Ode to a Lock of Keats' Hair
I’ve seen it in person and in photos, and I’ve read descriptions, too, of John Keats’ hair as a deep coppery auburn. Wavy more than curly, though lank and darkened following one of his fevered night sweats. A drawing by Keats’ friend Joseph Severn reveals this particular state of his hair, misshapen, scraggily strands plastered to his forehead. While John Keats, who died of consumption two hundred years ago this February 23 at age twenty-five, never made it to America, his brother George did. George and his wife had roamed the still-young nation, settling in and around Pittsburgh, later Louisville, in the first and second decades of the 1800s. Keats had talked and written of visiting his brother and sister-in-law in America.
But Keats did make it here, to New York—in part. The Morgan Library holds in their permanent collection three clippings of his hair. The most important fragment, I believe, is the one cut just weeks or days before the poet died in 1821. The substantial bunch of hair, secured with a black ribbon, assumes the shape of an almost-complete O that ends in a tail-like coil, the ends feathered with a flourish evocative of David Cassidy’s coif in the 1970s. This gathering of hair had been snipped by Severn, Keats’ devoted friend who had accompanied him to Rome from England in the hope that the warmer climate might cure him of his (terminal) disease.
The other clippings in the Morgan, wispier than Severn’s, were cut by other friends of Keats’—one on the eve of his sailing to Rome, the other while aboard the Maria Crowther, shortly before the ship pulled up anchor and set off for Naples. While Keats lay in his bed in his room overlooking the Spanish Steps awaiting death, Severn had leaned over the prostrate poet to cut the hair, a not uncommon memento that people collected and sent to one another, especially throughout the nineteenth century. A lock of hair was better than an autograph.
While it is only partly apocryphal that Keats wrote his Ode to a Nightingale in a single sitting in the garden at Wentworth Place in London, he did compose paeans to other objects and creatures—in addition to the bird that had alit on a branch in the garden, he wrote odes to a Grecian urn, autumn, Psyche, melancholy, indolence, and, notably, a lock of Milton’s hair. I have not seen in person the lock of Keats’ hair since the pandemic, with the museum largely off limits, but its shape, hue, and texture remain as visible in my mind as one of his couplets.
Keats experienced lockdowns and quarantines in his short lifetime, notably a two-week-long one off the coast of Naples when he and Severn had sailed from England. There they bobbed and rocked within tantalizing sight of the shore. A typhus outbreak back in London had prevented the two Englishmen from being allowed to disembark and continue their journey northward to Rome. As Severn, a painter, had written, “It would be difficult to depict in words the first sight of this Paradise as it appears from the sea. The white houses were lit up with the rising sun…and being tier above tier upon the hill-slopes, they had a lovely appearance, with so much green verdure and the many vineyards and olive grounds about them.”
What has been happening to us all from early 2020 now into 2021 happened then, too. While many of us have whined about not being able to dine indoors or get into a Trader Joe’s fast enough, Keats and Severn and other passengers on the tiny boat had to wait it out at sea, and it was no Princess cruise ship on which they were confined, but rather a drafty barebones craft whose sleeping quarters were separated by curtains. Severn wrote of how during the long pause, Keats is “often so distraught, with so sad a look in his eyes.”
Keats is famous not only for his poetry and the letters he wrote, notably those to Fanny Brawne, but also, frankly, for his youth and beauty. Those latter two fleeting talents, of sorts, often vault other earned attributes when it comes to a sensitive poet’s early death. Even Oscar Wilde, born thirty-one years after Keats’ death, spoke of Keats’ “finely cut nostril, and Greek sensuous delicate lips” as if he had personally gazed upon the reposing poet in his death room in Rome or on a divan at the Hampstead house at which he roomed. The poet Stanley Plumly writes in his 2008 Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography of why Keats became far more famous in death than in life, suggesting that, among the contributing factors, were, indeed, his age and buff looks. One of Plumly’s best lines, seemingly itself out of a poem, is his declaration that “memory has a gift for summary and symmetry.” In a very clumsy paraphrase of Plumley’s elegant line, a person becomes ever more beautiful and accomplished the longer they are lost to time.
I love that I live in a city where artifacts such as locks of Keats’ hair are catalogued, climate-controlled and treasured. Literary relics are my holy relics. To read in Plumly’s book of Keats’ years of suffering and pain is to ache for the young man who himself ached for death and, thus, relief. A lock of hair still bespeaks life. The color holds, maybe even its scent beneath the glass. His strands appear soft and silky, with a burnished lustre and with sufficient body to coil back on themselves. It is, after all, the hair of a young man and, regardless of one’s sexual orientation, a young man is one of creation’s most beautiful creations. Forgive what might seem like a moment of bias, or, worse, misogyny, but a young man, unlike a young woman of that time or even now, was unadorned. No makeup, no hair styling, no elaborate costuming to enhance one’s beauty. Still, today, a young man’s beauty is natural. What is there is already there, unaccented, unenhanced.
Keats did make it to America. He made it to my adopted hometown, where I have lived for forty years, following my arrival after college at the University of Michigan. Keats’ self-abnegation that his “name was writ in water” has long been washed away, though the words endure in stone as an epitaph on his marker in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery. For me, he exists here as much as he does in Rome, now and forever. My paperback edition of Selected Poems and Letters by John Keats, edited by Douglas Bush, from sophomore year in college, contains blizzards of exclamation points in the margins and youthful self-declarations writ in Bic-pen blue, including “really nice!”. Keats wrote in his “On Seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair,” citing the poet’s “bright hair,” that “Thy spirit never slumbers, But rolls about our ears/For ever and for ever!”
To see Keats’ hair on display on Madison Avenue is both macabre and sensual; there’s a necrophiliac whiff mingled with a sweet, sentient aliveness. As New York continues to awaken, to come back to life from our actual and metaphorical quarantine, I will visit this corporeal part of Keats, comforted that he resides in a city where I came years ago and have lived in for far more years that he was allowed in his life.
—David Masello
