5. ‘Footing slow across a silent plain’: Time and Walking in Keatsian Poetics

Oriane Monthéard

Critics have extensively analysed Keats’s work from the perspective of historical time, often by considering his integration into the cultural and literary community of his time. Yet his perception of time may also be envisioned through his experience of walking and travelling. Indeed, his summer 1818 walking tour in Scotland, that had social and literary implications and then created a specific relation to time, may be viewed as an opportunity for the poet to better adjust to temporality. In undertaking his tour, and as recorded in his letters, Keats first sought to break away from the constraints of the ordinary measurement of time. But roaming the Highlands also led him to take up the recently established habit of picturesque tourism and to relate both to a literary past and to more contemporary voices: following the tracks of other poets meant revisiting the landscape and experiencing a fictionalised temporality. Finally, Keats’s poems and letters relate the physical act of walking and the experience of immediacy it entails. In several poems, feet and steps stage the contact between the poet’s body and the ground loaded with memory. Thus, walking was for Keats a means to experience the past and to bridge past and present voices, which redefined his inscription in his own time.

Critics have extensively analysed John Keats’s work from the perspective of temporality to discuss how his attitude towards historical time and periodicity shaped his writing. Among other things, the poet’s sometimes uneasy relationship with his time, his struggle with feelings of social and temporal inadequacy have been pointed out, first through his attempts to be fully integrated into the early nineteenth-century cultural and literary community, but also because of his wish to address a potentially more receptive posthumous audience, as Andrew Bennett has argued.¹ Read as out-of-step in its time, his work brought about a sense of inappropriateness, or, in more positive terms, displayed an ability to be disruptive. Finally, towards the end of his life, the awareness of his impending death inevitably darkened Keats’s vision of temporal cycles. His poetic constructions of temporality somehow echo these issues, as, for instance, his efforts to historicise his own career in narratives of progress and expectation, or his strategies to disturb the course of poetic time by working against narrative progression in his long poems.

But Keats’s perception of time may also be appraised from another angle, narrower and yet revealing—namely his practice and his representation of walking and touring. In several poems, the role of walking or wandering is either structural or metaphorical: Endymion is the hero who surveys the world, gets lost and wastes his time chasing a goddess across nature, in a poem that extends narrative time in a never-ending digressive process. In a famous passage, The Fall of Hyperion’s speaker strives ‘to gain the lowest steps’ (l. 129) of the temple he is urged to reach in ‘a slow, heavy, deadly’ pace (l. 130). In these poems—and others—walking enacts the process of a quest, which may be measured out in narrative time and rhythm. Now Keats’s 1818 expedition in the North of England and Scotland from 22 June to 8 August casts another light on the subject. Keats’s letters, as a primary source, provide us with a very valuable, almost day-to-day testimony of the tour, and they also account for the writing experience of the walk. Along with the speculations on various subjects, the ‘descriptive sketches’ and the factual details of the walk—recording climate variations, distances and encounters—give evidence of the poet’s vision of the landscape and of his aesthetic emotions, in the form of an impressionistic, stylistically heterogeneous and often humorous logbook. A few poems written during the tour or shortly after were clearly derived from both the travel itself and its epistolary account.

Roaming the Highlands with his friend Charles Brown led Keats, as a poet and a letter writer, to reflect on his own relationship to time and space, as progression and rhythm were imposed by alternating motion, pauses, contemplation, and reflection. For any walker in the nineteenth century, touring was also endowed with social, cultural and literary implications that created a strong relationship to tradition. Thus, Keats’s involvement in this activity may be viewed as an attempt to experience temporality differently, if not to better adjust to it. Walking in his letters and in some of his poems is indeed represented as a reconciling attitude, as a physical and intellectual act connecting literature and life, the body and the landscape, past voices and present perception. In this chapter, I would like to explore how the emotional, intellectual and physical dimension of the walk affected Keats’s perception and representation of temporality. My intent is to show how Keats’s approach to the tour led him to redefine the writing ‘I’ and forge a poetic and epistolary ‘walking subject’ involved in a specific temporality. To do so I will draw on the letters and on several poems, as well as on the values associated with walking in general and more particularly in the nineteenth century. I will first analyse how Keats’s tour led him to step out of social and historical temporality, then I will focus on walking as an attempt to return to literary paths, and I will conclude on the role of the walking body as a temporal medium.

