John Keats and the Leanan Sidhe

For today’s post, I have decided to share a short story I have written about what really may have happened to the great poet John Keats!

John Keats and the Leanan Sidhe

by Maranda Wabik

So many of you may know the tale of the tragic Romantic poet John Keats.   He died very young from consumption, right?   Well, I am here to finally share the true story of what happened to the great poet!   You see he did not die young, in fact, he did not die at all.

John Keats fell in love with a faery woman, of the Sidhe.   She brought him into her homeland of Faery after his supposed death in the mortal realm.    You may ask how I know this to be true, and the answer is that I am that faery woman!   My name is Leanna and I am called this in reference to the fact that I am a member of the tribe of Faery women known as the Leanan Sidhe.   We are often called the Faery Lovers because our nature is to find talented mortal men to become our lovers.   My sisters and I go on to form bonds with our mortal mates, so strong that if we ever leave them the men wither away and die.

It is this nature of our species that inspired my beloved John when he composed my favorite of all of his poems “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.”   When he first read this to me aloud, he asked me to never make him suffer the fate of the Knight of his tale.    That is where our love story took a turn.

You see, I first came to John in the early years of his writing attracted to the talent of this young and beautiful poet.   He was beguiled by my beauty, telling me that the wildness of my long auburn hair and the lightness of my faery footstep made him think me a Goddess made manifest.    It was not long before I shared the truth of my nature and we began to have regular sexual liaisons.   He would rise from our bed at night and take his pen and begin to write draft after draft of his poems by candlelight.   I had heard of the strength of our Faery magick when we bedded our mates taking this form of passionate creation from my earliest days, but this was the first time I had experienced it firsthand.

There never was a more passionate sexual connection than that between myself and John Keats.   Each time we came together my magic would ignite and the whole world in the room would come alive with electric energy.   The wildness of my Faery blood would flow out of me and into the Universe making me feel like a powerful Creatrix Love Goddess!   Each time John brought me to orgasmic completion I would feel my magic making the world around me ever more beautiful.    As a Leanan Sidhe, I am both the inspiring muse and the artistic creator in equal measure.   This is why the world around us is ever more beautiful, looking like a Faery Woodland, the more time we spend with our lovers.   Sexual satisfaction is what makes us more fully alive and more empowered!   It must be noted that I am the true inspiration for all of his gorgeous imaginings.   It is me who is the “Faery’s Child” of his poetic rhyme.   It was not long before our passions made him the most popular of his younger generation of Romantic Poets.

In time, I was called back to my homeland of Faery.   This was not long after the publication of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” They asked me to report my findings on the power of my seductive capability.   I showed them reviews of John’s poems, and this pleased my sisters and mothers in the Faery Realm.    I was a true successor to our lineage of great romantic Muses.    It must be noted that in more recent times the younger generation of Leanan Sidhe would become the great Rock and Roll muses, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, but more on that later.    This was not a surprise to myself or John, as we both realized that our love affair was the Rock and Roll love story of the early 19th century!

It was during this meeting with my superiors in Faery that I told them I was truly in love with John and could not bare the thought of him dying when I ultimately had to return home.    There was a longstanding law amongst our kind that forbid us from forming a bond of Cosmic Faery Mate, as this would remove us from inspiring new artists.   However, there was a loophole.   If we agreed to become mothers siring and training the next generation of Leanan Sidhe muses then there was hope.

All I needed to do was convince John to become my husband and renounce his human status, seeming to die of a wasting illness, in order to have him be the father of the next generation of Leanan Sidhe daughters.   It was time for new blood in our ranks, as the current generation was centuries old, and none had found a mate like my John to father a new generation, one worthy of activating this loophole.

When I came back to his world and informed John of the possibility of us being together forever, he agreed quicker than I ever thought a human would.   He explained that ever since he met me in the Woodland next to the Fountain I was tending when I was sent to meet and seduce a new artist, he knew he would marry and sire offspring with none other than me!   He dropped to his knee and produced a gorgeous ring of Sapphire (a stone of everlasting fidelity) wrought in beautiful white gold and asked me to be his bride.   I accepted gratefully and we went about faking his death on earth!

Once he had “died of consumption” I brought him to my land of Faery.   He took up residence in my own “elfin grot” as I began to collect the herbs I would need to make him immortal!   Over the course of the next months, I brewed the powerful potion that along with my own immortal faery magick would make my beloved an immortal faery man.

On the night of the full moon, also our wedding night, I finally was able to make John Keats, my husband, and poetic lover, an immortal!   We have lived and sired many beautiful Faery daughters who have gone on to be trained under my tutelage in the arts of the poetic muse.

Some half a century ago, one of our daughters fell as deeply as I had and asked to be the next mother of our lineage.    I could not be prouder, as we have both been the teachers of my granddaughters of Leanan Sidhe ever since.   John and our Lizard King of a son-in-law get on quite well!   Our daughter Pamela was able to fake her own death after she was successful in inserting herself into the memories of her fake human family in order to make their love affair seem human.   Ah, I can hear the music starting as John and Jim are going to entertain the family with spoken word poetry, so I must bid this tale adieu! 

~I hope that you have enjoyed this story of Faery lovers and human artists.   Did you catch all my references?  Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

Note on Image: I created the image at the top of the post to go along with this story. It includes a collage of several paintings inspired by Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.”

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