Keats Stone
Keats Stone
I shall soon be laid in the quiet grave—thank God for the quiet grave—O! I can feel the cold earth upon me—the daisies growing over me—O for this quiet—it will be my first.
Violets were his favourite flowers, and he joyed to hear how they overspread the graves. He assured me that he seemed already to feel the flowers growing over him.
The letters I put into the coffin with my own hand.
Buried like a burning bright star beneath
Elfin seas of deepest blue violets,
Breathing deep to drink an Orphean sleep
Of whispering enchantments nepenthean,
Sibilant and serpentine, listening
For liminality in quiet breathing,
Coiling, creeping between each and every
Melting shade of Lamian glamoury,
Pouring spell-craft into a melody
Captured deep within a white carnelian—
A love-charm from Endymion’s brilliant queen
Love-touched with bewitcheries and love-dreams
Like love-deaths from nightingale ecstasies,
Sight-reading skies of opal and pearl
Singing to the stars of another world
Buried like a burning bright star beneath
Untamed grasses of wild white daisies,
Winding entwined through elfin seas
Of deepest blue violets, breathing deep
To drink its Lethean sleep, emerging
From the glamoury of perilous shadow
As dreamy ghost-paths glistening like snow,
Slithering lucid and luminous
Through faerie-song of silver voices,
Melodies from noctilucent clouds
As if the moon melted into the echo
Of its own interlunar music,
And the skies dripped liquid moonlight
Like tears frozen and spellbound
By astral visions of liminal shine
Buried like a burning bright star beneath
Elfin seas of deepest blue violets,
Beneath ghostly paths of wild white daisies
Glistening like a meadow of snow
Lies in the earth a pale carnelian stone,
Oval-shaped, a fragment of cloud-lightning
Cradled within a hand of bone,
Dry of blood but never once cold,
Changed by death and decay
But untouched by the quiet grave,
For deep within that living piece
Of feverish liminality streams
Red life born from death of a single star-beam:
Burning eternal as a buried love-charm
Singing one song of two broken hearts
Beneath violets and daisies
Restless atop a poet’s grave,
Rests in the earth the mortal remains
Of an immortal name, for when inwrapt
In the hour of crepuscular embrace
Fate cut his thread of liminality,
Silver-spun by incorporeal light
When the Queen-Moon wept ecstasies
Upon Endymion’s eternal sleep,
He welcomed the air of quiet death
By smiling on his own despair, grasping
In his still living hand his brightest star,
Brighter than bright, fairer than fair,
Whispering with Orphean charm
Soft words of his dying last breaths
Touch has a memory: eternity.
Shall I awake and find all this a dream?
But when he fell into a sleep
Of unapparent immortality,
Slipping beneath the elfin seas
Instead of into her arms, it was her
Sewing-stone of polished white carnelian
That captured the echoing shards
Of two self-consuming stars,
Tracing each shape of cold mortality
Between two ever-beating hearts,
Voicing their voiceless memories
Upon visions of spring that never came:
For if Life let two hearts divide
Then may Death let love reunite
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
For not even breathing deep to drink
Of his Lethean sleep could unsee
And forget what can never be unseen,
Thus, placed lastly within his winding-sheet,
Unopened and unread, were feverish
Love-letters that he could not bear to read—
Do I wake or sleep? No, there is no music,
There is no extinguished spirit beneath,
For he has journeyed far beyond the reach
Of his Orphean liminality,
And her loving last words are too worldly
For a heart that once loved with otherworldly scars:
His whose name was writ in water
And captured by the stars.
“Keats Stone” was written on the bicentenary of Keats’s death, 23 February 2021. It was later published as the final poem in A Ride Through Faerie & Other Poems, released on 10 December 2021.