However it may be, it’s mine now.
Even before I went to university to study literature I was touched by John Keats. His poems, Hyperion, To Autumn, are magnificent, but Keats’s life itself was beautiful too. Or maybe not beautiful, but tragically poetic in any case. The tragedy of the poet who died so young moved me. The feverish haste with which Keats wrote, as if he recognised the need to. I visited his grave in Rome, just to see that famous epigraph with my own eyes: ‘here lies one whose name was writ in water’.
The book I bought is The Months by Leigh Hunt; in life a giant of the literary world and one of Keats’s ‘early adopters’. Their friendship derailed after Keats published his epic poem Endymion about the beautiful young man who fell in love with Selene, the goddess of the moon.
Hunt was pretty much forgotten.
Okay, so that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s true that even for the more literary minded of scholars Hunt is a cousin twice, or at least once, removed from the current hardcore Romantic canon. And therein lies his charm for me. Granted, Hunt is the author of such unfortunate platitudes as
colours are the smiles of nature
and
travelling in the company of those we love is home in motion
but he also wrote the following sweet little poem, and that, in the immortal words of Bugs, is ’nuff said.
Jenny Kissed Me Jenny kissed me when we met Jumping from the chair she sat in; Time, you thief, who love to get Sweets into your list, put that in: Say I'm weary, say Iḿ sad, Say that health and wealth have missed me, Say I'm growing old, but add, Jenny kissed me. Leigh Hunt