Gratitude ode

Instead of exchanging corny greeting cards for our anniversary, we celebrated by traveling to Winchester, England. John Keats’ fondness for a footpath through the St. Cross meadows is part of his legacy, and for two months we walked that path almost every day. Of the meadows he wrote, “There is on one side of the city a chalky down where the air is worth sixpence a pint.” After returning to the cheap lodging he shared with his best friend in the fall of 1819, he penned his famous ode, “To Autumn.”

An ode is a literary outpouring of respect or gratitude, and Keats wrote many. Once, after boasting of habitually sleeping until 10 a.m., he composed an “Ode to Indolence.” His most famous poems are in this style: “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to Psyche” and although it sounds awkwardly aligned with an ode’s  purpose, an “Ode to Melancholy.”

Two hundred-twenty-five years later, we also visited Winchester, where we retraced Keats’ footsteps and strolled beside the same stream. I admired the lush pastoral scenery, stopping to watch a pair of swans preening their snow-white feathers, counting sheep grazing in the meadow, wondering if he had stepped in the same muck we so narrowly avoided. 

But that’s as far as my reverie got. My bare leg brushed against a patch of nettles and the pain was instant. It felt like a dozen bees had suddenly stung me. I hopped around on the narrow path, rubbing my calf until I lost my balance and backed right into another nettles patch. 

I could have blamed the entire irritating experience on Keats, but as a 71-year-old writer with a tenderness for poetic justice, I should have known better. The river that feeds this chalk stream is, after all, appropriately named the Itchen.  

Today, the Wildlife Trust maintains St. Cross Meadow, a nature reserve that offers streams, meadows and woodland. It is gorgeous, but in 1819, its untamed character also inspired Keats to draft letters to his many friends, recommending that they, “pass across St. Cross meadows till you come to the most beautifully clear river – now this is only one mile of my walk, I will spare you the other two till after supper when they would do you more good.” 

These days, wandering off the meadow path requires you to cross a sporting field, tennis court and parking lot – that is, if you can ignore the postings that forbid climbing over fences and urging visitors to “Please Stay on the Footpath.” But the stream is still like glass, so clear the white chalk shimmers from the bottom. 

Because chalk is permeable, water percolates easily through the ground to the water table, so chalk streams receive little surface runoff. Fewer than 300 chalk rivers have been identified globally, and 85% of them are in southern England. As a retired teacher who has spent considerable time with a piece of chalk in hand, I couldn’t help reaching into the stream, picking up a pebble and tracing a few swirly white lines on a flat rock beside me. But an ode to chalk it was not.

Keats saw his early writing flourish, but his finances suffered. Giving up a medical career to become a poet hadn’t helped. He published three volumes of verse and numerous magazine articles in just four short years, but much of his work was received indifferently by the literary establishment during his lifetime. Like talented creative artists everywhere, he had to die to become famous. 

I picture Keats not only roaming the meadow but also spending considerable time inside Winchester Cathedral, absorbing its history and epitaphs, sitting in a corner scribbling notes, even standing beside a memorial to a 41-year-old little-known novelist named Jane Austen, a writer who also found fame only after she died – two years before Keats arrived in the city. 

Like Keats, Austen, too, had come to Winchester to receive medical treatment, and she stayed in a house only a stone’s throw from the cathedral. None of her six anonymously published novels were in print at the time of her death, although Keats – who read and studied history and literature – surely had encountered news of her as a novelist. 

Austen was laid to rest in Winchester Cathedral in 1817.  Keats, just 25, was buried in Rome four years later, 17 months after leaving Winchester, having been advised by his physician to move to a warmer climate. What he found in Rome, I don’t know, but I like to think his ramblings through “our” meadow remained vivid in his memory. For his beguiling words and for pointing out the path, I will always be grateful, but never for his nettles.