Deconstructing Keats

For Keats’ love sonnet (and most other love sonnets), the most basic binary structuring the poem is male/female. Heterosexual desire drives the man to address the nameless woman and woo her with his words. However, through the underlying purpose of the sonnet is to bridge absence between lovers, neither of them are clearly present in the poem. As a paradoxically invisible addressee, the woman is merely denoted as a series of asterisks, showing from the outset of the poem that the binary may not be as clearly defined as the structure and assumptions behind the poetic form might suggest. For the man, rather than describe himself as what he is, he spends the poem explaining what he is not and the actions that will occur in the future rather than the present. This implies a lack even within the stable category of “man” that, in a patriarchal society, is always privileged above the woman.

He begins the poem, “Had I a man’s fair form, then might my sighs/ be echoed.” From the outset, he blurs the distinctions between male and female. The quality of being “fair” as well as “sighs” are not instinctively associated with men, but with women. According to the OED, fair is often applied to women, expressing a quality characteristic to their sex (i.e. the fair sex). Here in the poem, the speaker applies it to himself in addition to the sighs that define feminine sentimentality. The very negation of reality created by “Had I…” describes a masculine insufficiency in the speaker that he will perpetuate throughout the poem. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is when he evokes the knight/maiden complementary pairing. “I am no knight,” but at the same time, his lips do not tremble “with a maiden’s eyes.” He is neither maiden nor knight. But he has shown from the outset, that the privileging of one sex over the other is unstable, since he contains attributes of both and emphasizes his effeminate manhood. Yet, heterosexual passion requires both male and female, so in deconstructing gender, the speaker also can be said to deconstruct the idea of love as a unified entity.