Sophie Burrows (@burrowsdraws) is an award-winning illustrator.  James Morland is a postdoctoral research fellow on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project at Queen Mary University of London. 

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I have the urge for sleepless nights, for imminent fecal disasters, for our furniture to have teeth marks. We already have a plan for where Henry will sleep, who will stay on the sofa in case of separation whines, who will clean him after his rolling in South London’s finest fox excrement, and how best to tackle the neighbours’ ire when Henry’s herding instincts emerge and he barks to protect his herd from any movement inside or out.

To those opposite our house, the view through our window might be strange, with me giving head scratches to the not-quite-there dog lying across my husband’s shoulders. My husband’s eyes are full of longing. We sigh and respond to each other simultaneously:  ‘I just want Henry’ ‘I know’. Straight afterwards my husband bends down and picks up Henry, knees bowing under the imaginary weight, carrying him upstairs to make sure Henry’s back isn’t strained before his joints have fully developed.

I wonder whether we shouldn’t have named you. Whether this longing would have been less if we had kept you in an abstract and anonymous form, relegating our corgi obsession to sending each other Instagram posts rather than imagining Henry in our own living space. We came one step closer when we realised we could transport a virtual reality, life-sized corgi into your room via Google’s 3D imaging.

Initially our hearts had melted – here was Henry, albeit slightly more angular than we had imagined, standing in our office, fitting perfectly just under my desk. But as we watched the cycle of movements the magic began to dissipate: pant, look upper right, shuffle little legs to the left, bark, shake head, look upper left, repeat. We soon turned back to petting the Henry of our imagination.

My husband was once told he loved me so much because I was the human equivalent of a corgi. Inquisitive, protective, prone to zooming around the room in excitement, with a permanent smile and very short in the legs. Is this desire for Henry just a desire to have a canine equivalent of me in the household? Someone to always blame when a sweet treat mysteriously disappears from the kitchen? Or is it a desire for a progeny as various circles of heterosexual friends veer closer to the world of parenthood and pregnancy announcements, ultimately wanting to expand our family too after the most surreal first year of marriage?

Over the course of the pandemic I have been diagnosed with a chronic illness that brought with it increased risk from COVID alongside an exclusion from some of the things that gave me the most joy. My husband has been the most stable support through all of this, but I have missed the in-person support of my friends. The past year has been marked by absence of physical contact with family and friends. We haven’t seen any of my husband’s family in person since our wedding in December 2019. We’ve seen my parents once briefly in our freezing cold garden, hugging cups of tea instead of each other. With a government whose vision of family life is a nuclear family easily reached within walking distance or just a car ride away, the guiding assumptions of potential contact between lockdowns has produced even more longing on our part. Only during the pandemic have I truly felt the vastness of London.

As with the majority of our friends, we are carless and reliant on public transport, resulting in 4 hour walks to see friends and eat donuts in various parks last autumn. In this mix of diagnoses and pandemic, I have felt myself change. A usually very calm person, I’ve found myself on the verge of aggressive shouting as yet another couple refuses to let go of each other’s hands on the narrow pavement, shouldering me aside, pushing me into the mud. With Henry, I know he would be a few paces ahead of me sniffing and clearing the path. His protection would be trait-defined, his comfort would be there in moments when my energy was lowest, and the promise of play is always just moments away. As I lament the patience that I seem to have lost, I imagine a puppy: the perfect exercise in relearning patience.

Henry has appeared in his fullest manifestation at a time when I have been yearning for acts of care to be in person, bemused by diagnoses and test results told through the telephone, longing for my abdomen to be touched by a physician rather than describing symptoms in detail. As I write chapters on eighteenth-century physicians portraying themselves as the best advocates of their potential patron’s care through verse, I seem to have enacted that element of care in my own life with thoughts of unbridled canine affection. As I read the physicians describe my ‘Lethargy, with deadly Sleep opprest, / Strechd on his Back a mighty Lubbard lay’, I turn to social media and ask friends and followers to send me pictures of their pets to help assuage the lethargy that marks my ‘Change! From Scenes of Joy and Rest / To this dark Den, where Sickness toss’d alway’. Thomas Laqueur wrote a blog for our ‘Solitude and COVID-19’ series on dogs as a guard against cosmic loneliness. As my world has shrunk at just a time when I needed it most to be a place of caring connectedness, Henry has come to populate my thoughts and provided a guard against the encroaching disappointments that my diagnoses have brought with them. With Henry I am building my protective pack to shield me, but also imagining a joy that can’t be taken away by my illness.

In the absence of family members and friends, the urge has been to expand our family unit in a way that seems just within the realms of possibility, in the midst of a pandemic, living with fixed term employment contracts.  Henry represents looking head on at those precarious contracts, at my diagnosis, and at the pandemic and refusing to let them take away another part of the stable future for which we yearn. A happy family of two men and dog, is that really too much to ask? A real Henry would be emblematic of embracing what would make us happiest, we’ve learnt that life is far too short not to do that. But right now, happiness is leaning back in my chair and watching my husband absentmindedly reach down to pet our imaginary Henry, with a smile that has entirely forgotten the distance from family or the weight of lockdowns.

