But I digress....And so it was, that after a good scratch of the Stoned Holy Nut-Sac and thereafter savouring the Silky & Satisfying Feel & Taste of the Parritch which I had lovingly stirred with my trusty Spurtle, that I, your very own SToNEdholYbLOGGer, issued forth into the Unsullied Hours of the Morning ; Ready, if not quite willing, to drop to my knees and take yet another shafting from those Hard Task Masters - The Fates!..& all this, Gentle Readers, to garner a few kopeks to spend on Necessities & Garbage alike... Whatever idlesome thoughts as were ambling their Devil-May-Care way through the blancmange-like folds of the Stoned Holy Brain Packet, were quickly shooed away when I noticed that the Pastures & Paddocks which girdle Stoned Holy HQ were frosted in silver and the Sweet Recalled Aromas of Approaching Winter had circulated up the Stoned Holy Hooter!!
Ah, Autumn : Season of Mists & Mellow Fruitfulness. Close Bosom Friend of the Maturing Sun. Conspiring with him how to Load & Bless with Fruit the Vines that Round the Thatch-Eaves Run! Ah, poor John Keats : Coughing up blood & thrashing in his T.B Sheets by the Spanish Steps.....and now it seems, as I have read in the pages of the local periodical, not the Skulking, Emaciated, Doom-Laden Youth we'd previously been given to believe, but an Opium Addict "Drows'd with the Fumes of Poppies"! Does it matter if "Ode on Indolence" was written whilst the Peely-Wally Poet was off his face on Laudanum and scribbling feverishly? In the sense of it somehow diminishing his Artistry, the answer must be an emphatic NO! However, if it helps us imagine Keats as a fleshly creature of Needs n Wants n Weaknesses n Contradictions, YES!....... I for one would like to think Keats drew some pleasures from this world before leaving it. Is it an idle fancy of myself alone that the 'Bright Star', Fanny Brawne, got a good bloody seein-to before Keats' oh too perfect Peggin-Out in Rome!?!? (I may expand this notion into an Erotic Vignette for Modern Interpretive Dance entitled 'Keats & Teats'!!....watch this space!)
But how can the days have been, Scrapin'-for-Ha'pennies, for a Stoned Holy Rollin' John Keats and his Melting Flesh?! If No Man Chooses the Bed he's Born In, it must be noted also that the Age whereupon his life is played out against is not to his choosing either - Thus it was that Poor John got a time when Britain was distancing itself from the Bawdiness & Licentiousness of the 18th Century. A time when the Educated Classes were obsessively diferentiating themselves from The Riff-Raff & The Mob & the The Great Unwashed. I ask you, Good Readers, how was a Penniless Poet ever gonna get to 'dance beneath the Diamond Skies with one hand waving free' in a Codified and Mannered Society dominated by notions of Propriety & Respectability? Is it any wonder then that as Britain moved towards the stultifying repression and joyless Puritanism of the Victorian Era that Keats had recourse to reach for the Tincture of Opium!? Who amongst us would begrudge the Poet a few hours of escape, if not escapism, into Laudanum fuelled reveries?.....or, perchance as he himself put it, "For Poesy, No, She has not a Joy, at Least for Me, so Sweet as Drowsy Noons & Evenings Steeped in Honied Indolence ; O, for an Age so Shelter'd from Annoy that I may Never Know how Change the Moons or Hear the Voice of Busy Common Sense!"
....but this is 2012 and Laudanum is unavailable over the counter at yir local dispensary....Bargain Booze however, next door, is open for business and happy to supply 'Broken Britain' with cheap, mind-numbing concoctions to dull the senses and nullify the pain...if yiv no' awready blown yir Giro doon at the Bookies, that is!!! Far better methinks to look at the Autumn Skies above the Housing Estate with its boarded up windows and its row of grafitti splattered fast-food outlets and think of Lost John "While Barred Clouds Bloom the Soft, Dying Day & Touch the Stubble Plains with Rosy Hue"!!
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| ROCK ON, BEAUTIFUL JOHN!! |
