91–120.
11. Hyder Edward Rollins, ed. The Keats Circle, 2nd. ed., 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1965), i , 253, 257. Le Rime di Petrarca was likely the two-volume duodecimo
edition printed “Londra [i.e., Leghorn], 1778.” Petrarch’s Sonnets & Odes, according to Rollins, is
“John Nott’s Petrarch Translated in a Selection of His Sonnets and Odes, 1808,” p. 253n. See John Nott,
trans. and ed., Petrarch Translated: in a Selection of His Sonnets, and Odes (London: J. Miller, 1808),
Google Books; hereafter cited parenthetically as Nott.
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scheme, the book would nevertheless have been useful to Keats in his
study of Italian.12 Nott’s volume comprises several poems from the Rime
sparse emphasizing the hands of Laura and of Petrarch’s speaker, such as
the sonnet in which Petrarch claimed his poet’s hand was vanquished by
Laura’s beauty, as well as some of Petrarch’s famous blazons, which often
list Laura’s soft hands among her beautiful attributes (Sonetto vi, pp.
14–15; Sonetto lii, pp. 184–85).13 Nott also includes a sonnet of erotic
apostrophe to Laura’s hand occasioned when the speaker accidentally
finds her glove (Sonetto xxxii, pp. 120–21) and several poems dramatizing Petrarch receiving Laura’s hand of recognition or pity in a postmortem existence. In Sonetto V, for example, the speaker imagines a
scene of reading defined by his premature death and his beloved’s old age;
she reads his verse with regret (pp. 12–13). Sonetto lvi in Nott’s collection describes another imagined encounter from the “in morte” section
of the Rime sparse, which Petrarch claimed to have written after Laura’s
death (pp. 192–93). In this sonnet’s dream state, the speaker envisions
their reunion in heaven, where Laura takes him by the hand and says she
awaits him, but the speaker’s happiness dissipates when he awakens.
Petrarch’s imagined shifts between life and death create a literaryhistorical precedent for “This living hand,” which we might read either
as an imagined-dead Petrarchan poet reaching to a surviving beloved, or
as a hypothetically deceased beloved reaching to a living lover. Keats’s
fragment follows Petrarch in sketching subject and object as simultaneously dead and alive, a condition of extreme negative capability.14
Agency shifts between subject and object in “This living hand” just as
it does in the Rime sparse. Petrarch’s masculine speaker assumes a stereotypically feminine posture by ostensibly subordinating his will to his
sensibility as he puts his fate in Laura’s hands, professing that his existence depends on her elusive recognition of him. Keats replicates this
pattern of power-shifting between male and female characters in Endy12. For Keats’s study of Italian, see The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), i , 274; ii , 157, 212; hereafter cited
parenthetically as Letters.
13. Roman numerals here refer to Nott’s sequence, which differs from Petrarch’s numbering
scheme.
14. Stanley Plumly, The Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography (New York: W. W. Norton,
2008), p. 253. Plumly makes this observation about Keats’s state of mind in the fall of 1820 as he
writes to Brown about wanting to live for “a great occasion of my death” while waiting for his
ship to leave for Naples.
Keats and the Hands of Petrarch and Laura 103
mion, “La belle dame sans merci,” and “Lamia.” He imagines himself
in a similarly Petrarchan position when he envies the feminized flower
awaiting the “guerdon” of recognition by the busy masculine bee (LJK,
i, 232).15 For Keats as for Petrarch, the passive role is a paradoxical “diligent indolence” or “ardent listlessness.”16 The two male poets belie
their claim to passive subordination through the willful act of writing,
but each creates an androgynous textual identity in the process.
Women poets of the late eighteenth century had exploited the
androgynous aspects of Petrarch’s speaker. Charlotte Smith and Mary
Robinson, for example, both wrote as Petrarch in their respective
efforts to earn a living by writing, and both helped recuperate the sonnet form that would attract Keats decades later.17 These women, victims of bad marriages and limited choices, identified with Petrarch’s
alienation, ambivalence, and frustrated desire for recognition. They
asserted their feminism less in their defense of Laura than in their
Petrarchan aspirations to a poetic fame built on readers’ sympathy.
