Island pebbles
As a committed pebble picker, I was delighted to read that Keats also thought to bend down and scoop up a few when he travelled. Here he brings them back from his trip to Scotland, as a memento for his sister.On the metaphorical benefits of holding a pebble in your...
Of sweet sleep
Keat’s evocation of perfect sleep is particularly moving considering he was soon robbed of health and ‘quiet breathing’ by the assault of tuberculosis. Â He had also nursed his mother and younger brother through it, losing both of them to its...
Living in the moment
Keats is one of the Great Nuannaarpoqians. He grew up with sorrow, first nursing his mother through tuberculosis and, a few years later, his younger brother, before then succumbing himself. These and other travails did nothing to curb his capacity to grasp moments of...
Resilience as defiance
John Keats died young of tuberculosis, but while he lived he was resilient and determined to squeeze every drop of life and happiness despite nursing first his mother and then his younger brother as they themselves were assailed by TB. He knew all about fragility of...
Sleep and sanity
We know that insomnia can drive you insane and a good sleep can make you feel sane (or saner), but here is something to wish for, that you may go to bed sane and arise sane, with nothing but uninterrupted sleep to connect the two ends of your mental health. What has...
As obstinate as a robin
A beautiful way to insist upon freedom and independence of expression. Robins are so chirpy and robust, hopping about in midwinter, apparently cockahoop about being alive. On the things that matter, and without harming the things that matter to others, let’s...
An unaffordable bird
This thrush pops up twice in Keats’ letters, singing so heartily as to run him up ‘a pretty bill for music’. Having stood, numerous times, at the open window or beneath the roof edge just so I could hear the loud, ringing, endlessly varied song of...
An ideal summer evening
All that wine-tasters’ lingo about bouquet and tasting of tires or leather, not a patch on Keats’ description of the effects of good wine sipped in an arbour on a summer evening. Keats is at least as good a letter-writer as he is a poet, and his...
All in one nuannaarpoq description
In this wish-list John Keats, English poet and nuannaarpoq award winner No. 3 (according to this website), covers quite a few building blocks of happiness. Noteworthy is his mention of ‘health’ early on, given that it was illness that cut short his...
Clamber through the clouds
What a life-affirming ambition from my third candidate for a nuannaarpoq award, John Keats. He didn’t live long but he did live, squeezing every drop of enjoyment he could out of a life that was beset and ultimately curtailed by illness – his own and...
A mansion of many apartments
I found this expansive metaphor for life moving, particularly coming from a man who grabbed as much of it as he could before it was snatched from him by illness and premature death. It also struck me as a suitable response – or riposte – to a question...
Lolling on a lawn
The English poet John Keats is my next candidate for a nuannaarpoq award. I am building a dossier of his nuannaarpoqian behaviour and inclinations to parade before you, before creating a nuannaarpoq award-winners page where I can bring these life-loving exemplars...Yes, sign me up!
