by Neal Whitman, Poetry Prof
“Take a chance,” implores
the lotto ticket seller,
“create luck with faith.”
Numerology is a belief in the relationship between numbers and the lives we lead. Numerology is to Mathematics as Astrology is to Astronomy. I am an Aries so, of course we do not believe in such things. But, on the 19th of this month, I plan to buy a California lottery ticket with the numbers 9191819. It was on September 19, 1819, that John Keats went on a walk and wrote what some believe to be a perfect poem, if there could possibly be such a thing: “To Autumn”
I do not encourage gambling. But, might I invite you to go on a walk that day? I plan to walk and to begin a new poem that evening. Here is what I plan to do to get ready to write:
• Take a hot bath.
• Dress in pressed black jeans and a white shirt, both freshly laundered at the dry cleaner.
• Peel and slice an apple
• Pour a glass of red wine, in my case a Napa Cabernet Sauvignon –– when Robert Louis Stevenson honeymooned in Napa Valley in the summer of 1880, he wrote, “Wine is bottled poetry.”
• Uncap my Waterman fountain pen.
• Open up my Moleskine notebook and let’s see what flows.
This ritual will be inspired by John Keats who indeed did prepare to write poetry by taking a bath, dressing in his best clothes, and setting sliced apple and red wine on his desk. It was then he felt ready to dip his pen in an ink pot and begin to write.
John Keats was true to his writing habits when he sat down to write “To Autumn,” the last of his six odes. The previous ones were written in May of 1819. But, he wrote this one on September 19, two days before the autumnal equinox. Keats traveled to Winchester on September 15, and, as soon as he settled in his lodgings, took up all his old habits, including walking by day and writing by late afternoon and early evening. Getting dressed to write was a key element in his routine:
I rouse myself, wash and put on a clean shirt, brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoestrings neatly and in fact adornize as if I were going out — then all clean and comfortable I sit down to write.
Winchester is the county seat of Hampshire in South East England. Its best known landmarks are a statue of Alfred the Great, the 9th century King of Wessex, and Winchester Cathedral, one of the largest cathedrals in Europe. The town was fictionalized as Wintoncester in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles and, in part, as Barchester in the Barsetshire novels of Anthony Trollope. Jane Austen spent her last six months in Winchester where she died on July 18, 1817. Today a visitor can follow the footsteps of Keats, walking up St. Giles Hill for a view ovelooking the city and onto footpaths along Weirs Walk, the river that meanders through the countryside. For those of us traveling via imagination, we can “see” …
… barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
and touch the stubble-plains in rosy-hue
This is what Keats saw and then put to pen at the end of the day. What will I see on my walk this day? What will you see? Out two days before the fall equinox, perhaps we will experience the essence of this season: Keats’ “season of mists and mellow fruitfullness,” a season Immanuel Kant had described as sublime, not beautiful. In the fields outside Winchester, Keats imagined Autumn as lazy as the gleaner asleep on a half-reaped furrow, the haying not yet over.
Where you live, and I hope out walking on September 19, is the summer falling slowly into a more quiet season? Summer had its bursts, Winter soon its blasts. Autumn offers burrs, those seeds with hooks that return home with you. When you change clothing for the evening (and perhaps to write a poem), will you need to brush off these pesky passengers as Keats likely did?
marigold, ragweed, enchanters’s nightshade, goosegrass, stickseed, cicely, burdock
All seasonal burrs. Prickly. The stuff of poetry, eh?
Listen:Â To Autumn by John Keats