James Morland (@jameswmorland) is a postdoctoral research fellow on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project at Queen Mary University of London. 

The post To My Adorable, Defiant, But Entirely Imaginary, Corgi appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

In previous research, I’ve focused on how these voices of the past are turned to as a means of coping with death and grief. These poetic voices can similarly become a means of coping with the new normal of isolation, giving a larger historical perspective to our socially-distanced solitude and showing how this history of solitude can perhaps help us to cope with collective feelings of anxiety, grief, and loss.

From daily mentions of social distancing, enforced quarantines, and even down to ‘Stay Home’ Instagram stories, solitude is currently engrained in our daily discourse and is intrinsically connected to health.

This connection of solitude and health is far from new.

Solitude was often referred to as a ‘nurse’ in poetic works across the eighteenth century. The term ‘nurse’ derives from ‘nourice’, a wet nurse, or a woman who takes care of a child. At the root of the phrase is a maternal sense of nourishment and care. Solitude was seen as the nurse of many things in eighteenth-century poetry: sense, contemplation, joy, wisdom, woe, but most presciently for our current time, care.

As a ‘nurse’, solitude was directly linked to concerns about health and wellbeing. Alexander Pope called it ‘wholesome solitude, the nurse of sense’ in his ‘The Fourth Satire to Dr John Donne Versified’:

Bear me, some God! Oh quickly bear me hence
To wholesome solitude, the nurse of sense:

Pope’s use of ‘wholesome’ here is important for how we should be framing our current solitude. Wholesome in Pope’s sense meant ‘conducive to or promoting (mental and physical) wellbeing’ and ‘having the property to restoring physical health’: there is a sense of solitude as being both medicinal and curative here. This solitude is also closely linked to ‘Contemplation’, with Pope calling on a larger poetic history of the two being co-dependent. Contemplation’s ‘ruffled wings’ are pruned and restored as Pope imagines solitude as a restorative space for recovery.

This solitude, with its nursing of sense, is a space within which the mind can recover and develop a ‘free soul’ to look ‘down to pity kings’, pushing the mind outside society’s hierarchy. Though the results of this solitude are philosophical, the language used to describe the state of solitude is distinctly health-related. The language of good health is intrinsically connected to this process of solitary nourishment.

John Armstrong, in his 1744 poem The Art of Preserving Health, called solitude the ‘sad nurse of care’:

Chiefly where Solitude, sad nurse of Care,
To sickly musing gives the pensive mind.

What is most pertinent to our times is Armstrong’s play on the word ‘care’. The word has roots as meaning both concern & sorrow:

1. Mental suffering, sorrow, grief, trouble. Obsolete.
2. Burdened state of mind arising from fear, doubt, or concern about anything; solicitude, anxiety, mental perturbation; also in plural anxieties, solicitudes. †withouten care: without doubt. †to be in care: to be troubled, anxious, concerned.
3. Serious or grave mental attention; the charging of the mind with anything; concern; heed, heedfulness, attention, regard; caution, pains.
4. Charge; oversight with a view to protection, preservation, or guidance. Hence to have the care of, etc. to take care of: to look after.

Solitude in this formulation can be read as nourishing care in our more common use of the term in reference to nursing as ‘caring for others’, but also as fostering a sense of anxiety and sorrow. It has a distinct duality that has deep resonance with our current times.

This poetic history of solitude speaks to our current experiences of it. As the ‘sad nurse’, solitude is both caring and dangerous: its duality means that it is inherently caring and nourishing but also has the potential to lead to the darker consequences of too much musing. Just as Pope’s wholesome solitude leads to the restoration of contemplation, Armstrong’s ‘sad nurse’ leads to sickly musing and melancholy.

Our current calls for distancing have a similar duality to them – they have a distinct sense of anxiety and sorrow, but at their root is care for others. That is key to remember.

While this current period of solitude has the capacity to lead to a sickly musing, at its root is a history of caring and nourishment that it perhaps more easily forgotten than solitude’s more well-known connections with melancholy. It’s worth remembering that this solitude, as it often has been in the past, is linked to a nursing and caring for ourselves and those around us.

Some poetic voices to turn to (and transport you) while staying in place

Mary Whateley Darwall – ‘The Pleasures of Contemplation’
Lavinia Greenlaw – ‘The built moment’; ‘A difficulty with words’
Seamus Heaney – ‘A Herbal’
John Keats – ‘On the Sea’
Alexander Pope – ‘The Fourth Satire to Dr John Donne Versified’
Denise Riley – ‘Composed underneath Westminster Bridge’; ‘Listening for lost people’
Rainer Maria Rilke – ‘Water Lily’

James Morland (@jameswmorland) is a postdoctoral research fellow on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project at Queen Mary University of London. 