Smith’s and Robinson’s republican sympathies drew harsh criticism in
the Tory backlash of the 1790s, which branded Petrarchan-style sensibility as weak, French, and vulgar.18 Nevertheless, Petrarch and the
sonnet—in both its legitimate Italian rhyme scheme and “illegitimate”
English variations—remained popular well into the nineteenth century. In 1814, for example, British reformer Capel Lofft published his
five-volume Laura: or An Anthology of Sonnets (on the Petrarchan Model)
15. For more on Keats’s self-gendering here, see Margaret Homans, “Keats Reading Women,
Women Reading Keats,” Studies in Romanticism 39.3 (1990), 344–45; Mellor, pp. 178–82; and Susan
Wolfson, Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 235.
16. Keats uses “diligent Indolence” in the same February 1818 letter to J. H. Reynolds in which
he writes about the flower and the bee (Letters, i , 231). For “ardent listlessness,” see Endymion, Book
i, line 825 in John Keats, The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge: The Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press), p. 127. All references to Keats’s poems are to this edition; hereafter
cited parenthetically in text.
17. See three sonnets “From Petrarch,” in Charlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets and Other Essays
(London: J. Dodsley, 1784), pp. 22–24. Smith adds a fourth sonnet to the sequence in the third
edition (1786), Poems, ed. Jacqueline M. Labbe, vol. xiv in The Works of Charlotte Smith, gen. ed.
Stuart Curran, 14 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007), pp. 1–2. See also “Petrarch to
Laura” in Mrs. M[ary] Robinson, Poems (London: J. Bell, 1791), pp. 187–97. Robinson’s verse
narrative is her lead poem in The Poetical Works of the Late Mrs. Mary Robinson, 3 vols. (London:
Richard Phillips, 1806), i , 1.
18. G. J. Barker-Benfield cites the representation of Sensibility as an old “hag” in James Gillray’s image of “The New Morality” (1798) as an example of its denigration by prevailing conservative taste; see The Culture of Sensibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 262.
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and Elegiac Quatorzains. Honoring Petrarch’s object of desire in its title,
Lofft’s collection includes works by men and women from various
places and periods, including a sonnet by Leigh Hunt, The Examiner’s
editor who signed his columns with a pictogram of a hand.19
Hunt’s was one of the first hands of recognition Keats reached for
and received as a fledgling poet. Keats idealized Hunt as a better version of himself in a homosocial version of Petrarch’s narcissistic projection of Laura.20 Like Keats, Hunt lacked property and a university
education, but he still wrote poetry and engaged in political activism.
Keats’s 1815 Petrarchan-patterned sonnet, “Written on the day Mr.
Leigh Hunt left prison” praises Hunt for “showing truth to flatter’d
state” and claiming intellectual freedom, two activities commonly
associated with the historical Petrarch (line 1, p. 32). Initially, Keats
enjoyed more attention from Hunt than Petrarch ever got from Laura.
Hunt brought the unknown “J. K.” into the public eye in May 1816
by publishing Keats’s sonnet “To Solitude” in The Examiner before the
two met. Keats soon learned that Hunt, like Petrarch, valued reading,
conversing, and writing above all else in a way that Keats admired.
Taking Keats into his circle, Hunt enhanced the younger poet’s
appreciation for Petrarch, the sonnet, and the Italian language, which
Keats saw as “full of real Poetry and Romance” (Letters, i, 154–55). An
avid reader and translator of Italian poetry, Hunt also wrote many
original sonnets. He detailed the form’s history in a late essay that
praises Petrarch for “refining the love-making of his countrymen,” and
thereby enabling Italy to transcend its history of war and libertinism.
