Keats as Contemporaries Saw Him

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 480, 3 September 1948, Page 13

Keats as Contemporaries Saw Him

Lt me plead for a wider hearing for Mr. and Mrs. Abbey’s Difficulties than an unadvertised broadcast on a Sunday morning can give it, and an opportunity for more concentrated listening than is possible at the family breakfast table. Mr. and Mrs. Abbey’s Difficulties is that very rare thing, a biography written from the outside. Mr. and Mrs. Abbey were the guardians of John and Fanny Keats, and. this BBC play (based on an essay by E. M., Forster) is an attempt, and a dramatically effective one, to see the young man as he probably appeared to the solid taxpayer, the sound businessman, and the respectable matron. This is the story of a young man who was a failure. Offered a career as a surgeon, he declined it, preferring to write verses which his guardian found as hard to decipher as prescriptions and as worthless when deciphered. So amoral was he that Mrs. Abbey thought it advisable to forbid his own sister to communicate with him. He got himself allegedly betrothed to an unsuitable female (his landlady’s daughter) called Fanny Brawne. He died in poverty at the age of 26. This depressing narrative (which to the unprepared listener might be mistaken for a satire on 19th Century guardianship) is occasionally irradiated with the beauty (unbearable because of the context) of the poet’s own lines. "Bright star, Were I as steadfast as thou art" comes at a moment of intense poignancy, and a passage from Adonais points a bitter moral to the conclusion.