Thoughts on the 200th Anniversary of John Keats's Death, 1821–2021

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.

As utterly preposterous as it may seem given my enduring passion for the life and writings of John Keats, not to mention my rather hopeless propensity for all things melancholy and sentimental, I somehow failed to take into account just how difficult the 200th anniversary of his death would be for me and that any sort of meaningful writing would be, quite simply, unendurable.  I had foolishly mused to myself that I would, like my other Keatsian essays and mad ramblings, wake up early, or perhaps not sleep at all, and write down whatever brooding madness was swimming through my mind at the time.  How damned foolish of me.  Truly.  For how could I write a word when such a heartbreaking anniversary quite effectively cured me of my once incurable sickness of cacoethes scribendi which, I had hoped, would never find its remedy.  Alas.

I have tried many times to write…but no, I could not.  It has been too much for me to think on it … The recollection of poor Keats hangs dreadfully upon me.  I see him at every glance.

However, my original plan for the bicentennial of John Keats’s death—planned sometime in early 2015 before my first visit to his grave in Rome during my “Haunted Summer Grand Tour” of 2016 when my obsessions with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein led me to the Villa Diodati in Switzerland—was to travel once again to where he is buried within that most “romantic and lonely cemetery” in Italy that “might make one in love with death,” lie flowers at his grave, whisper words to the haunted air, and be alone with my thoughts.  But, needless to even mention, the plague of 2020, or, The Year Without Happiness, swept across the globe, breathed its virulent contagion of death upon the earth, put millions of people in lockdown and quarantine, closed businesses and even countries, and ruined countless lives—financially, emotionally, psychologically and, in far too many cases, permanently.  For almost the entirety of this damned year of 2020, beginning in early March where I am from, an “infectious pestilence did reign,” and, nearing a full year later, it still wears the crown.

Thus, because I could not travel abroad to Italy, visiting not only Keats’s grave “among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies,” but also the very room he died in by the Spanish Steps at 26 Piazza di Spagna, known now as the Keats-Shelley House, I instead decided to honor the memory of my dear Keats by writing him a poem.  As I have already mentioned in the very first paragraph, writing in prose, no matter how madly rhapsodic or elegiacally sepulchral, was not a possibility for me, but poetically I could possibly put my broken thoughts obscurely into verse—although perhaps too obscurely, which is one reason for my poem’s unrestrained use of epigraphs.  It is an absolute trifle, to be sure, and utterly unworthy of Keats’s brilliant name, but it was all that my silent muse would allow me on such a heartbreaking occasion.

The Life of poor Keats is ended at last; he died at the Age of 25.  He used to say he should effect nothing on which he would rest his Fame till he was 30, and all his Hopes are over at 25 … One of the very few Poets of this Day is gone.

The poem, which I titled “Keats Stone,” is partly inspired by his beloved Fanny Brawne’s sewing stone of polished white carnelian that she put into his “still living hand” before he left for Italy, as well as the beauty and “glamoury” of the cemetery with its violets and daisies, including the epitaph engraven upon his tombstone of “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water,” and partly by Fanny’s last love-letters that were “too worldly” for him and thus placed into his coffin unopened and unread.  Although I am dreadfully unsatisfied with my poem of elegiac fantasy, wondering still if I should have even published it on my website (I have worse poems on there, to be sure, but this piece is a tribute to Keats and thus it matters more), you can read it here:

https://www.clayfjohnson.com/poems/keats-stone

And yet, as much as I hate to admit such a grotesque gesture of poetic travesty, the poem for Keats, written under forced inspiration as it was for it did not at all come “as naturally as the leaves to a tree,” was actually another version of a piece I had written last summer during the plague year.  However, to be fair, or to make excuses, last year’s poem was indeed written with the anniversary of Keats’s death in mind—with a particular focus on both the polished oval of white carnelian that Keats “kept continually in his hand” and his gravestone’s epitaph of “writ in water”—for it was submitted to two publications with the hopes that it would be published around the time of his tragic bicentenary in February.  Not surprisingly, neither publication wanted “Keats Stone,” although one of them wanted another poem within the batch.  Perhaps somewhat ironically, or not at all, the poem that was accepted was yet another piece I had written last year with Keats in mind and, again, not surprisingly, yet another piece that was originally rejected—despair not, for such statements are not meant to savour strongly of bitterness (or disappointment, as the original Austen phrase goes), as I was not all under the delusion of an acceptance letter.