Acknowledging Petrarch’s persistent popularity, Hunt continues, “It
was on these accounts that Petrarch’s lesser, though beautiful genius,
being brought nearer to our common earth by the revolutions of time
and feeling, eclipsed that of the mightier star, Dante, up to a period as
late as the present century.”21 Hunt promoted Italianate love poetry
19. Hunt’s sonnet beginning “Sweet are the breezes” is published under the title, “Love, it’s
[sic] charms superior to all other. Elegiac.” in Laura: or An Anthology of Sonnets, ed. Capel Lofft, 5
vols. (London: R. & A. Taylor, 1814), ii , cxcv. The poem had appeared previously under the title
“Sonnet” in Hunt’s Juvenilia, 2nd. ed. (London: J. Whiting, 1801), p. 65. John Strachan omits this
sonnet from Poetical Works, vol. v of The Selected Works of Leigh Hunt, gen. eds. Robert Morison
and Michael Eberle-Sinatra, 6 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003). All further references
to Hunt’s poems are from this edition.
20. On narcissism in Petrarch, see Giuseppe Mazzotta in The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1993), p. 31. On narcissism in representations of courtly love, see Elizabeth
Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 126–30.
21. “An Essay on the Cultivation, Histories, and Varieties on the Species of Poem Called the
Keats and the Hands of Petrarch and Laura 105
as both aesthetically pleasing and politically subversive. His critics
noticed; John Gibson Lockhart’s 1817 attacks on the Cockney School
in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine ridiculed Hunt’s “knowledge of Italian literature [as] confined to a few of the most popular of Petrarch’s
sonnets.” Deriding Hunt’s “stretch to be grand,” Lockhart sneered,
“He wears no neckcloth and cuts his hair in imitation of the Prints of
Petrarch.”22 These prints, made after images by Thomas Stothard, also
impressed Keats, who likely saw them at Hunt’s home.23
Traces of Stothard’s Petrarch and Laura appear twice in Keats’s first
volume, Poems (1817), in verses dated to the time of his friendship with
Hunt. The first is a sonnet of social sensibility, written in the Petrarchan
rhyme scheme and beginning with the line, “Keen fitful gusts are whispering here and there.” The sonnet ends with the speaker
. . . brimful of the friendliness
That in a little cottage I have found
Of fair-hair’d Milton’s eloquent distress,
And all his love for gentle Lycid drown’d;
Of lovely Laura in her light green dress,
And faithful Petrarch gloriously crown’d. (lines 9–14, p. 65)
Juxtaposing Milton and Lycidas with Petrarch and Laura, Keats links
Petrarch’s expressions of love, longing, and loss in the Rime sparse to
Milton’s elegy for his friend Edward King as he affirms that both poets
were part of the evening’s literary conversation at Hunt’s cottage.
In Keats’s next image of Petrarch and Laura, which appears near
the end of “Sleep and Poetry,” a feminized and regal Poesy presides
between the lover and his beloved:
Petrarch, outstepping from the shady green,
Starts at the sight of Laura; nor can wean
His eyes from her sweet face. Most happy they!
For over them was seen a free display of
Outspread wings, and from between them shone
The face of Poesy: from off her throne
She overlook’d things that I scarce could tell. (lines 389–95, p. 78)
Sonnet,” The Book of the Sonnet, ed. Leigh Hunt and S. Adams Lee, 2 vols. (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1867), i, 20.
22. “On the Cockney School of Poetry,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 1 (October 1817), 39.
23. Hunt refers to Petrarch in the sonnet “To Thomas Stothard R. A.”; see Poetical Works, p.
234.
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Figure 1: Thomas Stothard, Petrarch and
Laura. Early nineteenth century. Copyright, the Victoria and Albert Museum,
London.
These two references to Petrarch find ready correspondences in
Stothard’s painting of Petrarch and Laura and in his Ella si sedea, a book
illustration and print.24 (See figs. 1 and 2.)