From Historical Time to Poetic Temporality

For Keats, the tour provided the perfect conditions to turn away from historical time and to perceive time more subjectively, as contemplation threw him into a suspended temporality that affected his sense of duration. In the first letter of the tour addressed to his brother Tom, Keats introduces his trip as a marginal episode and makes it clear that the first day of the tour ushers in a temporal parenthesis: ‘Here beginneth my journal, this Thursday, the 25th of June, Anno Domini 1818’.² Though the formality of the statement may serve humorous purposes, there is also something stylistically solemn about this epistolary introduction, announcing both the beginning of the journey (even though it actually started on 22 June) and the outset of its epistolary translation. As such, it points to Keats’s need to single out the moment in his own personal timeline. Keats’s experience of departing as a temporal disruption is soon confirmed, when he contemplates the lake and the mountains of Winander and is struck by the beauty of the place: ‘I merely put pro forma, for there is no such thing as time and space, which by the way came forcibly upon me on seeing for the first hour the Lake and Mountains of Winander’.³ While Keats fails to elaborate his thought here, the declaration nevertheless reveals how, in his mind, contemplation leads the observer to break away from an ordinary perception of temporality and to ponder on the very idea of time and space. To the young poet, the exceptional character of the walk and the temporary isolation from society it entailed would give him the chance to focus on his own perception of time in its relation to space and motion.

In addition, Keats was aware that his tour was opposed to ordinary walking in the sense that it turned a mundane act and a prosaic use of the body into a meaningful practice to which values and purposes may be attached. Keats’s discourse on the journey to come, inevitably inscribed in the temporality of prediction, reveals high expectations; much more than providing temporary relief from society, his walk was to be the starting point of an authentic poet’s life:

I purpose within a Month to put my knapsack at my back and make a pedestrian tour through the North of England, and part of Scotland—to make a sort of Prologue to the Life I intend to pursue—that is to write, to study and to see all Europe at the lowest expence [sic]. I will clamber through the Clouds and exist. I will get such an accumulation of stupendous recollolections [sic] that as I walk through the suburbs of London I may not see them—I will stand upon Mount Blanc and remember this coming summer when I intend to straddle ben Lomond—with my Soul!⁴

The disruptive quality of the moment to come is then expressed in a distorted perception of temporality that superimposes anticipation and remembrance: to Keats, the tour was sure to feed his imaginative mind with overwhelming memories that might ‘surpass’—a verb which is repeatedly used in his travel letters—any future vision. And the vividness of the memories would be such that they were to erase present experience and operate an alteration of temporal perception resulting in a form of time confusion.

Fig. 1 Francis Towne, Windermere at Sunset (1786). Watercolor and brown ink over graphite on medium moderately textured cream laid paper, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1975.4.1759. Public domain.

Keats’s first aesthetic emotions during the tour also seem to prevail over the unfolding of events, as they go together with a leap into timelessness. In the first letter of the tour, Keats explains how his perception of nature disturbs temporal vision: the contemplative mode and the aesthetic emotion it generates reshape his apprehension of time and urge him to inscribe temporality into the environment. When admiring Lake Windermere, the intensity of the vision (to borrow from the notion Keats discussed a few months earlier), as the poet soon realises, is aroused from the sense of eternity that the observer may feel:

[The] two views we have had of [the lake] are of the most noble tenderness—they can never fade away—they make one forget the divisions of life; age, youth, poverty and riches; and refine one’s sensual vision into a sort of north star which can never cease to be open lidded and stedfast over the wonders of the great Power.⁵

In Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel, Robin Jarvis shows that touring ‘brings a readjusted sense of proportion between humanity and the wider natural environment’.⁶ As Keats seemingly expresses here, this rearranged perception in terms of proportion rather applies to time.⁷ To him, as the walker becomes aware of the persistence of natural elements, he may put into perspective the human lifespan and the notion of permanence: mountains, rocks and the horizon have no age and their stability is equated to an eternal presence, which is also suggested in the sonnet addressed to Ailsa Rock, in which the mountain’s life is said to be ‘but two dead eternities’ (l. 10). In another famous passage from the same letter, Keats analyses how the beauty of the Ambleside waterfall acts on him. Here again the sublimity of the vision is expressed in temporal terms, as it seems to prevent the process of both anticipation and memory. This ecstatic moment may exist only in the distorted temporality of a stretched and suspended present, the pure present of perception, during which the spiritual character of the emotion is transposed to the perceived objects. The contemplative mode induced by the walk takes the observer to a poetic temporality in which the experience of the sublime seems to freeze images in time:

