These Living Hands: An Introduction to At the Edge

These Living Hands: An Introduction to At the EdgeThis living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm'd-see here it is-I hold it towards you.-John KeatsThe uncanny, even comedic, Gothicism of these enigmatic lines gets me every time.My experience of reading (and rereading) this strange fragment-poem plays out like a practical joke, but slightly more eerie than the phantom shoulder tap or other such classics.Maybe more like that old handshake, where the unwitting target is left clutching a detached arm, the at the EDGE http://journals.library.mun.ca/ateVolume 1 (2010)2 armless prankster standing in a state of mock horror.The dynamic described in these lines is fairly simple: We conjure the anatomical hand to which our gaze has been directed.We picture it there, and it is full of life.Then, as the lines encourage us to, we imagine the conditional death and burial of the hand (and presumably of the body to which it belongs), and confront our mysterious, though never explained, conscience-driven desire to reverse that hypothetical death.Finally, and as I would suggest, crucially, we are asked to envision the graphic self-sacrifice that would be required to reanimate the limb, which involves a transfusion of "blood" from our "own heart" (which will be left "dry") to the speaker's "veins [through which] red life might stream again" (5-6).At the end of the first six and a half lines, we return our attention to the living hand as the speaker utters his final injunction and performs the implied action that accompanies it: "see here it is-/ I hold it towards you-" (7-8).Yet in the brief interim between our initial focus on the speaker's hand in the first line and the final gesture whereby that hand moves towards us in the last, the hand seems to undergo a morbid transformation from living to something else: a hand that has died and been reanimated.Not only is the hand undead in this way when the speaker delivers what we can quite fittingly think of as the fragment's punchline, but the limb we imaginatively "see" being thrust at us in that final moment seems to have been amputated from its speaker's body.This startlingly physical immediacy and its shock effect is produced in a number of ways in these few lines, which are composed in the form of a direct conversational address that accompanies the primary action of foregrounding the speaker's anatomical hand.Keats's opening move is one key to achieving the severing effect.His use of the objective pronoun "this" instead of the possessive pronoun "my" to designate the "living hand" distances and at the EDGE http://journals.library.mun.ca/ateVolume 1 (2010) at the EDGE http://journals.library.mun.ca/ateVolume 1 (2010)depersonalizes the hand, which is referred to by the speaker three more times as "it" (2, 7, 8), further rendering it an object rather than identifying it as a part of the speaker's subjectivity.Without this alienating and oddly disembodying move, I doubt the final line would have the same impact.Moreover, the listener/reader is asked to imagine the speaker's veins transfused with the listener's blood, and since moving blood from one body to another compromises the boundaries of those individual bodies, this transfusion image contributes to the sense of amputation, as does the speaker's earlier prediction that "if" the hand were "in the icy silence of the tomb" it would "haunt [the listener's] days" as a ghostly separation from the body.The fragment, a single speech act, clearly works dramatically rather than lyrically, casting the reader as a listener: a physically present addressee or silent interlocutor.The lines'

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