"This Living Hand" by Keats

On the last day of class, we are discussing my favorite poem.Yay Keats! Sorry to be a nerd, but I wanted to upload a paper I wrote on it last semester in case anyone was interested. I know I'll forget to upload it next week so here ya go. See you in class.

“This Living Hand” and Non-Linear Time

            In Keats's short poem, “This Living Hand,” the speaker describes his own hand as it progresses through time. The description is circular, beginning with the moment the hand is writing, to its state after death, to its reincarnation through the act of reading the poem, and then finally back to the present moment in which the hand is thrust before the audience. As a result of this apostrophe, Keats forces the reader to accept the impossible: that a fictional, dead hand is in fact “warm and capable” and held “towards you” (li.1,8). This achievement may be attributed to the duality of the hand. It exists as a physiological state of life and simultaneously as the poem itself. In other words, it is not the hand alone which haunts the reader as a living corpse, but what the hand has created—an immortal text. Furthermore, by juxtaposing the live hand with the dead one, the speaker predicts that he will be able to overcome death by living through his audience. Thus, the rhetorical purpose of the poem is to enable the reader to suspend their own temporal state and accept the existence—however transient—of the hand as living and thrust before them. Once accepted, the reader metaphorically sacrifices herself so that the speaker may live again.

            It should be noted that calling this text a poem is merely one of several interpretations. The actual context of the work is not easily determined because it was found “on a manuscript page of Keats's un-finished drama, 'The Cap and Bells'” and subsequently published in 1898, nearly 80 years after the author's death (Bahti 219). Thus, it remains unclear who the intended audience is. While the piece could exist as spoken verse to another character in a drama, many scholars interpret that it is directly addressed to Keats's partner, Fanny Brawne (Hopkins 37). If the latter interpretation is accepted, then the text may be read as a stand-alone poem. Regardless, each of these possible contexts lends itself to a similar analysis: that the audience is forced to simultaneously accept two temporal states of being. Heather Dubrow more eloquently describes this phenomenon as an “anticipatory amalgam,” in which “a fantasy about a dead hand in the future and an action involving a living hand in the present are merging” (Dubrow 267). The very nature of the text as an indeterminable work does not in any way detract from its overall effect, however. Instead, it becomes even more powerful and poignant, as if written out of time—a work that perpetually defies temporal structure:

            This living hand, now warm and capable

            Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

            And in the icy silence of the tomb,

            So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

            That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood

            So in my veins red life might stream again,

            And thou be conscience-calm’d–see here it is–

            I hold it towards you. (The Poetry Foundation)

           

            The immediacy of the language creates the illusion that the action occurs as the poem is read. Particularly, the pronoun, “this,” which begins the poem, implies that the hand exists in the present moment in front of the reader. “This” is used to distinguish one thing from another and requires some variance of non-verbal communication to indicate what it is identifying. Thus, when the speaker distinguishes his own hand from any other, it is implied that he makes some kind of gesture to the reader (the “you” and addressee of the poem) to identify it. In this way, Keats encourages the reader to visualize the hand (“see, here it is”) in order to accept it as alive in the present moment. Furthermore, the hand is described as “warm” and “capable of earnest grasping” (li 1-2).  This description adds another sense of life to the hand beyond visualization: the sense of touch and feeling. While previously existing only as an image conjured in the reader's mind, the hand now develops into a more tangible entity. Brook Hopkins also adds that “warmth denotes the body's physiological condition, the 'heat of the Blood' that keeps it alive” (Hopkins 35).  In this way, the hand becomes a stand-in or symbol for the speaker's body as a whole. Along with this, it is “capable,” which signifies the body's vitality and purpose of action. All of these words are carefully selected to place the reader in the present moment—the moment in which the speaker lives.

            However, the present moment is consistently shrouded by the Keatsian cloak of impermanence.  The “living hand, now warm and capable” quickly transitions into a “cold” hand in “the icy silence of the tomb” (li. 1-3). In a letter to his younger brother in 1819, Keats reflects on this theme of impermanence:

From the time you left me our friends say I have altered completely—am not the same person...I daresay you have altered also—every man does—our bodies every seven years are completely material’d. Seven years ago it was not this hand that clinched itself against Hammond. (The Project Gutenberg EBook)

The transience of the body's physiological state is a concept that fascinated Keats throughout his life. Just as the body of Keats is rendered anew “every seven years,” the body of the speaker will soon become a corpse underground. Thus, while the reader is forced to accept that a living hand is thrust before her in the present moment, she is simultaneously haunted by its mortality.

