Grave Responsibilities

There’s a cat sanctuary in the grounds of the Pyramid in Rome. This rather incongruous Egyptian style pyramid was built in 30 BC as a tomb. It was later incorporated into the section of the Aurelian Walls that now border a cemetery designated by one guidebook as being for “non-Catholic cults’. The graveyard is also known as the Protestant.cemetery or the English cemetery although it contains the graves of many who were neither English nor Protestant.

The poet John Keats is buried there side by side with the friend who nursed him through his last illness – the painter Joseph Severn.

The ashes – or some of them at least – of Percy Shelley are buried nearby and are found by way of a path along the back wall.

When Thomas Hardy visited the cemetery in 1887 he noted that the graves of the “matchless singers” – Keats and Shelley – draw more attention than the grander pyramid tomb of the forgotten Roman, Caius Cestius that shadows them:

He does a finer thing,

In beckoning pilgrim feet
With marble finger high
To where, by shadowy wall and history-haunted street,
Those matchless singers lie … 

from “At the Pyramid of Cestius Near the Graves of Shelley and Keats”, Thomas Hardy 1887

“Thy name was writ in water—it shall stand/ And tears like mine will keep thy memory green.”

When Oscar Wilde visited the cemetery a decade before Hardy he knelt in devotion at Keats’ grave declaring it “the holiest place in Rome”.

The Grave of Keats

Rid of the world’s injustice, and his pain,
He rests at last beneath God’s veil of blue:
Taken from life when life and love were new
The youngest of the martyrs here is lain,
Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain. 
No cypress shades his grave, no funeral yew,
But gentle violets weeping with the dew
Weave on his bones an ever-blossoming chain.
O proudest heart that broke for misery!
O sweetest lips since those of Mitylene! 
O poet-painter of our English Land!
Thy name was writ in water——it shall stand:
And tears like mine will keep thy memory green,
As Isabella did her Basil-tree.

       – Oscar Wilde, 1877

The cats keep watch over them all, patrolling the graves of the famous and not so famous and all those that visit them.

Keats and Joseph Severn set off for Rome in mid September 1820. Keats had been advised that he would not survive another winter in England.

By then he was already suffering from the effects of self-administered mercury and from the ‘family disease'”- consumption, tuberculosis He separated from the person – Fanny Brawne – who made his life worth living and set sail for Italy in the hope of saving his life.

He was 24 years old.

It was a difficult two month journey with delays, rough seas and storms in the Bay of Biscay, and an enforced quarantine in Naples. it was mid November before they arrived in Rome.

They took rooms on the second floor in a house beside the Spanish Steps – Piazza di Spagna 26 – in an area known then as the English ghetto for the many British visitors who stayed and settled there.

The house is now the home of the Keats-Shelley museum – an air-conditioned oasis of scholarly calm amid the tourist frenzy of the city. 

Joseph Severn did not find the accommodation so pleasing. They shared the second floor with the landlady who reported Keats’ illness  to the authorities and Severn referred to as  “barbarous”.  In a letter to William Haslam in January 1819 Severn wrote of 

“…this cursed lodging place. Yet more. Should our unfortunate friend die, all the furniture will be burnt; beds, sheets, curtains, and even the walls must be scraped. And these devils will come upon me for £100 or £150, the making good.”

Severn’s letters to friends are harrowing in their details of Keats illness and the miseries of their time in Rome. 

If I should die

A year before his death, Keats wrote to his beloved Fanny Brawne to whom he was secretly engaged:

Now I have had opportunities of passing nights anxious and awake I have found other thoughts intrude upon me. “If I should die,” said I to myself, “I have left no immortal work behind me – nothing to make my friends proud of my memory – but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d.”

He was convinced that he had achieved nothing that would endure. He requested that rather than his name these words should be engraved on his gravestone:  “Here one lies whose name was writ on water.”

The stone also bears bitter words:

This grave contains all that was Mortal of a Young English Poet Who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies Desired these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone: Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water. 24 February 1821. (sic—Keats actually died on February 23.)

Those “enemies” were the critics who savaged his work and the angry words were those of his heartbroken friends who buried him.

Who killed John Keats?

Who killed John Keats?
‘I,’ says the Quarterly,
So savage and Tartarly;
”Twas one of my feats.

– Lord Byron

The Quarterly Review had savagely dismissed Keats poetry. But it was not criticism that killed Keats. It was the tuberculosis –  aka consumption, wasting disease, phthisis, the white plague. He had probably contracted it while nursing his brother Tom who had died of the disease in 1818 although the disease was epidemic at that time.(It remains the number one cause of death from an infectious disease wordwide.) Keats health was further compromised by self-administered doses of mercury.

Why Keats was dosing himself with mercury is not exactly known although some have speculated that he was treating himself for real or imagined venereal disease. He referred to the “poison” within himself but the circumstances of his ailments and illnesses remain murky, giving rise to considerable medical and literary speculation.

Keats had studied medicine at Guy’s Hospital in London and was well aware of the of the latest thinking in medical science. He knew he was facing death. In his last months he was prone to thoughts of persecution whether based in reality or illness  and mercury induced paranoia. Severn – fearing Keats would try to end his life –  kept laudenum from him and removed knives and scissors. Keats believed that someone in London had poisoned him. The great irony is that he may indeed have been poisoned – by the mercury he gave himself.

In his last years Keats harbored thoughts of enemies and persecution. Severn and Dr Clarke who attended Keats in Rome were surprised  by the precipitous decline in his health and the speed of the illness that killed him just three months after their arrival in Rome. 

A memorial tablet is set into the cemetery wall near the gravesite. Below the Warrington Wood medallion portrait of the poet is an acrostic poem by Vincent Eyre: 

K-eats! If thy cherished name be ‘writ in water’
E-ach drop has fallen from some mourner’s cheek;
A-sacred tribute: such as heroes seek,
T-hough oft in vain – for dazzling deeds of slaughter
S-leep on! Not honoured less for Epitaph so meek!”.

Oscar Wilde declared the tribute incongruous and ugly. I have no idea what the sentinel cats think of either the memorial or the pyramid.