By Stuart Mitchner

I see life in nothing but the certainty of your Love…

—John Keats to Fanny Brawne,
May 1820

When John Keats wrote about life and love to Fanny Brawne, he had less than a year to live. In a letter from Rome on November 30, 1820, his last, he told his friend Charles Brown, “There is one thought enough to kill me; I have been well, healthy, alert, &c., walking with her, and now — the knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade, all that information (primitive sense) necessary for a poem, are great enemies to the recovery of my stomach.”

Decades before eavesdropping on Keats, I was reading about the doomed romance of Abraham Lincoln and Ann Rutledge in a “young adult” biography. Curious to see how John Ford handled the story, I sampled his 1939 film Young Mr. Lincoln on YouTube and found that, thanks to Henry Fonda’s ungainly charm, Ford manages to suggest a romance without actually showing it.

Played by Pauline Moore, whose next picture was Charlie Chan in Rio, Ann has a basket full of flowers, Abe sniffs one, takes the basket and carries it as they walk along the river talking, she telling him he’s going to be somebody important someday, he poking fun at the idea, until they come to a stop and he takes a good look at her and says, with the tone of quietly awestruck discovery unique to Henry Fonda, “You sure are pretty, Ann.” Uncomfortably pleased, she lowers her eyes, and says “Some people don’t like red hair.” He looks at her and says “I love red hair” with a subtle, tender emphasis on the verb, so you know he’s just told her he loves her even if he doesn’t know it yet, but she knows it, smiling, holding out her hand to him, as if she might fall into his arms. Instead, she takes back her basket, and walks off. As he throws a thoughtful stone into the river, the hesitantly romantic soundtrack becomes dark and stormy, the river turns to snow and ice, and next thing you know he’s kneeling at her grave, putting some flowers on it, talking to her, not like a lover but as a poet communing with his spirit muse.

Emily’s Valentine

In February 1852, 21-year-old Emily Dickinson, who also had red hair, sent a 17-stanza valentine to William Howland, a tutor at Amherst College, who published it anonymously in the Springfield, Mass. Republican without her consent. Styling herself as “the busy bee,” she writes, “Three cheers, sir, for the gentleman / Who first observed the moon!” and “Peter, put up the sunshine; / Patti, arrange the stars; / Tell Luna tea is waiting / And call your brother Mars.” Says the busy bee, “Mortality is fatal, Gentility is fine, Rascality heroic, Insolvency sublime!” Two stanzas later, “A coward will remain, Sir, / Until the fight is done,” when “an immortal hero will take his hat and run!” What sort of hero? Maybe a poet or a player? Nearing the end, it’s “Good bye, Sir, I am going; / My country calleth me.”

But what country? where’s she going? She’s writing, “In token of our friendship / Accept this ‘Bonnie Doon,’ / And when the hand that plucked it / Hath passed beyond the moon.” Before bidding him farewell, she adds, at 21: “The memory of my ashes / Will consolation be….”

Most likely there were no more playful valentines coming Howland’s way after Dickinson discovered he’d taken the liberty of publishing it. Although she apparently retracted the poem, the flights to come show that there was no retracting the poet who is “Inebriate of air,” a “debauchee of dew / Reeling, through endless summer days.” And after a line that sings like Shakespeare and swings like Wardell Gray: “When landlords turn the drunken bee / Out of the foxglove’s door,” this player, this poet “shall but drink the more!”

Father and Daughter

A tall, thin, light-skinned Black man is standing in front of a mirror fingering his tenor sax while his little girl looks on and asks why he’s doing it without making any sounds. He explains that he’s practicing so he can play his best in a recording session with Charlie Parker.

Wardell Gray was born on the eve of Valentine’s Day, a romantic coincidence he shared with his wife, who was born on the same day, in the same year. In his last letter to her, he looked forward to a rendezvous in Las Vegas, where they had been married and where he had a gig coming up with Benny Carter’s big band. On opening night, May 25, 1955, he was missing; the next day his body was found in the desert; he was only 34. In the chapter devoted to Gray in Ten Modern Jazzmen (Cassell 1960), Michael James writes, “When he died the modern jazz scene lost a man whose powers of imagination and execution, impressive as they were, had always been at one with the infectious fervor of his art.”

Wardell Gray was buried in an unmarked grave until his daughter raised enough money to buy a stone embellished with a skillfully rendered tenor saxophone and several bars of music on either side of the word FATHER 1921-1955. And under that the words “Infinite Beginnings — Jazz Composer & Artist.”

“Who Made the Moon?”

My son and I recently listened to a Mississippi concert by the Little River Band, an Australian group he grew up with. Until that moment I’d never heard the song that begins when the singer songwriter Dwayne Nelson recalls the time his little girl asked him (“so sure that I would know”), “Who made the moon? who paints the sky? who hangs the stars and turns them on each night?”

Nelson comes back to the same questions three more times without being maudlin or precious, even though by the last time it’s obvious that the child who asked the questions is dead. Before he returns to the final verse, he’s sitting alone, searching the evening sky, wishing for “just one more night to hold her close and share the mystery and hear her asking ‘Who made the moon?’” By the end the music matches the words so well that the question has taken on power and pathos well beyond a little girl’s naked wonderment.

“A Fly in the Milk-pot”

Nelson’s song sends me back to Emily Dickinson’s spirited Valentine with its cheers “for he who made the moon,” and commands to “put up the sunshine” and “arrange the stars,” which sends me in turn to a verse infected with the same playful spirit that John Keats mailed to his brother George in America, dated September 17, 1819. Titled “A Party of Lovers,” the poem was eventually published in the New York World on June 25, 1827, six years after Keats’s death. I doubt that Emily Dickinson ever read it, but the “busy bee” of the valentine would surely relate to his lines about the “fly in the milk-pot — must he die / Circled by a humane society?” Not if the poet can help it, as, in effect, he “takes his spoon, inserts it, dips the handle, and lo! soon / The little straggler, sav’d from perils dark, / Across the teaboard draws a long wet mark.”

“Be With Me”

Given the timeless quality of the following letter-poem, it makes nonsensical sense that it turned up two weeks ahead of the February 27, 2025 New York Review of Books. As Christopher Benfey admits in his review of The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press), this “perfect poem” is not included in The Letters, “despite its epistolary conceit”:

Bee! I’m expecting you!
Was saying Yesterday
To Somebody you know
That you were due —

The Frogs got Home last Week —
Are settled, and at work —
Birds, mostly back —
The Clover warm and thick —

You’ll get my Letter by
The seventeenth; Reply
Or better, be with me —
Yours, Fly.

I’ve been looking for some equivalent to the feeling this imperfectly imperfect word music arouses in me. The first song that comes to mind is one of my son’s favorites, “The Loneliest of All Creatures in the Universe” by the Canadian group Klaatu.