It would be interesting to read the poem as an autobiographical statement. Keats met Fanny Brawne in 1819, the year in which he produced some of his greatest poetry: “La Belle,” “Ode to Psyche,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on Melancholy,” “Ode on Indolence,” “To Autumn.”
In the first of the thirty-seven surviving letters to Fanny from Keats, dated July 1, 1819, he writes: “Ask yourself my love whether you are not very cruel to have so entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom….I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days—three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.” In another letter to Fanny (July 15, 1819), Keats tells of a dream he had after reading an “oriental tale.” The dream is of an enchanting lady in a garden “of Paradise.” After men fall in love with her she makes them close their eyes “and on opening their eyes again [they] find themselves descending to the earth in a magic basket” and are “melancholy ever after.” Keats tells Fanny that he compared the enchantress with her but “could not bear you should be so” and concludes that, though as beautiful, Fanny is not as “talismanic as that Lady.” (Letters are from The Oxford Authors John Keats, 1990.)
His friend Charles Brown feared that Fanny would entrap Keats and didn’t want a relationship to develop. (Brown’s “protection” of Keats would be another interesting exploration.) After Keats died, Fanny wore mourning for three years and did not marry until she was thirty-three. All of this, I think, speaks of a strong but doomed love.
There is another influence on the poem, however, that should be explored: Dante’s Inferno.
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