In Monckton Milnes's (Lord Houghton's) "Life and Letters of John Keats"
it is related that Keats, one day, on finding a stain of blood upon his
lips after coughing, said to his friend Charles Brown: "I know the color
of that blood; it is arterial blood; I cannot be deceived. That drop
is my death-warrant. I must die." Who that ever read the passage
could forget it? David Gray did not, for he versified the incident as
happening to himself and appropriated, as his own, Keats's comment:
Last night, on coughing slightly with sharp pain,
There came arterial blood, and with a sigh
Of absolute grief I cried in bitter vein,
That drop is my death-warrant; I must die.
The incident was likely enough a personal experience, but the comment
should have been placed in quotation marks. I know of few stranger
things in literature than this poet's dramatization of another man's
pathos. Even Keats's epitaph--_Here lies one whose name_ _was writ in
water_--finds an echo in David Gray's _Below lies one whose name was
traced in sand_.
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