object:1.jk - Written In The Cottage Where Burns Was Born
author class:John Keats
book class:Keats - Poems
subject class:Poetry
class:chapter
This mortal body of a thousand days
Now fills, O Burns, a space in thine own room,
Where thou didst dream alone on budded bays,
Happy and thoughtless of thy day of doom!
My pulse is warm with thine old barley-bree,
My head is light with pledging a great soul,
My eyes are wandering, and I cannot see,
Fancy is dead and drunken at its goal;
Yet can I stamp my foot upon thy floor,
Yet can I ope thy window-sash to find
The meadow thou hast tramped o'er and o'er,--
Yet can I think of thee till thought is blind,--
Yet can I gulp a bumper to thy name,--
O smile among the shades, for this is fame!
'In giving this sonnet in the Life, Letters &c. next to that on Visiting the Tomb of Burns, Lord Houghton recorded that it was written "in the whisky-shop into which the cottage where Burns was born was converted." The date however is not the same as that of the other, as the travellers made the detour to the coast and across to Ireland, before coming to Burns' birthplace. The following extract from a letter of Keats's accompanies the sonnet in the Life: --
"The 'bonnie Doon' is the sweetest river I ever saw -- overhung with fine trees as far as we could see. We stood some time on the 'brig' o'er which Tam o' Shanter fled -- we took a pinch of snuff on the key stone -- then we proceeed to the auld Kirk of Alloway. Then we went to the cottage in which Burns was born; there was a board to that effect by the door's side; it had the same effect as the same sort of memorial at Stratford-upon-Avon. We drank some toddy to Burns's memory with an old man who knew him. There was something good in his description of Burns's melancholy the last time he saw him. I was determined to write a sonnet in the cottage: I did, but it was so bad I cannot venture it here."
Lord Houghton gave this as from a letter to Haydon; it is really an edited extract from a letter to Tom Keats which happens to have been pasted into Haydon's journal. On the 11th of July, at Maybole, Keats began a letter to Reynolds, the whole of which is very interesting; but the following passage is, in this connexion, peculiarly so: --
"I begin a letter to you because I am approaching Burns's cottage very fast. We have made continual enquiries from the time we left his tomb at Dumfries. His name, of course, is known all about: his great reputation among the plodding people is, 'that he wrote a good mony sensible things.' One of the pleasantest ways of annulling self is approaching such a shrine as the Cottage of Burns: we need not think of his misery -- that is all gone, bad luck to it! I shall look upon it hereafter with unmixed pleasure, as I do on my Stratford-upon-Avon day with Bailey. I shall fill this sheet for you in the Bardie's country, going no further than this, till I get to the town of Ayr, which will be a nine miles walk to tea."'
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