Keats on Depression: Strongest Consolation for a Heavy Heart
“My hand feels like lead and I’m so depressed that I can’t think of anything to write down. It’s an unpleasant numbness, but it doesn’t make the pain of life go away.”
In a moving letter to his brother, Van Gogh described despair as feeling like being shackled hand and foot at the bottom of a deep, black abyss, completely powerless. A century later, William Styron gave voice to the soul-malady that so many of us have endured silently by writing in his classic masterwork, “The grey drizzle of terror generated by depression takes on the aspect of actual anguish.”
Prior to Styron and even before Van Gogh, the great Romantic poet John Keats (October 31, 1795–February 23, 1821) depicted the illness in his Selected Letters (public library), an essential collection that contains Keats’s thoughts on what gives human existence meaning, how solitude opens up our channels to truth and beauty, and his exquisite love letter to Fanny Brawne.
Periodic depression attacks devastated Keats’s brief life, yet he found solace in his artistic endeavours. He remarked, “Life must be experienced, and I certainly gain a consolation from the notion of penning one or two more Poems before it quits,” to his closest friend.
Benjamin Haydon’s John Keats lifelike mask, 1816 (National Portrait Gallery)
In May 1817, Keats confides in the painter Benjamin Haydon, who had just finished casting the young poet’s life mask and who would eventually go on to commit himself at age sixty after outliving Keats by a quarter century due to depression.
I don’t feel like I’m in the best of moods right now to write anything, and it seems like losing that mood is the start of all kinds of weird things. You always tell me not to give up, and while I wish it were as simple for me to do so, the truth is that I have a terrible Morbidity of Temperament that occasionally manifests. This condition is without a doubt my greatest enemy and obstacle to overcome, and I might even say that it is likely to be the root of my disappointment. Although every bad thing has a positive side, this particular curse would allow me to stare obstinately at the Devil Himself at any time. If given the chance, I am certain that I ought to have been a rebellious Angel.
Keats on Depression: Strongest Consolation for a Heavy Heart
The poet was surrounded by an even more menacing cloud of despondency the following spring. A object of beauty is a joy for ever is the opening line of his now-famous poem Endymion, which was released to harsh criticism. His sibling experienced a severe haemorrhage. Another abruptly declared his intention to get married and relocate to America. Keats fell into a deep depression as a result of this upheaval of instability and the assaults on his main psychological survival strategy. In a letter to his closest confidant, Benjamin Bailey, Keats portrays the sickness exquisitely before the clinical profession and contemporary memoirist made the illness their subject.
I am so lethargic this morning that I am unable to write; this feeling frequently causes me to put things off; when you ask for an immediate response, I do not like to wait until the next day; however, I am currently so depressed that I have no ideas to put on paper; my hand feels like lead; and while this unpleasant numbness does not lessen the pain of existence.
Keats continues: “Nearly two centuries before scientists started to shed light on how body and mind interact in mental health.”
My intelligence must be deteriorating because while I should be writing about who knows what, I’m bothering you with body moods instead because there is no such thing as a mind.
He understands that the darkness is passing, that when it finally lifts, one is left wondering, in the words of another great poet, “What pained me so badly throughout my life till this moment?” He does so with the cold, helpless lucidity of the sad. — but in the cruellest twist of all, the recognition does not provide relief:
I know full well that that is all nonsense, but I am in the kind of mood where, if I were underwater, I would hardly kick to get to the surface. I’m hoping that in a short while I’ll be in the right frame of mind to react to your mention of my book in a rational way. I waited until Monday to show any interest in anything, let alone that or anything else. I am almost stone-hearted about my brother’s wedding and don’t get excited about his moving to America. All of this will pass; the only thing I regret is having to write to you at this time, but I can’t force my letters through a hot bed.
One point of identification does provide relief as one lucid beam pierces the dense fog of inner desolation. Throwing oneself on the kindness of friends might be comforting; it’s like an albatross sleeping on its wings.
In a another letter, Keats states, “I could not exist without the love of my pals.” And in fact, he expresses the strongest—possibly the only—treatment for depression in a letter to his closest friend. The dejected poet wrote more than a century before Styron found happiness and solace from sorrow in the capacity for presence, when he was Keats’s age.
You have unavoidably been led astray by your disposition if you once believed that Worldly Happiness could be attained at predetermined times. I hardly ever remember counting on Happiness, and I don’t look for it if it doesn’t exist right now. Nothing outside of the Moment surprises me. Always, the setting sun will put me right. Alternatively, if a sparrow appears at my window, I participate in its existence and pick at the Gravel.