The original rejection publication in question was, in fact, a contest: the Keats-Shelley Prize of 2020, and Songbird was its theme.  This was irresistible to me—Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” is a profound favorite of mine and the first poem that I ever accidentally memorized—so it was imperative to submit something, even if I knew without a shadow of doubt that whatever poem I submitted would not even come within a farthing of winning.  Even still, it is a poem that I am still quite satisfied with (something somewhat rare for me with regard to my poems), and one that was accepted elsewhere on the second try which, I suppose, ain’t bad.  The poem, “Requiem” as I called it, was written with climate change in mind, especially the Amazon rainforest fires of 2019, with a special interest on the disheartening topic of both hedgehog and nightingale decline in Britain.  It was published in November of 2020 in the Woodland Issue by, quite appropriately, Nightingale & Sparrow.

Oddly enough, or, to be perfectly honest, annoyingly enough, the prize’s theme for 2021 is Writ in Water and, as I have already rattled on about, my original poem from August 2020, written months before the theme’s announcement, was not only inspired by Keats’s nameless, heartbreakingly tragic epitaph, but I actually ended my poem with it—both the August 2020 version as well as the February 2021 version that I posted on my website today.  No, foreseeing such a theme on the 200th anniversary of Keats’s death was not exactly prescient of me, but I cannot help feeling unpleasantly nettled by it given that I am an absolute unknown writer without the slightest hint of writerly representation.  Unknown, uncommissioned, unworthy.  Yes, such seemingly trivial matters stir the ever-brewing storm within one’s mind, wearing down a person little by little, eating away at the smallest shadow of inspiration like a cancer until, as a broken spirit of quiet regret, realize, at last, that such endless literary toiling, “being in itself a nothing,” invariably comes to nothing.

I have been beating about in the tempest of his mind so long. To-night he has talked very much to me, but so easily, that he, at last, fell into a pleasant sleep…Among the many things he has requested of me to-night, this is the principal one,—that on his grave-stone shall be this,—

HERE LIES ONE WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN WATER

Although Keats’s actual “posthumous existence” has been one of unquestionable immortality and everlastingness, “among the English Poets after my death” as he so determinedly wrote in October of 1818, when he requested his nameless gravestone just days before his death in February of 1821, there was neither determination nor hope left in his heart, for he truly believed that he had written nothing immortal and that he was about to go to the grave as an absolute failure—there was not the faintest glow of lambent fire within poor Keats’s dying mind that he had obtained any sort of poetic success in his tragically short literary career.  No, tortured by literary ambitions ever since he took up the pen, Keats knew within his broken heart that he was dying only to become nothing more than “common dust” buried in some lonely Italian cemetery.  And, perhaps most tragic of all when one considers what truly matters at the very end when Death is imminent and lingering by one’s sickbed, Keats believed that he had failed his beloved Fanny Brawne, thus, to his already tortured mind during his final weeks of “posthumous life,” not only was he tormented by the constant anguish of dying a failed poet, he suffered the crushing despair of believing himself dying a failed lover as well.

How horrid was the chance of slipping into the ground instead of into your arms—the difference is amazing, Love … Let me have another opportunity of years before me and I will not die without being remember’d.

And there is the greatest tragedy of it all.  For us, Keats represents everything that is eternal and everlasting, all that is timeless, deathless, continuous and ceaseless, and the purest and most perfect expression of poetic immortality—the “sweetest ecstasy” as I called it in my essay last year on the bicentennial of Keats’s March 1820 letters to Fanny when the prospect of death weighed heavily upon me.  But for Keats, there was not the faintest prophetic glimpse into his own posthumous remembrance, no hope to “be among the English Poets,” and, with the prospect of death a certainty, no comfort of that sweetest ecstasy.  “If I should die,” he wrote in a letter to his beloved in February of 1820 just a year before his death, “I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory.”  If only Keats could have known.