What astonishes me more than any thing is the tone, the coloring, the slate, the stone, the moss, the rock-weed; or, if I may so say, the intellect, the countenance of such places. The space, the magnitude of mountains and waterfalls are well imagined before one sees them; but this countenance or intellectual tone must surpass every imagination and defy any remembrance.⁸

As the transformation process described here is akin to the poetic process Keats discusses later in the same letter,⁹ perception explicitly becomes both a poetic and temporal experience, and the temporality of the walk, as worded in these passages, reproduces poetic temporality.

Finally, touring meant freedom from an ordinary measurement of time: wandering freely, as Wordsworth claimed to do, meant choosing and inventing the schedule, the rhythm and conditions of the walk. Improvisation was also part of Keats’s tour, as any tour, not to mention the possibility of losing one’s path—which happened to him from time to time. For Keats, wasting time by digressing from the planned itinerary could turn out to be a sought-for temporal and contemplative experience, not unlike his indulging in the idea of ‘productive leisure’, such as the unnecessary but fertile time of intellectual indolence that eventually stimulates imagination: ‘We, I may say, fortunately missed the direct path, and after wandering a little, found out [the water fall] by the noise—for, mark you, it is buried in trees, in the bottom of the valley—[…]’.¹⁰

Fig. 2 Thomas Hearne, View from Skiddaw over Derwentwater (between 1772 and 1782). Watercolor and graphite on moderately thick, slightly textured, cream wove paper mounted on moderately thick, slightly textured, cream laid paper, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1977.14.4685. Public domain.

Of course, a tour in the nineteenth century was not devoid of constraints and did submit walkers to logistical difficulties related to the arrangement of the travel. It can’t be denied that Keats devotes a large part of his account to organisational issues, and as he keeps complaining of tiredness or of the monotony of the Scottish meals, he presents the travel as a form of voluntary servitude. Yet, this servitude was chosen and worked out of the social regulation of time founded on obligation. To Robin Jarvis, the first Romantic travellers’ tours were ‘a clear assertion of autonomy: they travelled in a way they did not have to and in a way they could not be suspected of having to adopt from necessity’.¹¹ This was probably true for Keats and Brown.

Beside independence from necessity, what Keats and his contemporary walkers might have longed for was the opportunity to reinvent one’s self and thus to experience ‘freedom […] from a culturally defined and circumscribed self’,¹² an idea which may be found in Keats’s words when he anticipates the tour, and states: ‘I will clamber through the Clouds and exist’.¹³ By connecting touring to a deeper, richer and more authentic mode of being, Keats’s vision recalls Hazlitt’s declaration in ‘On going in a Journey’, which discusses how a pedestrian traveller tends to ‘lose [his] importunate, tormenting, everlasting personal identity, and become a creature of the moment, clear of all ties’.¹⁴ Hazlitt’s argument is that freedom in walking opens up the prospect of losing one’s identity, because the walking self, focused both on the aesthetic perception of the environment and on the needs of the body, which are submitted to a cyclical temporal pattern, differs from the social self and has no historical mooring. These reflections recall Keats’s experience and the way he accounts for it in his epistolary narrative, insofar as the walking and writing ‘I’ that emerges, letter after letter, defines a very subjective relationship to time. In A Philosophy of Walking, Frédéric Gros goes even further and asserts that ‘[b]y walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history. […] The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no history, it is just an eddy in the stream of immemorial life’¹⁵. While the statement sounds very close to Keats’s notion of the poetic subject that has no identity and thus no inscription in historical time, it also confirms the idea that the tour probably created the perfect conditions for Keats to see the world poetically. Yet, if a tour offered him the possibility of slamming the world’s door, he also chose to walk on existing poetic paths.

