Keats Hand

John Keats wrote a poem called The Living Hand. Keats lived from 1795 to 1821, dying at the young age of twenty six. I do not know much about his values except that in his poems he speaks of power, love, money, health, and full life. In his poem The Living Hand, I think his audience may be to a specific person, but it does not specify. The situation is one of threat and immortal subconscious control by him on the person reading.

John Keats wrote The Living Hand in basically one long run on sentence with very little punctuation. He throws in a few commas and that is about it. I guess the commas are merely for taking a breath because they do not seem to imply to me any other sort of break in the action of the poem. I think this whole poem being one long sentence makes it very bold in the sense that it is direct and concise. It is not meant to be rhyming and "flowy". It is a blunt statement.

I thoroughly enjoyed this poem after reading it over a few times and finally getting what he was talking about. He is threatening the reader that if he were dead, he would haunt you until you prayed he were alive again so he would stay out of your dreams. It is very serious on one hand and sort of amusing on the other since I am an outside observer from two centuries later in the world.