The small painting of Petrarch and Laura matches Keats’s description of
“Love­ly Laura in her light green dress” from “Keen fitful gusts”—in the
colored version Laura’s dress is indeed light green—and Petrarch “outstepping from a shady green,” from “Sleep and Poetry.” In the painting
Laura floats on a higher plane than Petrarch, consistent with her elevated
status as his idol. She emerges from twilight with a heavenly moonlit
glow, presented by angels as Petrarch imagines her in Sonetto lxvi from
Nott’s collection, excerpted from the “in morte” section of the Rime sparse
(pp. 216–17). In Stothard’s image, Laura also resembles the moon goddess
and dream lover Cynthia as described by Keats in Endymion (1818), with
. . . locks bright enough to make me mad;
And they were simply goridan’d up and braided,
Leaving, in naked comeliness, unshaded,
Her pearl round ears, white neck, and orbed brow; (Book i, lines 613–16, pp. 120–21)
24. Petrarch and Laura is associated with Keats for the first time here. Ella si sedea may match Sidney
Colvin’s reference to “[Stothard’s] small print of Petrarch as a youth first meeting Laura and her
friend.” Colvin, John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Critics, Friends and After-Fame (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1917), p. 54.
Keats and the Hands of Petrarch and Laura 107
Unlike Cynthia, who takes Endymion by the hand a few lines later
and causes him to swoon, Stothard’s Laura withholds her “salute” by
clasping her hands at her waist.
At the center of the painting, Stothard focalizes the hand of Petrarch,
whose hairstyle matches the one for which Lockhart mocked Hunt.
Rising from Petrarch’s open palm, a dark cloud threatens to block his
vision of the enchanting Laura. Vaguely suggesting a winged, eyeless face, this dark cloud offers a visual precedent for Keats’s “face of
Poesy,” which overlooks the couple and sees things his speaker “scarce
can tell.” With its “free display of / Outspread wings,” this line—and
perhaps this painting—also prefigure the better-known “viewless
Figure 2: James Neagle, after Thomas Stothard, Ella si sedea, Poems of Penn, based on Petrarch (1801).
Etching and engraving. Reprinted with permission by Special Collections, Baillieu Library, The
University of Melbourne.
wings of Poesy” of “Ode to a Nightingale.”25 Placed between Petrarch
and Laura, in the domain of love and poetry, Stothard’s winged face in
the cloud ambivalently signifies a bridge or a barrier between the two.
25. Zuccato also connects these lines from “Sleep and Poetry” and “Ode to a Nightingale” but
without reference to the painting; see p. 138.
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In Ella si sedea the hand focalized in the center of Stothard’s image
belongs to a figure invented by the artist to represent the poem’s reader.
This scene also shows Petrarch, hooded here, “outstepping from the
shady green” and unable to “wean his eyes from [Laura’s] sweet face,”
as Keats writes in “Sleep and Poetry.” The print’s legend reads “Ella
si sedea, / humile in tanto Gloria, / coverta già de l’amoroso nembo”
(“she was sitting / humble in such a glory / already covered with the
loving cloud”), lines from Petrarch’s “Chiare, fresche et dolci acque”
(“Clear, fresh and sweet water”) a long poem from the Rime sparse “in
vita” section, which Petrarch claimed to have written during Laura’s
lifetime.26 Hunt published his translation of this poem in The Examiner in December 1816.27 In the text, Petrarch imagines Laura mourning his premature death and regretting her refusal to extend her hand
to him during his life, similar to the scene from Sonetto V in Nott’s
volume. Whereas Petrarch and Laura shows the dead Laura conjured
by a living Petrarch, Ella si sedea shows an imagined-dead Petrarch
conjuring a living but absent Laura. The section of “Chiare, fresche”
illustrated by the print offers the poet’s reverie of Laura amid a “loving cloud”: a shower of petals—like the pages of his poems, perhaps,
or Zeus’s “golden shower” on Danaë—on her hair, her skirt, and the
ground where she sits.28 In Hunt’s translation, this section describes
Laura as “sprinkled and blushing” (line 45). The woman seated next
to Laura in Stothard’s print is not part of Petrarch’s poem. Her face
resembles Laura’s, but her plain dark dress contrasts with Laura’s luminosity. Raising her right hand toward Petrarch, she testifies to the
convergence of love, poetry, and desire in the petal shower. A meeting between her hand and the poet’s hand at the center of Petrarch and
Laura parallels the encounter imagined by “This living hand.”
Keats retained these images of Petrarch and Laura as his association
26. Translation by Robert Durling. See Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, trans. and ed. Robert Durling
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 244–47; hereafter cited parenthetically as
Durling’s Petrarch.
