The Vale of Soul-Making
Background
In the winter of 1818 John Keats nursed his youngest brother, Tom, through tuberculosis until Tom died, at nineteen. His other brother, George, had just emigrated to America with his new wife, Georgiana. Keats missed them terribly, and through the spring of 1819 he kept a long journal-letter to them, adding a few pages every few days — news, jokes, gossip, new poems, and whatever he was thinking about.
One day he was thinking about suffering. The world, he wrote, is usually called “a vale of tears.” He proposed another name: the vale of Soul-making, a school where the heart learns to read and a person becomes someone.
That same spring he wrote the great odes. Less than two years later he was dead, at twenty-five, of the same disease that had killed Tom.
The passage
Hampstead
Spring 1819
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The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and superstitious is “a vale of tears,” from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven — What a little circumscribed straightened notion! Call the world if you please “The vale of Soul-making.” Then you will find out the use of the world (I am speaking now in the highest terms for human nature admitting it to be immortal which I will here take for granted for the purpose of showing a thought which has struck me concerning it) I say ‘Soul-making’ — Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence. There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions — but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself.
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I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read — I will call the human heart the horn Book used in that School — and I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that School and its horn book. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways. Not merely is the Heart a Hornbook, It is the Mind’s Bible, it is the Mind’s experience, it is the text from which the Mind or Intelligence sucks its identity. As various as the Lives of Men are — so various become their souls, and thus does God make individual beings, Souls, Identical Souls of the sparks of his own essence.
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Keats’s spelling and emphasis, from Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends, edited by Sidney Colvin (1891), which is free to read on Project Gutenberg. A horn book was a child’s first reader: a paddle of wood with the alphabet on it under a thin sheet of horn.