Well, I'm older than 24, no one in my house is practising the violin or even the ukulele, and my various maladies are not, I'm reliably told, fatal - though as TS Garp pointed out, we are all terminal cases. Luckily, the Yeomanry did not carry R5 rifles or, as at Marikana, double that amount of people might have died.
At St Peter's Field in Manchester, 18 people were killed when cavalry of the Manchester Yeomanry charged into a crowd of around 60 000 protesters demanding reform of parliamentary representation. One boffin has written that the poem has "a direct connection" to the Peterloo Massacre of 16 August 1819. But some of the forementioned experts have also cogently argued that underlying the poem (if one knows where and how to look) was Keats' engagement with contemporary politics. So, I assume, whatever else might be "found" in the poem, that in the first place Keats enjoyed the walk, just as I relished the quiet and leaf-strewn Parkview streets. Keats wrote to a friend about his walk - "How beautiful the season is now - How fine the air.
Hence, as attested to by various buffs, the poem's sense of "melancholy" and "mortality". Only 24, Keats knew he had tuberculosis of which his mother and brother had already died - and he perished about 18 months later. The famous 1819 poem was inspired by a stroll Keats took near his home, allegedly trying to escape the sound of his landlady's daughter practising the violin. Jeremy Gordin's reflections on wandering the leaf-strewn Parkview streets As I made my way through the streets of Parkview this morning, "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" came into my head - the first line of "To Autumn" by John Keats (or, if you like, "Junkets," Jun-kets, as my friend Robin Malan has named his small publishing house in the Cape).
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