death closes all

With apologies to Wimsatt and Beardsley, Keats's poetic fragment “This living hand” opens best to analysis via consideration of the way it affects the reader. For rather than resulting in vague ruminations and statements, or false generalities about the emotions of the reader, deconstructing what little we have and psychoanalytically understanding Keats's fragment will be able to tell us more about the poem than a mere New Critical analysis ever could. For indeed from the New Critical perspective, there is not much to analyze. Nevertheless, it will prove a useful starting point, a structuralist direction of entry to significant post-structuralist depths. What is missing from our primary analysis will be the point of entry to the second, and that which is absent from both interpretations will be the gateway to the third. So we will begin in our attempt to motivate the concept of the partial poem—I use the word concept very deliberately here, with a nod toward its Latin roots, in the sense of a taking in, creation of something one might hold or grasp with one's hand, con capere—in addition to explicating the methodology involved.

THIS LIVING HAND

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 wouldst 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.

            — John Keats

Keats opens with the image of a hand. It is immediate, it is impersonal. Whose hand is it? We don't know. This is a hand. By not specifying the owner of the hand, Keats dismembers it from the body to which it earlier belonged. It is a strange focus for Keats—why the hand? We will return to this and understand the strangeness his choice imparts, but for now it is best to continue. This warm hand, still capable of conception, of grasping, is quickly supplanted by a cold, dead one, a hand “in the icy silence of the tomb.” Yet this cold hand is the one that reaches out to the living all the more earnestly—its “reach” a mockery of the hand's reach in life, for no longer does the hand stretch out innocently to the living, but the hand haunts the living, haunting every day and extending even to “chill thy dreaming nights.”

In fact, this hand does not simply haunt the living, no—this hand and poetic fragment is more personal than that. The hand haunts you. It haunts you so that you would wish to be dead, if that would only let the hand's owner live again. There is not even any other way you can have a clear conscience. The hand, from beyond the grave, calls you to your grave. See it, here it is, immediate and personal: the speaker holds out his hand towards you. One certainly sympathizes if the reader tries to recoil from the speaker's touch.

You may notice that so far I have not called Keats's lines supposed to have been addressed to Fanny Brawne a poem. It is seven lines of blank verse followed by the half-line “I hold it towards you.” The fragmentary nature of the piece suggests separation; it is like a limb cut off from a tree, a fragment broken off from some unimaginably greater complete poem. The last line breaks the meter, as if to emphasize this. Most poems have more than one “sentence;” this poem only has one, which builds and gathers clauses until it suddenly and abruptly ceases. The poem is like the speaker's hand; perhaps the poem is itself the hand reaching out from the tomb.

How does Keats create this effect of revulsion, how does he affect the reader in this way? By the last half-line the hand protrudes from the universe of the poem, reaching out through a symbolic rupture in the page towards the reader. Perhaps instead of recoiling from the speaker's touch, we should take hold of his hand with a morbid curiosity, and see how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

Can Keats's lines be read as a dream, should they be read as a dream, what do we gain by looking at his lines through Freud's dream-logic? The very nature of this fragment's existence suggests that the answer to our first two questions is yes. John Keats composed these lines in the margins of another work, The Cap and Bells, a sentimental fairy tale he would never finish. Furthermore they are brief and broken, much as a dream is—the living hand presented without introduction, and hand held out in a moment of tension at the end, unresolved—qualities of a dream-world.

Who are the characters of the dream? There are two: the speaker, presumably owner of the hand, and the spoken to, the figure referenced as “thy/thou,” which we shall refer to as the reader. Since either figure is a possible candidate for the dreamer of this poem-dream, we will consider both perspectives, and investigate how the poem can then be seen as the fulfillment of a wish.

From the point of view of the reader (making him the dreamer's character), what is the wish-fulfillment? Perhaps we can read the fragment as follows: the hand presented to the reader—the thing you are supposed to “see,” for “here it is”—is really the living hand of the first line, an interruption of the wandering thought of the previous lines. The speaker was wondering what it would be like if that good living hand were now cold and lost—but at the end the speaker stops his reverie and in comfort, to calm the reader, extends forth his still-living hand. But then why does the last line have its unsettling effect? That is because of the other possibility, whether we are consciously aware of both or not: perhaps this hand extended to us runs with “red life” only because we wished our hearts “dry of blood.” The reader is dead but our wish is fulfilled: the living hand has been restored. But now should not the reader doubt his existence?

The alternate choice of characters is to make the speaker the dreamer. In this case the wish-fulfillment is less obvious, but the structure of the lines assist us here. This poetic fragment is not a question, it is a statement: the speaker's hand will haunt the reader's days. But it is also not fact, which gives it multiple dreamlike qualia. Keats did not say the hand “might...so haunt thy days..,” he said “would...so haunt thy days...” That is the wish. The speaker wishes to be remembered by the reader, to be remembered and wanted by someone who would rather die than have let the speaker die. The performative act of reading the fragment fulfills the speaker's wish by making someone take the place of the reader. With even a single reader, the speaker's wish to not die, to have someone die instead of himself, is fulfilled. The speaker to the reader: “you will eventually die, but thank you, I will die no longer, for by fulfilling your purpose, you have given me new life.” Or: “I will die no longer because you have read me.”

If those desires are the focus of the dream-poem, why the focus on the image of hands, why the specific displacement? This point is especially crucial because of the seeming dependence of the odd power of Keats's lines on that disembodied image. His work would not have the same “strangeness” if he had written about this “living foot” or “living neck” instead. Keats chose to write about what he used to write those very lines: his living hand. He separated that external human part which most positively make humans active rather than passive beings. The hand extended in the poem is familiar, we all have a hand: but it is strange, it is weird, because we know not what realm it reaches from, deathly pale or otherwise. And perhaps the strangeness is entirely due to the fact that we do not know, that there exists an essential ambiguity.

Likewise, it does not matter who the reader and the speaker are, which is which: for both are one. In grasping the hand the speaker offers, the reader identifies his hand and joins it with the speaker's—a marriage of the dual identities. It is some perverse inversion of Lacan's mirror stage, the reader identifying in the speaker an image of what is to come, to come at the end. Instead of being a fragmented body who looks into the mirror and sees a premonition of a future self, an I, by the very fact that the reader is an I the reader must see reflected in Keats's poem dismembered limbs, a floating hand. You the reader look into the mirror—see here it is—your future of inevitable death.