"This living hand, now warm and capable" (A Poem)

Written sometime around 1819, John Keats’ poem may or may not be a complete work, with some literary scholars contending it is a brief composition meant to be part of a larger play or poem.[1] Due to its potentially incomplete nature, there are a variety of interpretations associated with the terse text. One maintains the poem alludes to the idea that the hand of the writer serves as a mystical device which allows the storyteller to commune with spirits and convey their stories.[2]

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.[3]

Works Referenced

Keats, John. “This living hand, now warm and capable.” The Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats. Ed. Edward Hirsch. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. 365.

Rowe, Katherine. Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Wu, Duncan. Romanticism: An Anthology. 4th ed. West Sussex: Wiley, 2012.
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[1] Wu, 1503.
[2] Rowe, 114.
[3] Keats, 365.