Cricketer John Keats injured himself the way A. J. Burnett recently did!

On this date (almost), a Great Poet recorded his failings in a late-winter, spring-training game of cricket. This would be March 19, 1819: 193 years, roughly 70,500 days (counting Leap Years like this one), or 1,692,000 hours ago for the curious. The five-foot-one, ultra-coordinated cricketer—to our own time the greatest prodigy in English poetry—wrote to his brother and sister, George and Georgina, the following letter:

“Yesterday, I got a black eye—the first time I took a cricket bat—Brown who is always one’s friend in a disaster applied a leech to the eyelid, and there is no inflammation this morning though the ball hit me directly on the sight—’t was a white ball.”