a long poem
by David Keith Johnson
(1979)
In the Middle Ages, a “makar,” or maker, was a poet. In this piece, the poet is my grandfather, Keith Monroe Lyons, who “made” a song just as one might make a piece of furniture or a meal or any other useful thing.
The notes throughout were prepared for my parents when they asked about the poem.
THREE LETTERS1
after John Keats
I.
The thoughts of those who seek are beautiful
As summer grain among the wind and light,
Whose unseen penetrations of the soil
Anchor the golden arguments in sight;
In time these thoughts are slain, cut down and sealed
In rootless harvest shocks, shut in a bin
Where no light plays, no wind sings or convulses;
So we must plant again,
Secure the resurrection in the field
So vital thoughts can give their living yield,
For nothing dies whose life is proved upon our pulses.
II.
The winds that sing among the shafts of grain
Give lessons as they soothe us; we who sing
Must listen to the living wisdom they contain
In every breath, in every whispering:
A song will please us by a fine excess
Of beauty; our thoughts it richly remembers;
Its cycle will reflect the complete ease
With which sunrise surrenders
To twilight: east, meridian, and west;
A song loses its name when it is pressed;
It should form naturally as leaves upon the trees.
III.
I will not live in fear that I may fail –
No great thing is achieved without great striving –
Nor look toward an end to my travail;
Never arrived I always am arriving;
And if I die before I come to reap,
Having lived well in faceless isolation,
Never to share the song that round me rings,
This is my consolation:
Though my loss causes not one soul to weep,
My faithful dedication I will keep
To love the principle of Beauty in all things.
Next Section: Proem of the Book of the Makar
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1 John Keats was the son of a stableman in England, born in 1795. He trained to be an apothecary, which was more like a physician’s assistant than a pharmacist. When still young, he fell in love with literature and determined to make his mark as a poet. He was on a race with time on at least two different tracks. First, economically: he had a small inheritance which kept him free for a time, but he knew eventually he would have to find employment, probably as a surgeon’s mate on a ship. Secondly, he knew his prospects for long life were slim. He nursed his brother, Tom, through his final illness, a respiratory ailment that ran in his family.
His progress as a writer was accordingly rapid, and in his early twenties he had what critics call a “miracle year,” producing his famous odes: On Melancholy, To a Grecian Urn, To a Nightingale, and my favorite, To Autumn. Also he wrote many lyrical poems, sonnets, and extended works, such as “The Eve of St. Agnes.”
Through this, he wrote letters to his surviving brother, George, who had migrated to Kentucky in America, describing his ideas on poetry and artistic achievement. My poem, also an ode because it is in three parts, is a re-statement of Keats’s letters to George. Like my grandfather, Keats, (who unlike my grandfather died at age 26,) was not schooled by others in his greatness, but achieved it through the development of his own soul in the midst of daily life.