27. Hunt’s translation appeared under the title “Laura’s Bower” in The Examiner (December
8, 1816), 774–75, and a footnote acknowledges the gift of “a print after Stothard on the subject of
the fourth stanza.” It appears as “Petrarch’s Contemplations of Death in the Bower of Laura” in
The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt, ed. Humphrey Milford (New York: Oxford University Press,
1923), pp. 440–41.
28. This image might also have been familiar to Keats through its echo in Milton’s Paradise Lost,
iv , 765–73, as noted by Bell, p. 108.
Keats and the Hands of Petrarch and Laura 109
with Hunt changed from an asset to a liability. Early in 1817, when
their friendship seemed a boon to both, the two men had playfully
exchanged crowns—ivy for Hunt and laurel for Keats—in a parody
of Petrarch’s Roman coronation. Hunt also crowned Keats in print,
publishing three sonnets to him in Foliage (1818). In the first Hunt
writes, “I see, ev’n now, / Young Keats, a laurel flowering on your
brow,” naturalizing his own act of bestowing on his protégé the highest of public poetic honors (v, lines 14–15, p. 230). In the next, “On
Receiving a Crown of Ivy from the same,” stresses Keats’s hand in
placing the wreath: “I submit my head / To the young Hand that gives
it—young, ‘tis true / But with a right, for it’s a poet’s too” (v, lines
1–3, p. 230) and imagines the crown as a conduit between Keats’s hand
and his own: “As on my hand I lean to feel [the crown’s leaves] strew
/ My sense with freshness” (line 7). With these poems Hunt accepted
Keats’s attention and returned the young poet’s salute.
The salutary effects of Hunt’s reciprocating hand of recognition
were short-lived for Keats, however. Keats’s response to the coronation
game, “On Receiving a Laurel Crown from Leigh Hunt,” demonstrates
the young poet’s anxiety about living up to Hunt’s laurel. He concludes
with a vision of political equality that dispenses with royal headgear:
A trampling down of what the world most prizes
Turbans and crowns, and blank regality;
And then I run into most wild surmises
Of all the many glories that may be. (lines 11–14, p. 90)
Contrary to the glories of literary and social aggrandizement, Keats’s
relationship with Hunt brought the younger poet critical damnation as a Cockney. In 1818 Keats retrospectively rejected the symbol
of Hunt’s honor: “were it in my choice I would reject a petrarchal
coronation—on accou[n]t of my dying day and because women have
Cancers” (Letters, i, 292–93). Keats here implies that he has failed himself and the world with Endymion and questions poetry’s ability to
bestow immortality or to compensate for human suffering, as Hunt
had suggested it might. Nevertheless, Keats still hopes to die for “a
great human purpose” consonant with a poetic vocation. The letter
closes with an ironic pun about receiving “more than a Laurel from
the Quarterly Reviewers who have smothered me in ‘Foliage’” (Letters, i, 294), an expression of relief that he had not been mentioned by
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name in a negative review of Hunt’s volume. Keats’s friendship with
Hunt and the subsequent criticism of the Cockney school showed
Keats how reciprocal recognition put autonomy at risk.
Keats’s resulting ambivalence about recognition is particularly apparent in his meditations on indolence, where his Petrarchan sensibility
looms large. In the pretext and text of “Ode on Indolence,” Keats creates
a trio with parallels to the figures in Stothard’s Ella si sedea by personifying
Ambition, Love, and Poetry as “a man and two women.” Helen Vendler
notes the resemblance of “Indolence’s” threesome to the love-triangle
in Endymion in which the eponymous shepherd-poet’s love, initially
divided between the goddess Cynthia and the Indian maid, is resolved
when the female characters merge and take Endymion by the hand.29
Whereas Keats might have identified with his Endymion or with the figure of Petrarch in Ella si sedea, in “Indolence” he views these three figures
with detachment while maintaining his persistent Petrarchan sensibility
in his conflicted desire for recognition and his ambivalent gendering.
