When he loved a woman he loved the dubious fascinating Fanny Brawn-- sordid-brained, worldly: to him a mixed living devilish-glowing goddess. A higher-souled woman would neither have so tortured nor so held him. He was purely lyric. He cared truly nothing for the verdicts of critics and reviewers: and in the sweet-lipped boyish beauty of his youth they truly and easily killed him. It would be like that--it had to be. He was so purely lyric.
He died in the sweet fierce dazzling cause of Beauty.
I have so many thoughts and my thoughts are always my own. There are endless written thoughts deeper than mine--finer, stronger, anything-you-like. But mine answer for me: no written thoughts affect them, though they thrill my reading hours. Only John Keats’s thoughts can enter in and crush and cripple mine.
Because everybody is a little bit like John Keats I have a starry thin edge of faith inside me. He is food for my hunger of thought, fire for my passion of life.--John Keats!
From my desk he gazes at me in a frame of old-gold. Every day the sunset on the glass blurs his large mournful joyous eyes with strangest agonized sunset tears: he shows me the sweet, sweet intoxication of his lyric grief.
He died young, unfinished--and oh, but it’s a shivering ecstasy to think of all those lyrics in him he never wrote!--the sweeter melodies--‘Unheard.’
Hidden somewhere in the invisible unused air-plateaus is a little Child: mine: who has never been born.
A tenet in me is that a woman by every right and by old earthen law should, if she will, have her child--should be the warm-winged mother.
I am a devil and a fantasy, a jezebel and a wanderer in fields of inverted fungi: so I seem to me. I do not know my status--I but know my personal incidents as they happen. But I am also woman: a woman by inherence and by fact. Being woman I am the potential mother, mother of my Child who has not been born.
I am bodily in good health--if not robust yet durable, as a mother should be: I am always tired as if from touches and weights of living as a loving mother should be: I am warm of blood, latently savage-toothed like a jungle-mother, deadlier than the male, as a brave mother should be. Though I have no child I have an ancient right in my Child, and I want my Child. My Child _is_, but has not been, born. Merely to want my Child makes me a fitting mother.