BrokenLyre wrote:Ok...gotta make the confession... but this will only be understood by true Keats lovers.... I think.
My wife and 7 year old daughter were sitting at the kitchen table. I was sleeping on the couch when my daughter started calling to me from the kitchen. My daughter said, "Dad!..dad look, dad! dad! dad! dad! Dad look!" But I never heard her and she got no response from me.
Then she said "Keats!" and I immediately said "What?" And she and my wife laughed. She then said, "Dad! I called you seven times and you never heard me???!! You're so weird!"
It's an internal Keats sighting. And yes, it happens frequently that I don't hear my own name. But I always respond when I hear "Keats." My subconscious is always on the alert for a Keats sighting I guess. You understand, even if my family doesn't.
Great, great story, Brokenlyre!! It's up to us all to "teach" the younger generation about John Keats and it seems as though your seven-year-old is learning her "lessons" well!!
I know I've probably "told" this story about my now five-year-old grandson, Aidan, but he knows Keats. He likes me to recite "Ode To a Nightingale" as he falls asleep (excellent lullaby, wouldn't you agree!?); he likes "Ode to Autumn," and when I read it to him, he always asks if Keats is writing about a real person -- I suppose the second and third stanzas confuse him; it is kind of difficult to explain allegory/metaphor to one so young! What's really funny (if that's the correct adjective to use, and I'm not too sure it is . . .), is that he likes the film
Bright Star, but he can't seem to get it through his little brain that Bright Star was not Fannie's name! His favourite part is when, to use his words, "Bright Star finds out Keats is dead and she walks in the snow, crying, and saying that poem out loud to herself." Oh, to be young (and innocent [?])again. . . . He wants to know if I'll take him to "Linden" the next time I go. My hope for Aidan is that he will never forget Keats and will eventually hold him as close in his heart as we all do. And if I have anthing at all to do with it, he won't and he will!