Death is so final.  Death is so unbearably quiet.  And yet, for Keats, once so full of hope and life, once so consumed by that inspired light, who once wrote that he would “sooner fail than not be among the greatest,” had now realized his present fate and thus resigned.  He knew that he was out of time, that there was neither hope for recovery nor chance of life, and, knowing that there was only one remedy to his “present torture,” Keats now desired to die.  “He has now given up all thoughts, hopes, or even wish for recovery,” wrote his friend and companion Joseph Severn in a letter to Mrs. Brawne on 11 January 1821.  And according to Severn once more just fifteen days later in another letter dated 26 January, less than a month before Keats would die, the idea of death had become Keats’s only comfort:

“Keats is desiring his death with dreadful earnestness—the idea of death seems his only comfort—the only prospect of ease—he talks of it with delight—it soothes his present torture.”

Severn would write once again of this “comfort” just thirteen days later in a letter to Keats’s good friend Charles Brown dated 8 February 1821, only sixteen days before Keats’s death:

“I have hoped he would recover, but the doctor shook his head, and, as for Keats, he would not hear that he was better—the thought of recovery is beyond every thing dreadful to him.  We now dare not perceive any improvement, for the hope of death seems his only comfort.  He talks of the quiet grave as the first rest he can ever have.”

This was not some romantic death, if such a thing can be called.  This was torture.  This was misery.  Keats died in despair.  He died without the comfort of his beloved Fanny Brawne whom he hauntingly saw “eternally vanishing” before him—“O that I could be buried near where she lives…to see her handwriting would break my heart…to see her name written would be more than I can bear,” he wrote in November 1820.  He died broken-hearted, haunted by the ghost of love lost forever and the certainty of literary failure.  He died believing that all his feverish literary efforts amounted to nothing, that his inspired sufferings poetical were all for nothing, that his anguish for immortality was for nothing, and that he achieved absolutely nothing.  Keats, whose luminous poetry will be remembered for all time, breathed his last within the air of quiet death, embraced the quiet grave, and died believing that he would be remembered for nothing.

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep
He hath awakened from the dream of life
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings.

And yet, as I wrote almost one year ago today, Keats, who was cheated of life, can now never die.  With his singular brilliance he captured the ever-beating heart of poetic immortality.  “He lives, he wakes—‘tis Death is dead, not he’ / Mourn not for Adonais,” as Shelley wrote in Adonais (1821), his brilliant elegy to Keats that he immediately began composing when he learned of his death on April 11 which, to me, is one of his most perfect and beautiful poems—Shelley himself wrote that his Adonais was “a highly wrought piece of art, perhaps better in point of composition than any thing I have written.”  There are many, many lines from Shelley’s elegiac lament for Keats that have stayed with me upon first reading.

He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird…

From the world’s bitter wind
Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb.
What Adonais is, why fear we to become?…

‘Tis Adonais calls! oh, hasten thither,
No more let Life divide what Death can join together.

But, to achieve that poetic immortality, that eternal remembrance, that sweetest ecstasy, Keats had to die.  There was no other way for it.  Through death, Keats became what he was destined to become.  Perhaps the Austrian writer Franz Grillparzer said it best in his elegiac oration during the funeral of my dear Ludwig van Beethoven in 1827: “You have not lost him but won him.  No living man enters the halls of immortality.  The body must die before the gates are opened.  He whom you mourn is now among the greatest men of all time, unassailable forever.”  Are there any other words that can so eloquently describe the sort of immortality that Keats drank when he breathed his last at the age of twenty-five?  Although I mourn him today, I can rejoice in the certainty that he will be remembered for all time.

Thus he was, thus he died, thus he will live for all time.

There is nothing more I can write on this day.  As Keats wrote in May of 1818, “I am now so depressed that I have not an Idea to put to paper.”  However, I shall end this essay, one that has been most difficult for me to write, with quotes from Keats and his contemporaries that aided in inspiration for my poem “Keats Stone.”  Although I am not in the habit of explaining my poems, though my overfondness for obscurities of “Orphic arcanæ” and esoteric duality sometimes forces me to, I believe that some of the passages below will be most useful to those not as familiar with Keats as I am.  The quotes might also help illustrate, I hope, that my poem is not just some piece of random fantasy written on a whim without the least bit of thought or consequence, but rather, that my piece to honor the memory of the immortal Keats, was written with careful consideration to significant facets of Keats’s life, writings, death, and “posthumous existence,” and that my refrain of “violets and daisies” actually does have important meaning, as well as the “Orphean liminality,” the “whispering enchantments nepenthean,” and, perhaps most especially, Keats’s beloved Fanny Brawne’s “sewing-stone of polished white carnelian.”

