Keats was one of the most life-loving people you could hope to meet, grasping with all his force every chance of happiness, even evanescent, and despite being repeatedly assaulted by unforgiving ‘Circumstances’.  He looks life’s fragility in the eye without flinching, and insists on pursuing such joy as he can find. 

Resilience is his middle name. 

Here circumstances are presented as clouds that help trouble and strife to germinate and proliferate. 

This is the world, and we cannot expect to give many hours to pleasure – Circumstances are like Clouds continually gathering and bursting – While we are laughing the seed of some trouble is put into the wide arable land of events – while we are laughing it sprouts it grows and suddenly bears a poison fruit which we must pluck.

Source: John Keats, 14 Feb – 3 May 1819, Selected Letters, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford World Classics, 2002/2009), p. 212-3

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