The post The Nourishment and Nursing of Solitude appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

Keats writes from 1 Well Walk in Hampstead, where he had moved with his brothers, George and Tom, in April 1817 to escape the damp rooms of Cheapside due to Keats’ frequent colds and Tom’s deteriorating health. Both George and John nursed Tom through his tuberculosis, the Keats ‘family disease’ which ultimately killed their mother and all three brothers. Keats embarked on a walking tour of the Lake District and Scotland in mid-1818, accompanied by George and his wife Georgiana, who emigrated to the United States from Liverpool half way through the journey. During this walking tour, Keats’ own health was beginning to deteriorate, having caught a cold on the Isle of Mull and developed a fever.

Shortly after leaving Inverness, Keats received a letter urging him to return to Hampstead as Tom’s health had declined. Keats writes this letter to George and Georgiana a few weeks after returning from the tour to find an emaciated and feverish Tom. Here, in the face of Tom’s imminent death and his own illness, Keats turns to questions of solitude at the very beginnings of his annus mirabilis:

Ours are ties which independent of their own Sentiment are sent us by providence to prevent the deleterious effects of one great, solitary grief.

Keats appeals to the shared familial ties with his brother and sister-in-law as the counter to this ‘great, solitary grief’ in the face of Tom’s decline in health. His connections with George, Georgiana, and his lover, Fanny Brawne, the ‘three people whose Happiness to [him] is sacred’ ‘does annul that selfish sorrow which [he] should otherwise fall into’. His relationships with these three are the bulwark against his melancholic disposition, or ‘unreflection head’ as he terms it earlier in the letter, which he sees as his solitary and ‘selfish sorrow’ in relation to ‘poor Tom who looks upon me as his only comfort.’

After his mother’s death (also due to tuberculosis) during his schooling, the younger Keats turned to solitude to deal with the grief, often hiding beneath his teacher’s raised platform in the aftermath of her death. In contrast, here Keats calls on a collective family emotion to ‘bear up against any Calamity for my sake as I do for your’s.’ The prospect of grief, that ‘great, solitary’ thing, leads Keats to press for the collective sharing of emotion as a counter to this solitary experience.

He calls on George and Georgiana to allow their sorrow to become physically apparent, a moment of collective emotion that can connect them:

the tears will come into your Eyes – let them – and embrace each other – thank heaven for what happiness you have and after thinking a moment or two that you suffer in common with all Mankind hold it not a Sin to regain your cheerfullness

To keep a future solitary grief at bay, Keats urges a continued connection with a suffering held ‘in common with all Mankind’. He pushes his family members to feel their independent emotions, but in doing so to find their connection with each other (and mankind as a whole) via suffering as a means to regain cheerfulness.

Yet, later in the letter, Keats the poetic creator swiftly seeks to remove Keats the brother from any of this sharing himself. There is a distinct difference between the communal and collective feeling associated with Keats the brother, and the solitude of Keats the poet. In contrast to the familial connections which counter ‘solitary grief’, Keats rejects such domestic bliss for himself and embraces solitude, writing ‘Notwithstanding your Happiness and your recommendation I hope I shall never marry.’

Keats takes great lengths to dismiss women and relationships with women, which would only become a hinderance to his goal of poetic glory. Despite his passionate relationship with Fanny Brawne, which saves him from his ‘selfish sorrow’ earlier in the letter, here his ‘mighty abstract Idea [of] Beauty in all things stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness.’ He contemplates ‘an amiable wife and sweet Children [as] a part of that Beauty, but I must have a thousand of those beautiful particles to fill up my heart.’

With the prospect of encroaching death and solitary grief, Keats turns to his family to renew his sense of connectedness, but in poetic solitude Keats creates a familial connection with nature itself: ‘The roaring of the wind is my wife and the Stars through the window pane are my Children.’ As a result, his ‘Solitude is sublime’ and rather than conjugal happiness he has ‘sublimity to welcome me home.’ His connection with nature is so close that Keats disappears into it, writing, ‘I melt into the air with a voluptuousness so delicate that I am content to be alone.’

Keats’ poetic life may be alone but is sensually connected with nature as he melts voluptuously into the wind, his natural wife. He asks his brother to think of his ‘Pleasure in Solitude, in comparison of my commerce with the world.’ This commerce with the world is not an equal exchange; he is at the mercy of others who ‘do not know me, not even my most intimate acquaintance.’ ‘Every one thinks he sees my weak side against my will’, Keats laments, but ‘I am content to be thought all this because I have in my own breast so great a resource.’ Alone within the commerce of the world, Keats’ imagination is his solitary refuge to indulge in his ‘yearning Passion’ ‘for the beautiful, [and] connected.’

This passion for the ‘connected’ is key to understanding Keats’ differing versions of solitude in this letter and across his poetry. At the root of these solitudes are the lamentation of death and a search for poetic life, both of which are dependent on feelings of connection. For Keats the poet, solitary reflection away from the commerce of the world is the path to poetic glory. Yet behind this, for Keats the brother, solitary grief is countered by shared tears.

Further Reading
Andrew Motion, Keats (London: Faber & Faber, 1997)
John Keats, O Solitude!
John Keats, To Hope

James Morland (@jameswmorland) is a postdoctoral research fellow on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project at Queen Mary University of London. 

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