Keats' "Hand"

In eight lines of Keats’ “This Living Hand” he evokes a condition similar to that of Frankenstein’s creation, who exists in a purgatory-like space between life and the vast, unknowable state beyond human existence. The hand Keats describes is clearly living, as the title states, yet it seems to be on the precipice of death or at least mortal extinguishment. This juxtaposition is illustrated through the contrast of temperature imagery in the first five lines of the poem. The living hand is at first “warm and capable of earnest grasping,” but quickly shifts to a statement in the conditional: “would, if it were cold and in the icy silence of the tomb…chill thy dreaming nights…” In the fifth line the conflation of heat and heart, whether purposeful on Keats’ part or not, fits with poem’s overall association of warmth and life. This emphasis on sensation/sensory perception exemplifies a motif the can be traced throughout many of the work’s we have examined, including works of both Shelleys, Blake, and Hemans. I believe this poem can be read as a Romantic rumination on the precipice between this life and the next, but reading footnote 1 on page 949 also suggested another interpretation related to the senses as the means to explore the fluid boundaries between inner and outer life, as well as life and death. This footnote suggests that the “hand” in Keats’ title might refer to handwriting, or the creation of the hand, as opposed to describing an actual hand. “This living hand, now warm and capable” is perhaps a personification of a poem or the act of writing verse that can reach out to the reader with vivacity but could also turn cold and dreary. If one sucked the sanguine nature from a poem and wrote on the terrific or sublime the poem could impart the effect of “the icy silence of the tomb” and might “haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights…” In this way, Keats could be referring to a poem traversing the boundary between the expression of vitality and finality.