Returning to Poetic Nature: Walking in a Fictionalised Landscape

By walking on well-trodden paths and in the invisible footsteps of other walkers before him, Keats’s experience in his tour was coloured by his pre-conceived ideas and his literary representations of touring and the landscape, turning what should have been a discovery into a metaphorical return. To follow the tracks of learned tourists, radical walkers or pedestrian poets was a way for him to assert his belonging to that community of the past and of the present,¹⁶ and thus to better inscribe himself into the cultural history of touring. Keats was certainly not a conqueror of virgin territory and sought instead to imitate other tours, notably the Lake District tours. Scotland was another usual destination, associated with foreignness and picturesque sceneries that naturally attracted the young poet.¹⁷ For second-generation Romantics, undertaking a tour was a way to embrace a recently established habit that had emerged at the end of the eighteenth century. Experiencing the landscape had indeed become a cultural, social and possibly political experience, and then a necessary component of education, as the perception and practice of hiking had shifted from a lower-class and ordinary event to a culturally privileged upper-class activity providing intellectual pleasure and aesthetic emotions. There was also, especially for the first-generation Romantics, a transgressive dimension to the temporary self-exclusion from society involved in touring. This evolution in the significance of touring certainly shaped Keats’s vision of his tour, even though the value he pre-ascribed to his travel was also that of a didactic experience to be drawn from contemplation and encounters with local folklore.¹⁸

Yet his enterprise was not only about social and cultural inclusion, it was also a literary time travel, by which fictional temporality was superimposed on the present temporality of perceiving and walking. For Keats, a tour necessarily had literary implications, since in the touring tradition the emotions of contemplation were acknowledged as deeply related to poetic production and writing in general. As mentioned before, Keats had anticipated his tour before setting out on his journey, and the epistolary narrative confirms it is about validating—or not—his expectations on the landscape. This landscape he wandered in was then a literary one that had been aestheticised by literary representation and that, to him, bore the signs of literary concepts such as the sublime and the gothic—even though, as several epistolary passages and parodic poems indicate, Keats also mocked the Romantic posture of the poet who marvels at the sublimity of nature. Moreover, just as his epistolary writing often expresses facts of his everyday life using quotations from various authors, he probably had in mind the models of canonical literature of the epic, the pastoral and travel literature, of which his tour may be seen as a form of fulfilment, and his letters an autobiographical transposition.¹⁹ Mr Abbey, the Keats family trustee, compared Brown and Keats to Don Quixotes, a remark that Keats gladly reported in one of his letters, as it matched his vision of the tour as a literary itinerary.²⁰

Fig. 3 Thomas Hearne, The Ruins of the College of Lincluden, near Dumfries (ca. 1806). Gray wash over graphite on moderately thick, moderately textured, cream laid paper, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1975.4.509. Public domain.

If walking linked him to the literary tradition of the wandering poet looking for inspiration in natural beauty, it more particularly referred to the Lake poets and their walking practice. Landscapes that other walkers and poets had already seen, described or represented, and that therefore Keats had already imagined, determined the fictional temporal mode of his tour, which was not only about visiting the countryside, but also paradoxically about revisiting it. From this perspective, Keats’s tour was about reading the traces and imprints of other poets as they were inscribed in the landscape by the observer’s interpretation. Wordsworth’s image, first, haunts his epistolary account, especially at the beginning of the trip, as he walked across the land of his poetry. Not that Wordsworth’s and Keats’s walking practices may really be compared: while Wordsworth was an avid walker, who invented walking and mountain-climbing as a poetic attitude, Keats’s tour was an exceptional moment in his life. However, the way Wordsworth perceived and used the landscape surely inspired Keats and accompanied him in his own excursion. As Keats marvelled at the landscape which he knew had been observed by Wordsworth before him, he tried to share his vision of the landscape. After all, as Keats wrote to Reynolds on 3 May 1818, a few weeks before the tour, ‘we read fine—things but never feel them to thee [sic] full until we have gone the same steps as the Author’,²¹ a metaphor that was then turned into real experience.

