Paul Schleifer

February 23 2018

Word of the Day: vacillate

Vacillate: 1. to waver in mind or opinion; be indecisive or irresolute; 2. to sway unsteadily; waver; totter; stagger; 3. to oscillate or fluctuate. I think the first definition defines the way we use the word most often about people. The second definition, which seems to regard a person’s physicality, is less frequent. And the third definition defines the word as we use it about inanimate objects, I think. And yet the second definition is the one that appears in English first, in the 1590s. The first definition first appears in the 1620s.

It comes from Latin vacillatus, past participle of vacillare “sway to and fro; hesitate,” according to etymonline.com. The Latin word also has the sense, or the connotation, of “untrustworthy.”

February 23 is the day we commemorate the death of John Keats, the English Romantic poet who died at the age of 25.

Keats was born to a working-class couple, the oldest of four. He was able to go to school, but not to the really good schools. His father died when Keats was just eight, and his mother remarried, badly, almost immediately. His mother then died of tuberculosis when Keats was fourteen, and Keats was in the care of his grandmother. Later the same year, he was apprenticed to a surgeon and apothecary named Thomas Hammond, with whom he stayed for about 5 years. He enrolled at Guy’s Hospital as a student, but his ambition to write poetry led him away from a medical career. He had two bequests available to him, one from a grandfather and one from his mother, but he was unaware of these because the family lawyer did not say anything.

He made several influential friends, including Leigh Hunt, who helped his career along. He, along with his brothers George and Tom, moved from London to Hampstead, where John and George nursed Tom during his fight with tuberculosis. In June of 1818, George and his wife left England for America, where they lived until their deaths, of tuberculosis, until 1841. John continued to care for Tom until Tom’s death in December of 1818.

In the winter of 1818-19, Keats moved into Wentworth Place in Hampstead. He heard a lecture by William Hazlitt about poetry and poets, and he was inspired by meeting William Wordsworth. In the fall of 1818, he had met Fanny Brawne, and in April of 1819 she and her mother moved near Wentworth; the relationship, the love between the two, flourished. However, Keats knew that, as a struggling poet, he could never marry Fanny.

But 1819 saw Keats produce some of the greatest poetry ever written. The time is referred to by scholars as Keats’s annus mirabilis, his wonderful year. During this wonderful year Keats wrote five of his six great odes: “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to Psyche,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on Melancholy,” and “Ode on Indolence.” In addition, he wrote “The Eve of St. Agnes” and “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” among other works.

In 1820, having been diagnosed with the same disease that had killed his mother and brother, and which would later kill his other brother and his sister-in-law, Keats was advised to leave England for Italy, for his health. He had medical care from two friends in Rome, care which probably brought on his death more quickly. And in the spring of 1821, he died and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. On his tombstone were engraved these words:

This Grave / contains all that was Mortal / of a / Young English Poet / Who / on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart / at the Malicious Power of his Enemies / Desired / these Words to be / engraven on his Tomb Stone: / Here lies One / Whose Name was writ in Water. 24 February 1821

Ode to a Nightingale

BY JOHN KEATS

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves;
And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

Can you sense the vacillation in his mind?

The image is the Portrait of John Keats by William Hilton. It can be found in the National Portrait Gallery, London.