Beaver Teaser

This year being the 200th anniversary of the death of John Keats (in case you hadn't heard, he died of TB in Rome on 23rd February 1821) there's a lot of Keatsiana and Keatsiosity about at the moment. A lot of it is, ah, Keatsch, but recently the Guardian asked five poets to name their favourite Keats poem, and among the usual suspects Rachel Long chose one I had never come across before. In fact, on first reading I was sure it was either a parody, or perhaps something by Robert Browning, not least because of the publication date given: 1848. Huh? It was this:

Modern Love

And what is love? It is a doll dress’d up
For idleness to cosset, nurse, and dandle;
A thing of soft misnomers, so divine
That silly youth doth think to make itself
Divine by loving, and so goes on
Yawning and doting a whole summer long,
Till Miss’s comb is made a pearl tiara,
And common Wellingtons turn Romeo boots;
Then Cleopatra lives at number seven,
And Antony resides in Brunswick Square.
Fools! if some passions high have warm’d the world,
If Queens and Soldiers have play’d deep for hearts,
It is no reason why such agonies
Should be more common than the growth of weeds.
Fools! make me whole again that weighty pearl
The Queen of Egypt melted, and I’ll say
That ye may love in spite of beaver hats. 

It seems “Modern Love” was first published in 1848 in Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats, edited by Richard Monckton Milnes, and is an unpublished fragment. I don't have a scholarly annotated complete Keats to hand (this is one of those times when I miss spending my working day deep inside a university library), so can't confirm in which drawer or behind whose fridge it was found. Lacking a rhyme scheme, it's also hard to say whether it's complete or not. It does have some nice touches (I love "Cleopatra lives at number seven"), and there are a couple of things about this poem I thought worth commenting on. No need to take notes, though.

First, those boots. I think this is a classic case of some poetic language which it has become impossible to read with its original sense intact; not least, in this instance, because our modern reading is both better and more appropriate to the poet's original intention. Having died in 1821, Keats had no way of knowing that "wellingtons" would, one day, come to have the primary sense of a utilitarian knee- or calf-length work-boot made of rubber, with a certain sure-fire hilarity factor. In his day (I'm leaning heavily on Wikipedia here) "Wellingtons" as pioneered by the fashion-forward Iron Duke were, apparently, a trendy item – dandyish, even, as worn by the likes of Beau Brummel – but made of leather, though, and suitable for evening dress, and most emphatically not green or polka-dotted [1]. "Romeo boots", too, have subsequently become an actual Thing, although I confess I'd never heard of them before. But the central idea that the alchemical eye of love can transmute the lead of the everyday into the gold of romance is surely enhanced, and given an appropriately wry twist, by our contemporary reading.

But then there is that final line: "That ye may love in spite of beaver hats". I have to admit, despite decades of reading and interpreting poetry, that I have no idea what that means, or is meant to mean. This seems to be an example lying at the very opposite end of the symbolic spectrum to those wellies: that is, a reference whose living significance and resonance has been irretrievably lost, at least to the "common reader". Setting aside any smirking about subsequent meanings of "beaver" – settle down at the back – I do know what a "beaver hat" is. Felted beaver fur was prized as a suitable material for hats for centuries, in many shapes and styles, and the demand for it is what exterminated the European beaver, and probably goes a long way to explain all that North American unpleasantness in 1776 and 1812.

The lead up to the final line makes perfect sense: Pliny's tale of Cleopatra's pearl cocktail is well-enough known. The idea of setting foolish lovers an impossible challenge – to reconstitute an object of enormous value frivolously consumed in the name of love, an act which was itself the result of an extravagant wager – fits nicely with the rest of the poem: an imaginary pearl tiara conjured from a plain comb, Cleopatra living at number seven, and so on. In which case "I'll say / That ye may love..." must mean something along the lines of, "do that – yeah, right, as if! – and I'm, like, go for it then, you loved-up saps". But why "in spite of beaver hats"? Something to do with exaggerated military headgear or martial vanity? Some kind of "know your place" put-down? Did the wearing of a beaver hat – presumably fairly common in Keats's day – have some significance lost to us now, just as the "MAGA hat" will one day require an extensive scholarly footnote? Or maybe it's really just a temporary placeholder, like McCartney's "scrambled eggs"? A "soft misnomer", perhaps, that will wait, forever now, for substitution? The thing is, after all, an unpublished fragment.

But I still find it as baffling as Browning at his brownest, and I cannot fathom it; can you?

Friends! Explain to me that beaver hat
That Keats invokes, and I will surely say
I love thee more than Paul loves scrambled eggs...

1. Actually, I was brought up to be a wellington (inverted) snob. My father followed the 1950s working-man's fashion for black, fabric-lined wellingtons turned down at the top like a cuff to stiffen the boot and ease foot insertion. No-one seems to do that now, though, not least because so many style-conscious labourers seem to have adopted the leather jackboot or toe-protecting lace-ups. But any wellington resembling a riding boot, or any colour other than black is and always will be wrong. Although it's true my best ever pair were loose-fitting, short-knee Hunter Argylls, black with a narrow red stripe at the top. Classy!