Though Keats’s plan of meeting Wordsworth during the tour was not fulfilled,²² another encounter took place, as Keats walked in his steps, which generated a process of identification through perception. Keats clearly endeavours to see through Wordsworth’s eyes when he imagines the viewpoint he must have had from one of his windows: ‘Wordsworth’s house is situated just on the rise of the foot of mount Rydall, his parlor window looks directly down Winandermere’.²³ Several times, perception seems to be guided by the memory of Wordsworth’s poetry, as the presence of his texts is deciphered by Keats in the landscape: when he admires the Windermere lake, and writes that the two views of the place ‘refine one’s sensual vision into a sort of north star that can never cease to be open lidded and stedfast’,²⁴ the poetic representation is reminiscent of The Excursion²⁵ and the immediacy of perception is blended with the memory of the text. In a letter to George and Georgiana Keats, the process of reading Wordsworth’s text in the landscape is even more explicit, with a quotation from ‘To Joanna’: ‘I have seen Kirkstone, Loughrigg and Silver How—and discovered without a hint ‘that ancient woman seated on Helm Craig’.²⁶ Brown expresses the same idea in his journal: ‘Mr. Wordsworth formerly had a house there. His line—“That ancient woman seated on Helm Craig” was brought to remembrance as the object itself came in sight’.²⁷ Thus, Keats turns his walk into enacted reading, involving the subject in space both intellectually and physically and bringing his own temporality into collision with that of Wordsworth’s poems.

Fig. 4 Unknown artist, Burns’s Mausoleum at Dumfries (with text); page 52 (Volume One), Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1974.12.860. Public domain.

In the case of Burns, to whose image and legacy Keats turns shortly after, the tour almost becomes a remembrance tour. The presence of Burns in Keats’s trip, in his letters and in the sonnet paying tribute to him, takes the form of a pilgrimage, in which places of memory are not viewed in a collective sense, but from a very individual perspective, since visiting the places associated with the poet deeply affects the subject: ‘One of the pleasantest means of annulling self is approaching such a shrine as the Cottage of Burns—we need not think of his misery—that is all gone—bad luck to it’.²⁸ The statement may be related to Keats’s tendency to empathy and identification with the objects he perceives. Regarding Burns, it is also a form of ‘temporal empathy’, as suggested in the sonnet ‘On Visiting the Tomb of Burns’, which stages a poetic subject whose present is already taken to the past, since discovering the place is depicted as both a present experience and a recollection: ‘as in a dream I dreamed long ago’, on lines 3 and 4, may even include a sense of déjà vu.

Keats’s emotional, temporal and literary experience when visiting Burns’s tomb and other places related to him calls to mind passages from Dorothy Wordsworth’s account in her Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, in which she documents her emotions and those of her travelling companions when exploring the same places fifteen years before Keats. Keats’s disillusionment when he discovered Burns’s poor living conditions, which he expressed in ‘His Misery is a dead weight upon the nimbleness of one’s quill’,²⁹ recalls Dorothy Wordsworth’s statements: ‘We could think of little else but poor Burns, and his moving about on that unpoetic ground’ and ‘but there is no thought surviving in connexion with Burns’s daily life that is not heart-depressing’.³⁰ Moreover, Dorothy Wordsworth’s perception of the places associated to Burns also takes the form of a temporal experience:

[…] we talked of Burns, and of the prospect he must have had, perhaps from his own door, of Skiddaw and his companions, indulging ourselves in the fancy that we might have been personally known to each other, and he have looked upon those objects with more pleasure for our sakes.³¹

Keats probably did not have these statements in mind when taking his tour, but he knew of William and Dorothy Wordsworth’s touring habits. In a broad sense, Keats’s pilgrimage is a tribute to Burns but also to other travellers, including Coleridge, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, his itinerary being directed by Burns’s texts and experience and by his contemporaries’ tours in a more recent past.

Fig. 5 David Octavius Hill, Burns’s Cottage (1880), The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. The New York Public Library Digital Collections. Fair use, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-f8f0-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Keats’s steps on his walk are undoubtedly guided by his wish to see what these other poets had seen. The temporality and topography of the walk is then partly determined by a time projection, as Keats strove to walk in other poets’ elusive footsteps,³² so as to revive the text and experience it in the landscape and in the time of perception. What is established then is a form of time coincidence between the memory of the text, its inscription in space and the poet-walker’s involvement in the landscape, a process Keats performs by using his imagination, his eyes and his walking body.

