Touching and Being Touched

John Kerrigan

• Reading after Theory by Valentine Cunningham
  Blackwell, 194 pp, £45.00, December 2001, ISBN 0 631 22167 0

A few months before his early death from tuberculosis, John Keats scribbled these lines in his papers:

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming
nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d – see, here
it is
I hold it towards you.

Once read, always haunted. As it moves through subjunctive volition and vain hope into nightmare, this poignant yet ominous sentence finds some resolution at ‘conscience-calm’d’, only to be extended by a gesture which disturbs the more because what is so frankly held out is both the living hand that wrote what we read but also (Keats being dead) the cold hand in the tomb.