"This Living Hand" by John Keats, a reading response

John Keats died in 1821. “This Living Hand” was composed sometime in 1819 and he was likely in the beginning stages of tuberculosis. The story goes that Keats found the time to jot down these 8 lines of verse, perhaps saving it for another poem. This lends a fragmented nature to the poem. The incomplete nature seems to add value to the poem. “This living hand” in the context of Keats having died young and one of his later poems, left incomplete, creates a more haunting quality to the poem. In this sense, the poem acts like a relic that can resurrect Keats upon each reading.  When we read, “the icy silence of the tomb” acts to immortalize the very hand that composed the poem, we are also left with the persistence of Keats and can imagine his hand emerging from the page. The idea that “this living hand, now warm and capable” is present in the now adds another layer of familiarity to the poem acting as a captured moment, similar to a photograph, encapsulating the young Keats. Not only is it now, but it’s “warm” and alive. When he claims he will “haunt” us in the reading of the poem.  The idea of reading the poem seems to enact a sort of invocation that reanimates his hand and by extension, himself the poet. Knowing that he dies shortly after this poem, adds an additional mystical quality to the poem in that he is foreshadowing how the reader will read the poem when it is long cold. He also knowingly seeks to comfort us, the you, in the poem by projecting the desire of a living hand. This poem, compared to others we’ve read, seems to be among the first to truly engage the reader. How does the poem turn itself into object? How do we account for various contexts in which we read the poem after reading Pascoe? How do fragments inform the creation of the authentic Romantic narrative? Does the narrative or Pascoe expand or limit our understanding of this Keats poem?