The Body as a Temporal Medium³³

In the letters written during the tour, Keats offers his addressees a narrative on the walking body and the physical experience of immediacy and, as his journal-letters particularly testify, the tour gives him the opportunity to write about the body faced with daily physical exertion. This account, relating what may be called ‘the physiology of the walk’, includes a sub-discourse on exhaustion, physical pain, soreness, hunger, cold and discomfort caused by failing equipment:³⁴ all these troubles affecting Keats and Brown are carefully documented and they anchor both walkers to the present, with bodily sensations acting as constant reminders of the ongoing physical activity. For a poet who was particularly attentive to senses in general, strenuous effort was probably very instructive and productive, as it allowed him to witness how walking directly affected his impressions. This focus on the body goes together with a reduction of the viewpoint, confirmed in Keats’s famous epistolary declaration ‘I live in the eye and my imagination, surpassed, is at rest’, suggesting a deeper awareness of physical sensations and an attraction to the immediacy of perception.³⁵ Just as bodily responses to the walk created unusual conditions to relate to the world, the perception of temporality seemed to be altered by the travelling rhythm: the aching, or at least moving body in which the walker and letter-writer was absorbed was then the perfect medium for an enhanced presence in the world and an enhanced attention to the moment.³⁶

This unusual feeling of immediacy is conveyed in the physical sensations that sometimes arise unexpectedly in the epistolary discourse, which is originally devoted to aesthetic reflections, sociological commentaries or any other concern. The following passage, though written in a pastiche Swiftian mode, illustrates how the discourse on the walking body collides with the descriptive vein in the letters, mixing literary references and the sudden appearance of the walker’s most trivial troubles as though these could not be escaped:

I’ll not run over the Ground we have passed. That would be merely as bad as telling a dream—unless perhaps I do it in the manner of the Laputan printing press—that is I put down Mountains, Rivers, Lakes, dells, glens, Rocks, and Clouds, with beautiful enchanting, gothic picturesque fine, delightful, enchancting [sic], Grand, sublime—a few Blisters &—and now you have our journey thus far.³⁷

This interest in physical immediacy goes further, as Keatsian poetics establish a connection between feet and the ground to bridge past and present and stage poetic memory. In the letters recording the tour, and in several poems (written during the tour, but not only), frequent references to feet and steps may be noticed. Written the year before the tour, ‘I stood tip-toe upon a little hill’ opens on the image of the speaker’s body bent forward and points to the feet as a de-centred agent of perception, since toes that support the whole body favour an enlarged perception. The Scottish girls’ bare feet, mentioned two or three times in several of the travel letters, seemed to fascinate Keats, not only as signs of their destitution but also because they suited ‘the scenery about them’, by which he might have meant these girls had a more direct relation with nature.³⁸ The playful ‘There was a naughty boy’ written during the walk, ends on the motionless child standing in his shoes: as the walk is halted, the song is silenced, while the boy’s hopping and bouncing his way to the North has shaped the poetic voice and rhythm all along. In ‘This mortal body of a thousand days’, this ‘flat sonnet’ written in Burns’s cottage, as Keats complains, the power of the perceiving eye is superseded by the ability of the speaker’s feet to relate to the dead poet:

My eyes are wandering, and I cannot see,

Fancy is dead and drunken at its goal;

Yet can I stamp my foot upon thy floor,

Yet can I ope thy window-sash to find

The meadow thou hast tramped o’er and o’er […] (lines 7–11).

While the eye is commonly the organ representing perception, inner vision and imagination, feet provide here a more down-to-earth physical medium that is closer to the soil, where touch replaces sight. Feet, then, guarantee travel in both space and time.

In these examples, the act of walking embodies a poetic thought unfolding in time and space and based on the connection between the ground and the mind. If ‘On visiting the tomb of Burns’ indirectly evokes the poetic subject relating to the poet’s memory through contact with the ground, this is what ‘There is a joy in footing slow across a silent plain’ expresses more explicitly. In this poem, the walk is the physical means to represent a journey through space and time where past and present are connected. This poem even seems to crystallise the main aspects of Keats’s experience in his tour: first the inscription of the landscape in literature and history, then communion with nature in immediacy, and finally an involvement of the subject in a cultural legacy through interaction with the ground:

There is a joy in footing slow across a silent plain,

Where patriot battle has been fought, where glory had the gain;

There is a pleasure on the heath where Druids old have been,

Where mantles grey have rustled by and swept the nettles green:

There is a joy in every spot made known by times of old,

New to the feet, though each tale a hundred times be told:

There is a deeper joy than all, more solemn in the heart,

More parching to the tongue than all, of more divine a smart,

When weary steps forget themselves upon a pleasant turf,

Upon hot sand, or flinty road, or sea-shore iron scurf,

Toward the castle or the cot where long ago was born

One who was great through mortal days and died of fame unshorn.