In the same letter written in May of 1818, Keats continues: “My hand feels like lead, and yet it is an unpleasant numbness.  It does not take away the pain of existence.  I don’t know what to write.”  Like Keats, I can write no more.

Below are poignant quotes that inspired particular lines from my poem.  They were all written by Joseph Severn, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Keats’s beloved Fanny Brawne.  However, one of them, recorded by Severn, was purportedly said by Keats while on his deathbed.

“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.”

—Joseph Severn, recorded in his memoirs, or, as the late Stanley Plumly (1939 – 2019) wrote in Posthumous Keats (2008), “from yet another unpublished series of notes that Severn filed under ‘Recollections’”

“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.”

—John Keats (these poetic and brilliantly Gothic words were apparently Keats’s response to where he would be buried just four days before his death; they were recorded by Severn in a letter dated 6 March 1821)

“He was buried very near the monument of Caius Cestius, a few yards from Dr. Bell and an infant of Mr. Shelley’s.  The good-hearted Doctor [James Clark, Keats’s physician at Rome] made the men put turfs of daisies upon the grave.  He said, ‘this would be poor Keats’s wish, could he know it.’”

—Joseph Severn, in the same letter dated 6 March 1821

“The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies.  It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.”

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, from his preface to his poem Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion, etc. (1821), which he wrote shortly after learning the news of Keats’s death

“The English burying-place is a green slope near the walls, under the pyramidal tomb of Cestius, and is, I think, the most beautiful and solemn cemetery I ever beheld. To see the sun shining on its bright grass, fresh, when we first visited it, with the autumnal dews, and hear the whispering of the wind among the leaves of the trees which have overgrown the tomb of Cestius, and the soil which is stirring in the sun-warm earth, and to mark the tombs, mostly of women and young people who were buried there, one might, if one were to die, desire the sleep they seem to sleep.”

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, written from Naples to his friend Thomas Love Peacock in a letter dated 22 December 1818

“He kept continually in his hand a polished, oval, white carnelian, the gift of his widowing love, and at times it seemed his only consolation, the only thing left him in this world clearly tangible. Many letters which he was unable to read came for him. Some he allowed me to read to him; others were too worldly,—for, as he said, he had ‘already journeyed far beyond them.’ There were two letters, I remember, for which he had no words, but he made me understand that I was to place them on his heart within his winding-sheet.”

—Joseph Severn, recorded again in his memoirs, written some forty years after Keats’s death when he would “behold Keats’s dear image again in memory”

“From time to time he gave me all his directions as to what he wanted done after his death.  It was in the same sad hour when he told me with greater agitation than he had shown on any other subject, to put the letter which had just come from Miss Brawne (which he was unable to bring himself to read, or even open), with any other that should arrive too late to reach him in life, inside his winding-sheet on his heart—it was then, also, that he asked that I should see cut upon his gravestone as sole inscription, not his name, but simply ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water.’”

—Joseph Severn, recorded in his memoirs

“I duly performed my promise that I would place the 3 unopened letters within the winding sheet on his heart.”

—Joseph Severn, recorded in his memoirs

“All that grieves me now is that I was not with him, and so near it as I was…for it is now known that his recovery was impossible before he left us, and he might have died here with so many friends to soothe him and me, me with him…in a letter from Mr Severn written about a fortnight before he died and which was not shown me, so that I thought he would live months at least if he did not recover, he says ‘he is still alive & calm’… In that letter he mentions that he had given directions how he would be buried, the purse you sent him and your last letter (which he never read, for he would never open either your letters or mine after he left England) with some hair, I believe of mine, he desired to be placed in his coffin. The truth is I cannot very well go on at present with this…had he returned I should have been his wife and he would have lived with us.”

—Fanny Brawne, Keats’s beloved, written to Keats’s sister in a letter dated 27 March 1821