Keats, Shakespeare, and the Bible

We have an interesting argument that Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn" owe a good deal to Shakespeare's "King Lear" that in turn is indebted to the Bible's "Book of Job". I cannot say that I am convinced by the supposed connections between Keats's poems and "Lear", but I like the suggested relationship among these works. For one, although it now seems obvious, I never thought about the similarity between "Lear" and "Job". I am not sure that Shakespeare had "Job" consciously in mind, but it is nonetheless a fascinating proposition.

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[Keats] didn’t study Shakespeare: he lived it. Shakespeare was scripture for him, and the scriptures were not; Keats knew them but didn’t revere them. He cited Shakespeare as his highest authority all the time, with the remarkable depth and flagrant inaccuracy of associative and not literal memory. He recalled lines not by and for themselves but as they embodied perspectives, scenes, and whole plots, and recalled all of that as something like revealed truth as spoken by Shakespeare the “Presider,” whom he imagined hovering over him, as he wrote in his letters.

-- Adam Plunkett, "Keats and King Lear"

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Cats and Weather

After getting up from bed, I look out the window. Shit, it rained again. This casts some doubt on my plans to let the cats out this afternoon. That looks like more than a little drizzle. The cats were tearing up the house at four, five in the morning. I nervously look around for damages, praying I don't come across a ripped up recliner-chair or couch.

We got another one of those near-freezing, rainy cold fronts. It should be ending now. It is a real winter. Today is the first of March; I'm thinking this should be the last of it for the year, as we glide into spring, though you cannot be too confident, considering the way the climate is changing. I expect things to be getting hotter and dryer, but anything can happen, it seems.

I hate sounding as though I am complaining when I actually prefer colder and wetter (within reason), but I am thinking about the cats and our furniture. In a world that is getting hotter and dryer, I savor with particular relish these cold, drizzly blasts.

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Evening

The weather forecast changed. It looks like this rainy, wintry period is being extended with fresh rains coming tomorrow morning. Although the ground is much wetter than I'd like for the cats, I let them go out in the afternoon and evening, as this is about as good an opportunity we are going to get for them to work off their restlessness. What weather! The weather has always been a little crazy and unpredictable, but this is outright insanity. Something is certainly changing.

The Natural World

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