            The reader is not only haunted by the speaker's bodily member, but by the poem as well, which exists as an extension of the hand. Similar to the premise of Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn, art—and in this case, poetry specifically—outlives its maker. Although the hand of the speaker will follow him to the grave, his work will remain. This fact is accepted subliminally because the modern reader—by accessing the work 200 years after his death—proves its validity. The speaker holds his living hand before the reader, yet the reader knows that in her own temporal state, the hand is nothing more than decomposed matter. It is the convergence of these two states that haunts the reader, and even makes her aware of her own mortality and impermanence. The immortal poem exists as the speaker's ghost, haunting readers for the rest of their lives and threatening “to make them perpetually aware of the difference between life and death” (Hopkins 36). While in this moment, they are alive and “capable,” they will soon join the speaker underground.

            More than just haunting, however, the speaker predicts that the reader will sacrifice herself in order to bring him back to life and be “conscience-calm'd.” (li. 7). It is as if the juxtaposition between the warmth and vitality of the living hand and the coldness and “silence” (li. 3) of the dead hand is so powerful that the reader is tortured, yet captivated at the same time. The effect of the poem, the way that it blends life and death, is so captivating that the reader wishes her “own heart dry of blood” (li. 5) so that the speaker may live again and become immortal. Metaphorically, this means that readers will keep coming back to the poem and re-reading it. By doing so, the speaker suggests that he is reincarnated through the reader, “as if the poem itself has become the poet's body, something that can be reanimated only through a transfusion of life from the reader” (Culler 68). In this way, the lines of the poem resemble the “veins” (li. 6) of the speaker, which fill up with blood as they are read again and again.

            The poem concludes with the line, “see, here it is—I hold it towards you” (li. 7-8), yet the “it” is left open for interpretation. Is “it” the living hand, the dead hand, the poem itself, or perhaps a combination of all three? The latter interpretation seems to fit best with the work as a whole because it blends together seemingly incompatible states of existence. In the present moment in which the speaker writes, he holds up his living hand. Yet, in the present moment of the reader, the hand is a corpse. Both images of the hand exist simultaneously in the mind of the reader. And it is through the poetry that these images are crafted, through the words on a page which is literally held in front of the reader.

            Although the context of the original work is unknown and the intended audience is indeterminable, “This Living Hand” remains a powerful text. Keats is able to manipulate the language of the poem in such a way that time is no longer linear. While the action takes place in the present tense, the speaker haunts the reader with his inevitable death. Here, the transience of life, which Keats himself was so haunted by during his own lifetime, is thrust upon the reader, forcing her to contemplate her own mortality. This harrowing contemplation, the speaker predicts, will encourage readers in the future to metaphorically sacrifice themselves so that he might live again. Through the act of reading the poem, the speaker is reincarnated in the minds of the readers and thus, as long as the poem exists, he will be immortal. The hand which is thrust before the reader will live again and again.

Works Cited

Bahti, Timothy. "Ambiguity and Indeterminacy: The Juncture." Comparative Literature 38.3             (1986): 209-23. JSTOR. Web. 3 Oct. 2014.

Culler, Jonathan. "Apostrophe." Diacritics 7.4 (1977): 59-69. JSTOR. Web. 3 Oct. 2014.

Dubrow, Heather. "The Interplay of Narrative and Lyric: Competition, Cooperation, and the           Case of the Anticipatory Amalgam." Narrative 14.3 (2006): 254-71. JSTOR. Web. 3              Oct. 2014.

Hopkins, Brooke. "Keats and the Uncanny: “This Living Hand" The Kenyon Review 11.4               (1989): 28-40. JSTOR. Web. 3 Oct. 2014.

Keats, John. "This Living Hand." The Poetry Foundation. Web. 3 Oct. 2014.

            Cambridge, Mass: Belknap of Harvard UP, 1982. Print.

Keats, John. "Letter to George and Georgiana Keats." 17 Sept. 1819. Letters of John Keats to (citation cut off...bah!)