Keats Part Two

Back in May I spent a week in the Italian capital. I wanted to sit in the sun and enjoy a glass of chilled wine, but it rained. A lot. The climate is so worryingly unpredictable these days. Actually the real reason for my trip was one of pilgrimage; not with the obvious destination of St. Peter's, which I did visit, even climbing to the top of the huge dome, no I was on Keats part two. Having laid a wreath at his memorial in Westminster Abbey back in the autumn, I thought it was about time I visited his actual grave. The bonus was the rest of Rome thrown in for free.

Keats is buried in the Protestant Cemetery, but before visiting that, there was another place I just had to go At the bottom of the Spanish Steps, on the right as you look up at them,  there is a tall town house - now the Keats-Shelley House museum - , one apartment in which Keats lived during his last desperate sojourn in Rome. He had been sent to Italy for the sake of his health. He was dying from tuberculosis. No amount of clean, fresh, dry air was going to cure that, but there we are. A disease that consumed so many, it is/was the nastiest of ways to go; coughing up blood and not been able to breathe. I know some of that. We think it is largely cured in the West, and so it is, but not so in other parts of the world. I had to have a chest Xray for my South African work visa, for example.

So it was here in a now buzzing location that lovely Johnny Keats at just twenty five years old breathed his last on 23 February 1821. His bedroom is kitted out with period furniture, and has its original painted ceiling; the one he stared up at. On the day I visited the museum, there were so few people there I had this special place to myself for almost half an hour. We had nice chat about poetry and finding the perfect image, while the crowds swarmed the Steps outside. I wandered the rest of the museum pleased to see treasures like an all too familiar painting of Shelley, and Oscar Wilde's manuscript of his sonnet on visiting Keats' grave. It's a quiet treasure trove for the literary-minded. Linger over the death mask and first editions of Keats' and Shelley's work.

Too far away to go the same day on foot, I waited until the next morning to find the cemetery. Just behind the Pyramid of Cestius at Porta San Paolo is the green oasis, more garden than cemetery really. Keats' grave is easy to find, there being a helpful sign and charming guardiennes of welcome. Famously un-named - here lies one whose name is writ on water - , it is only clear that it is his because his friend, the artist, Joseph Severn is buried beside him and his grave notes the friendship and Keats' name. Later an appalling poem was put on a plaque on a nearby wall.

I sat for a while on a convenient bench and we had another early morning discussion about poetry and London. Or rather I talked and Johnny listened again.

I left him to find Shelley. Drowned in the Gulf of Spezia the following summer and cremated on the nearest beach, as witnessed by Bryon, Shelley's ashes are buried here. The spot is marked by a large horizontal stone near the far wall of the cemetery. Not exactly easy to find and not as beautiful a memorial as he deserves. He clearly needs more friends.

Keats' birthday wreath laying, Westminster Abbey

Every year on Hallowe'en when almost everyone else is either busy carving pumpkins, or blithely ignoring the horror fest, a small band of Keats devotees participates in something rather wonderful.

Until this year I was entirely ignorant of Keats' birthday wreath laying ceremony in Westminster Abbey. And it was only by virtue of a small innocuous post on Facebook that I not only found out about it, but ended up being one of the participating readers. I wrote in praise of the new Hockney window, which I was keen to see but too mean to spend the twenty pound entrance fee on. Judith Palmer, director of the Poetry Society, came to my rescue by offering to get me in for free, and also inviting me to read in the service.

Presided over by the charming and welcoming Rev. Jane Sinclair, who is one of the Canons in Residence at Westminster, we gathered in Poet's corner under the Keats memorial, which with Shelley's is high up above Shakespeare's. After a few prayers for the life of Keats, 223 yesterday, and the beauty of his poetry, I read the sonnet On the Grasshopper and the Cricket, also known by its first line 'The poetry of earth is never dead'. It was an ecological choice chiming with the climate change protest going on outside the Abbey on Parliament Square, but also appropriate for the change of seasons, now that we have moved from a prolonged period of very warm weather into the cold of winter.

Here it is in full:

The Poetry of earth is never dead:    

  When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,    

  And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run    

From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;    

That is the Grasshopper’s—he takes the lead       

  In summer luxury,—he has never done    

  With his delights; for when tired out with fun    

He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.    

The poetry of earth is ceasing never:    

  On a lone winter evening, when the frost      

    Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills    

The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,    

  And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,    

    The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.

I especially love the idea of the grasshopper as taking 'the lead/in summer luxury'. Lead on.

Katy Evans-Bush read Keats' letter of February 1818 to his friend Reynolds. It is one of the more important of Keats' correspondence as it explains in part his view of poetry:

'We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us, and, if we do not agree, seems to put its hand into its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself - but with its subject.'

No self-conscious experimental showing off for Keats then.

Chris Hardy read another sonnet: 'When I have fears I may cease to be', which is so deeply affecting as Keats frets about dying before he has written much of what he wants to. Finally Mab Jones offered Keats' entreaty to his siblings: 'Be as happy as you can. Think of me, and for my sake be cheerful'.  Not a bad mantra to live one's life by.

The most beautiful wreath was laid. It was a perfectly designed with a subtle colour palette. To Autumn made flesh, if you will. I left the short service feeling honoured to have been a part of it and ever so slightly shivery.

Of course, once in the Abbey, it was time for a little wander. Dwelling in Poets corner, we named checked our favourites of the 100 or so poets buried or memorialised there. I commented on the great lack of women's names aside from the obvious - Austen, Gaskell, Barrett-Browning, Brontes. As usual there is much to do to redress this imbalance as there are only nine women, aside from a couple of actresses and opera singers. Where are the memorials to Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Christina Rossetti, Virginia Woolf, Stevie Smith, Doris Lessing, and Iris Murdoch, to name but a worthy few? I feel a campaign coming on.

As to the Hockney window, which was after all the point of this whole escapade, it is a dramatic and exciting addition to the Abbey. Hockney has imported an abstraction of the Yorkshire countryside in Spring - all hawthorn - to bring much cheer and dazzle to the nation's church. Chapeau to the Dean for his vision.