This Living Hand
This Living Hand - fact Summary
Keats Confronting Mortality and Love
This brief, direct address frames a living hand as both intimate token and spectral threat. Keats imagines that if the hand were dead it would haunt the beloved, driving her to wish his blood would flow again so life might return. The poem compresses fear of impending death and intense attachment into a single gesture offered to the addressee, often read as Fanny Brawne.
Read Complete AnalysesThis 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 wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calmed - see here it is - I hold it towards you.
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