Letter written to neighbour Fanny Brawne as John Keats lay dying of tuberculosis could fetch up to �120,000
A poignant letter in which the poet John Keats, already mortally ill, vowed to kiss Fanny Brawne's signature ? since he could not kiss and risk infecting her ? is to be auctioned with an estimated value of up to �120,000.
Keats corresponded daily with many friends who cherished the letters after his death in Rome at 26 from tuberculosis, which had already destroyed his brothers. All but a handful of the notes are now in museum and archive collections.
He was still living next door to Brawne in Hampstead when he wrote this one in 1820, but was often too ill to see her. He wrote on the envelope "you had better not come today", but assured her of what he could hardly have believed, having watched his brother Tom die: that "health is my expected heaven".
Later that year friends would take him to Rome in the desperate hope that a warmer climate might help. They reached the city after long delays on the journey in a particularly cold and foggy November, and he was dead within four months.
Keats and Brawne's love affair, and his letters, featured in the 2009 film Bright Star. The letters were regarded as remarkable by critics as well as his friends. Joseph Severn, the artist who was with Keats when he died, wrote that many of them "contained quite as fine poetry as any of his actual poems".
The collector and poet Roy Davids is selling the note along with more than 500 other manuscripts and portraits, including a letter from Sir Walter Raleigh, an essay by William Blake, an unpublished speech by Winston Churchill and a wealth of material relating to the late poet laureate Ted Hughes.
David said: "It is a mark of Keats's poetic genius and the power of his imagination that the words of this letter fall so naturally into the rhythm of verse. To own a manuscript by Keats is really the closest you can get to him both physically and mentally. In some degree it is an act of worship."
The collection will be auctioned by Bonham's in London in March.
Letter from John Keats to Fanny Brawne, 1820
My dearest FannyThe power of your benediction is not of so weak a nature as to pass from the ring in four and twenty hours - it is like a sacred Chalice once consecrated and ever consecrate. I shall Kiss your name and mine where your Lips have been - Lips! why should such a poor prisoner as I am talk about such things. Thank God, though I hold them the dearest pleasures in the universe, I have a consolation independent of them in the certainty of your affectation. I could write a song in the style of Tom Moores Pathetic about Memory if that would be any relief to me. No. It would not be. I will be as obstinate as a Robin, I will not sing in a cage. Health is my expected heaven and you are the Houri - this word I believe is both singular and plural - if only plural never mind - you are a thousand of them.
Ever yours affectionately my dearest, j.k
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/25/john-keats-letter-auction
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