However, when Fanny heard that Keats was nursing his seriously ill younger brother, her efforts to help touched Keats and when she asked him to teach her about poetry he agreed. The poetry soon became a romantic remedy that worked not only to sort their differences, but also to fuel an impassioned love affair.
When Fanny's alarmed mother and Keats' best friend finally awoke to their attachment, the relationship had an unstoppable momentum. Intensely and helplessly absorbed in each other, the young lovers were swept deeply into powerful new sensations, "I have the feeling as if we're dissolving," Keats wrote to her. Together they rode a wave of romantic obsession that only deepened as their troubles mounted.
When Keats fell ill a year later, the two young lovers faced no marriage but separation. In Keats' own poignant words, "forever panting and forever young." [D-Man2010]