In the Ode’s pretext, which survives in a 1819 letter, Keats shifts
between stereotypically masculine and feminine postures as he
describes his condition subsequent to a cricket injury in the terms of
a Petrarchan blazon: “If I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lilies I
should call it languor” (Letters, ii, 78).30 “Languor” echoes the Italian
verb “languire” (to languish) used in Petrarch’s sonnet “Beato in sogno
et di languir content” (“Blessed in sleep and satisfied to languish”),
addressd to a trio of “Love, my Lady, and Death” (Durling’s Petrarch,
pp. 366–67).31 In the letter Keats quickly abandons his Petrarchan pretensions as he continues, “as I am + I must call it Laziness—In this
state of effeminacy the fibres of the brain are relaxed in common with
the rest of the body” (Letters, ii, 78). His use of “effeminacy” underscores his shift from athletic action to a Petrarchan pose of passivity
and receptiveness.32 And yet like Petrarch, whose languor produced a
sonnet, Keats ironically engages in the intellectual activity of thinking
and writing from the posture of professed stasis.
29. Vendler, Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1983), p. 24.
30. See also Homans, p. 344; Mellor, p. 182; and Wolfson, Borderlines, pp. 236–37.
31. Durling translates “sogno” elsewhere as “dream.”
32. Hazlitt defined “effeminacy” as the “prevalence of sensibility over the will” when criticizing the late Keats in “On Effeminacy of Character” (1822), in The Selected Writings of William
Hazlitt, ed. Duncan Wu, 9 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998), vi, 222.
Keats and the Hands of Petrarch and Laura 111
In his indolence, Keats envisions a man and two women who collectively attract his increasing attention by refusing to recognize him,
just as Laura’s silence increased Petrarch’s interest in her:
Neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any alertness of countenance
as they pass by me: they seem rather like figures of a greek vase—a Man and
two women—whom no one but myself could distinguish in their disguisement. (Letters, ii, 79)
Aligning Keats’s trio here with the one in Stothard’s Ella si sedea,
Poetry replaces Petrarch, while Love and Ambition refer interchangeably to Laura (and the laurel she connotes) and her reader-companion.
With few distinguishing features or actions, Keats’s threesome functions as his idealized self-projections, his “three fates,” as Laura was
for Petrarch.33 Offering him no salute, they remain objects for him to
name and to categorize.
In “Ode on Indolence” Keats’s speaker initially pretends not to recognize the trio, as if trying to resist the Petrarchan lover’s desire, and coyly
asks, “How is it, shadows, that I knew ye not?” (line 11, pp. 375–77). By
the third time they pass him, though, they have disturbed his languor
enough to compel recognition, so eventually he “knew the three” (line
24). Altering the letter’s sequence and gendering in “Indolence,” Keats
places Love first, still a maid, followed by Ambition, “pale of cheek” and
presumably male, and last his female “demon” Poesy (lines 25–30). In
the threesome from Stothard’s Ella si sedea, Petrarch prefigures the Ode’s
Ambition, while Laura and her companion, still interchangeable, stand
for Love and Poesy. In the poem all three coalesce into an androgynous (though predominantly feminine) trinity that becomes the elusive
object of the speaker’s ambivalent desire.
As the Ode continues, the speaker’s attitude toward reciprocity with
the trio becomes increasing conflicted. “[T]o follow them [he] burn’d”
and “ached for wings,” as he gradually recognizes them, but they still
pass him by (lines 23–24). Missing the opportunity for connection, the
Ode’s speaker then feigns indifference, dreaming himself into the position of an indolent beloved object, which carries no risk of rejection.34
The lines “My soul had been a lawn besprinkled o’er / With flowers, and
33. Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (1961; rpt.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), p. 420.
34. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 35.
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stirring shades, and baffled beams” (lines 43–44) recall Hunt’s translation of Petrarch’s song, in which Laura is “sprinkled” with flowers, and
Stothard’s Ella si sedea, in which Petrarch is the self-imagined “stirring
shade.” Keats’s speaker reverts to the Petrarchan lover’s position in the
next line, but in contrast to Petrarch’s vision of the petal shower on
Laura, Keats allows his speaker no parallel release:
The morn was clouded, but no shower fell,
Though in her lids hung the sweet tears of May;
[. . .]