Light heather-bells may tremble then, but they are far away;

Wood-lark may sing from sandy fern,—the Sun may hear his lay;

Runnels may kiss the grass on shelves and shallows clear,

But their low voices are not heard, though come on travels drear;

Blood-red the sun may set behind the black mountain peaks;

Blue tides may sluice and drench their time in caves and weedy creeks;

Eagles may seem to sleep wing-side upon the air;

Ring doves may fly convuls’d across to some high-cedar’d lair;

But the forgotten eye is still fast wedded to the ground—

As palmer’s, that with weariness mid-desert shrine hath found.

At such a time the soul’s a child, in childhood is the brain;

Forgotten is the worldly heart—alone, it beats in vain. (lines 1–24)

Memory, first, flows through the ground and the poets’ body. Here again, the journey in space also involves time travel, and walking enacts this link between feet and the earth, between a physical movement unfurled in the poetic present and in the invisible footsteps of past figures. The speaker repeatedly evokes the different versions of this soil (‘silent plain’, l.1, ‘nettles green’, l. 4, ‘pleasant turf’, l. 9, ‘hot sand and flinty road’, l. 10, etc.) where the memory of ‘the glories of old’ is buried and received by the walking poet. In the poem, feet are a synecdoche of the physical presence of the poet, but also an indirect synesthetic image, in which feet may almost listen to old tales, as suggested by ‘new to the feet, although the tales a hundred times be told’ (l. 6). This communion, performed by inscribing one’s footprint where others have done the same, is soothing (as the speaker feels joy and pleasure) and is performed slowly, so as to be savoured. This slow pace corresponds to the poetic rhythm that ensures the connection with the imaginary past, since feet also evoke the measurement unit of a poem. As expected, the tempo of the poem founded on rhyming couplets deprived of run-on-lines and with a comma or strong punctuation at the end of each line recreates the monotonous pace of a walk, in which steps are predictably followed by other steps. The poem, by equating walking in nature and the tempo of the text, confirms that wandering on a silent plain is a poetic action or even the enactment of the poetic process.

The other facet of the text which seems essential here is the role of the body in its relation to the subject’s identity and his inscription in time. In the second part of the poem, steps, time and imagination are linked to discuss the dangers of self-absorption in poetic vision and poetic memory, or when ‘weary steps forget themselves upon a pleasant turf’ (l. 9). We should remember that this idea of self-absorption in contemplation and meditation may be related, according to Robin Jarvis, to ‘the regular, alternating rhythm of right leg, left leg [that] can induce a hypnotically self-absorbed state (if the conditions of the ground are not such as to demand constant vigilance)’.³⁹ The state of weariness the speaking ‘I’ insists upon in the poem might pertain to that feeling. Moreover, the representation of the subject shifts from these forgetting steps to the ‘forgotten eye’ (l. 21), which ‘is still fast wedded to the ground’ (l. 21), a displacement confirming that feet are perceiving organs in an earthlier, incarnated version of perception that anchors the poetic body to the earth. The shift from ‘forgetting’ to ‘forgotten’ reinforces the absorption of the self that seems to pass into oblivion. Then, the ultimate transformation of the locus of imaginative memory occurs in ‘Forgotten is the worldy heart’ (l. 24), which achieves a full embodiment. Just as the ground that contains images and songs is revived by perception and imagination, the walking body bears the marks of time.

When reading Keats’s travel letters and some of his poems, it becomes clear that he used his feet and legs in the service of poetic thought and expression. What he seemed to experience in his tour is even a sort of creative walking, in which perception is an active process involving the participation of the wanderer: ‘We walked 20 miles […] every 10 steps creating a new and beautiful picture’.⁴⁰ Walking was for him, as for other Romantic writers, not only a means to gaze upon the landscape, but also a literary and temporal event, if not an art of time, in the sense that the poet-walker may invent his own pace and his own relationship to the present circumstance. Keats’s epistolary and poetic production during his tour certainly benefited from this interaction between motion and a constructed temporality. The multiple temporalities induced by the walk—immediacy, allegiance to the past, timelessness and fictional temporality—shaped a walking and writing subject influenced by a strong anchorage of the poetic body in its environment, both inward-looking and particularly ready to receive aesthetic emotions. As several poems written during the trip are either satiric works or fugitive poems, this mobility in space and time also allowed for a liberated, irreverent, and sometimes even regressive poetic subject to emerge.

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