I gave a talk to sixth-form students yesterday called: ‘Who Said That? How to Talk About the Speaker of Poems’. I like doing school talks because it feels possible to ask questions about the basics of reading poetry and see where they take us. As a starting point, I found myself thinking about John Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ again (as I did last month) — and in particular, the portrait above. Here is some of what I said.
Good afternoon. My name is Jeremy Noel-Tod, and I am the speaker who has come to speak to you about speakers. More specifically, I’m going to be speaking to you about the convention we have, when talking about poems, of referring to ‘the speaker of the poem’. I use it all the time as a lecturer at a university, and you no doubt have been encouraged to use it in class.
Here is a posthumous portrait of the poet John Keats — ‘posthumous’ meaning that it was painted from memory, after Keats’s death at the age of twenty five. The painter, Joseph Severn, was someone who had very strong memories of Keats, because they were close friends; Severn, in fact, nursed Keats during his final illness. So we might say it is an elegiac portrait: a picture made to remember a dead person with affection. Severn said that it caught a particularly important moment in Keats’s life:
This was the time [Keats] first fell ill & had written the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ [1819] on the morning of my visit to Hampstead. I found him sitting with the two chairs as I have painted him & was struck with the first real symptoms of sadness in Keats so finely expressed in that poem.
I think that Severn’s account of this portrait of his friend also tells us something about how we really think of poets as two people. They are people like us, who feel sad and fall ill. But they are also people who manage to exist posthumously, in a sense — by expressing their feelings in poems.
Consider, for example, the significance of the two chairs in this portrait. Severn tells us that this is how he found Keats reading one morning when he was becoming ill with tuberculosis, a lung disease which causes weakness and weight loss. The literal meaning of these chairs, therefore, is that they are a means of physical support, propping Keats up so that he can sit and read in the morning sunlight rather than in bed.
But I think this glowing, romanticised portrait also invites a symbolic interpretation of its two chairs, and the poet in between them, lost in a book: we are looking at Keats the person as he enters the disembodied world of words where he is Keats the poet. The speaker of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ — a poem about the desire to escape physical suffering through the power of the imagination — wants ‘to leave the world unseen’. And it is this second, invisible person — ‘the speaker’ of Keats’s poem — who we might imagine sitting transparently in that second chair, like a ghost, looking out into the sunlit world that his poems love.