ESC: English Studies in Canada

F O O D , S E X , D E A T H , A N D T H E F E M I N I N E P R I N C I P L E I N K E A T S ’ S P O E T R Y H ELEN B. E LLIS University of Waterloo I n his perceptive discussion of Keats’s letters, Lionel Trilling notes the pervasiveness of ingestive imagery used by Keats, and also the ambivalence many readers feel toward such imagery: It is surely possible to understand what led Yeats to speak of Keats as a boy with his face pressed to the window of a sweetshop. The mild and not unsympathetic derogation of Yeats’s image suggests something of the reason for the negative part of our ambivalence towards eating and drinking. The ingestive appetite is the most primitive of our appetites, the sole appetite of our infant state, and a preoccupation with it, an excessive emphasis upon it, is felt — and not without some reason — to imply the passivity and self-reference of the infantile condition. Keats, Trilling continues, was not afraid of the passiveness of infancy; indeed, he took his ideal of felicity from the cozy warmth he associated with food. And as Keats matured, “the luxury of food is connected with, and in a sense gives place to the luxury of sexuality.” The most famous example of this association in Keats’s poetry is in the luxurious feast spread in Madeline’s bedroom, where warmth, security, and sexuality “are made to glow into an island of bliss with the ultimate dramatic purpose of making fully apparent the cold surrounding darkness; it is the moment of life in the infinitude of not-being.” 1 Trilling thus clearly enunciates some of the basic associations to be found in Keats’s poetry between sex, food, women, and death. In poem after poem, and in his letters as well, feasting and sexuality are closely equated, so much so that eating and drinking become persistent metaphors for the hero’s rela­ tionship to his mistress. But the association is also more “infantile” than most readers of Keats have recognized, for often the relationship of lover and mistress is that of infant child and nurturing mother. The maternal mistress, moreover, is not always nurturing; she can be destructive as well, and deprive her lover/child of food and life as capriciously as she has given them in the first instance. Sexuality, food, and the mistress thus become associated with E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C anada, vi, i , Spring 1980 death. In all of these representations, Keats is drawing upon both a personal association of luxurious sensations with death, “Now more than ever seems it rich to die,” 2 and both classical and Celtic myth, in which the pursuit and winning of the non-mortal lady by the mortal man results in death or life-indeath . This paper explores the various manifestations of these relationships in Keats’s poetry. For Keats, the “feminine principle” came to involve death as well as life, and as he explored the implications of this principle, he gained an ever-deepening understanding of its terror and its rewards. The two most obvious feasts provided by the lover are that given to the knight in “La Belle Dame sans M erci” — “roots of relish sweet, / And honey wild, and manna dew” ; and the rich feast Porphyro spreads for Madeline in “The Eve of St. Agnes.” In “La Belle Dame sans Merci” the sharing of food is a traditional element in the Celtic legends upon which Keats based his poem,3 but no such tradition lies behind Porphyro’s feast; it is an addition by Keats to the legend.4 This change in the legend is thus clear evidence for Keats’s personal association of food with sexuality, and such feasts are to be found everywhere in his poetry, not just in these two obvious examples. In this context, even such conventional gatherings as the marriage feasts spread by Lamia for Lycius’s friends (n. 173-90) and that for Endymion and Cynthia in Book...