O Shadows! ‘twas time to bid farewell!
Upon your skirts had fallen no tears of mine. (lines 45–46, 49–50)
Determined to resist the attractive but unresponsive Love, Ambition,
and Poesy, who withhold their hands of recognition from him, the
speaker ends his dream and his poem. His unshed tears, like Petrarch’s
petals, read like metonyms for the words of love poetry. The refusal of
Keats’s speaker to expend them is ironically belated, however, as the
“Ode on Indolence” nears its end after five-and-a-half stanzas. Bidding
“ye three ghosts, adieu!” he becomes a subject without an object, an
“idle sprite” apathetically approaching abjection (line 59). In another
potential irony, some time between the indolence letter and related
Ode, the “idle sprite” wrote the “great Odes”—“Ode on a Grecian
Urn,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” and “Ode on Melancholy”—which
posthumously won for Keats the laurel of poetic fame.
In “Ode on Indolence” Keats denies his need for any crowns of
recognition from Hunt, from readers, or from critics; his speaker
rejects the role of “a pet-lamb in a sentimental farce”—Keats’s term
for his poetic persona under Hunt’s influence, as opposed to the role
of “Philosopher” which he now hoped to become (Letters, ii, 116).
He reaffirms his ultimate dependence on this reciprocal recognition,
however, in “This living hand.” The fragment’s speaker engages its
invented object more directly in the I-thou terms the poet uses in his
last sonnets of hopeless Petrarchan love—“I cry your mercy,” “The
day is gone,” and the revised “Bright Star”—but without those sonnets’ gendering of subject and object. Nonetheless, as in the late sonnets presumably written to Fanny Brawne, the reader’s response to
“This living hand” is figured as a matter of life and death.35
35. Wolfson reads “This living hand” in the context of Roland Barthes’s ideas of the “death of
the author” and “birth of the reader”; see Formal Charges, pp. 188–91.
Keats and the Hands of Petrarch and Laura 113
The fragment’s hand resembles Petrarch’s conjuring hand in
Stoth­ard’s Petrarch and Laura and perhaps recalls the legend that Laura
once touched Petrarch’s hand in accepting his verses.36 Like Petrarch’s
Laura, the object of “This living hand’s” speaker exists only through
the poem’s text, creating the possibility that Keats’s speaker addresses
not another but rather some aspect of himself. The poem’s blank verse
suggests the message should be taken seriously. After the spillover of
the first enjambment, the flow is interrupted in the middle of the second
line, when the conditional-contrary-to-fact signaled by the subjunctive
“if it were” abruptly begins the turns of what is and what is not, who
is dead and who is alive, who is offering the hand and who is receiving
it. The fragment’s speaker embodies negative capability by refusing to
choose between the positions of lover and beloved, subject and object,
masculine and feminine, even life and death. Keats would have valued
Petrarch’s ambivalence and his crafting of a persona inhabiting an inbetween space of painful pleasure, where the hand of one might meet
or miss the hand of the other, the space assigned to poetry and love.37
Whether reaching across to its respective other, or even reflexively
to its own other hand, “This living hand” makes the identity of one
contingent upon recognition by the other, as in the medieval convention of the transformative salute. The two distinct identities are inextricably linked and perpetually incomplete, as indicated formally by
the fragment’s final half-line. We might read the poem as the octave of
an unrhymed sonnet whose sestet remains to be written. Keats never
published the poem himself, but its circulation in print nevertheless rescues its speaker from isolation. The poet survives along with
the poem through his last direct appeal to an interdependent other,
interpellated by the “you” upon which “This living hand” ends and
Petrarch’s Rime sparse begins.38 For Keats as for the poet of the Rime
sparse, the ultimate saving salute is the reader’s.
United States Military Academy, West Point
36. Thomas Campbell, Life of Petrarch, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1841), Google Books,
ii , 365.
37. On Petrarch’s ambivalence, see Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism
(1966; rpt. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1995), p. 270.
38. Petrarch’s opening sonnet starts “Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono / di quei sospiri”
(“You who hear in scattered rhymes the sound of those sighs,” Durling’s Petrarch, pp. 36–37).