Annalisa Nicastro
John Keats came here to Rome in the hope that his weak health would improve. Unfortunately, on 23 February 1821 he died in his house in Rome (today the Keats-Shelley House) with Joseph Severn, his friend and travelling companion, beside him. What does Severn tell us about this tragic event?
In his journal, letters, and memoir written late in life Joseph Severn describes the tribulations of their voyage to Italy from London, and Keats’s suffering, distress, and death in Rome from tuberculosis. Severn’s descriptions are so vivid that his letters can make for difficult reading, but he also presents Keats in moments of tenderness, and captures the poet’s laconic wit and love of making puns, which stayed with him till very end of his life even through his illness.
Keats’s death is recorded in painstaking detail, along with his last spoken words, in a letter sent from the House by Severn to Keats’s close friend Charles Brown on 27 February, four days after his death. The letter belongs to the museum collection and is currently on display in Keats’s bedroom.
"Here lies the one whose name was writ on the water". What is the meaning of this epitaph placed on Keats's grave in the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome, which is what Keats wanted to be written on it?
Keats was too ill to write anything much in Rome. All that we have surviving in his hand from his time in Rome is his last letter dated 30 November 1820 to his old friend Charles Brown, which is a difficult and painful letter to read. And of course we also have Keats’s last poetic words, the epitaph on his tomb in the Non-Catholic Cemetery, which read ‘'Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water'’. These nine words could be considered Keats’s final poem etched in travertine and a memorial to his life and to his time in the city of Rome.
Nobody is entirely sure what these words mean but various theories have been put forward. My theory is that they contain a reference to Joseph Severn’s role as custodian of Keats’s deeds and words during the final months of his life. Keats loved making puns till the very end of his life, and he’d punned on his friend’s name before, referring to him as the River Severn, the longest river in Great Britain. Almost everything we think we know about Keats’s time in Rome is written, not in Keats’s own hand because he was too ill to write apart from that one surviving letter, but are reported at second hand by Joseph Severn. Therefore they are written in the River Severn, written in water.
Moreover, Joseph Severn informs us that Keats had planned to write one last poem in Rome, whose subject was to be Sabrina, the Latin name for Hafren, a legendary nymph-princess who, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, drowned in the River Severn. Sabrina had entered Keats’s mind while reading Milton’s Comus aboard the Maria Crowther but he was too ill to ever write it. In this sense the epitaph, with its pun on the river Severn, becomes all that ever surfaced of ‘Sabrina’, Keats’s final poem.
He died young but he wrote a lot: odes, works and letters where we find much of his poetics. Which Keats manuscripts may we find in your collection?
Keats was a brilliant and prolific writer of poetry and letters, and he wrote most of the poems for which he is best known, including his Great Odes, in the space of just over a year. Unfortunately many of the early drafts of his poems were cut into shreds and distributed amongst his friends after his death, which is why you’ll see only fragments from his poem ‘Lamia’, for example, in the Keats-Shelley House.
We have two autograph letters by Keats, both of them dating from 1818. One of the letters is addressed to Severn while they were both still living in England, and the other was sent to Thomas Monkhouse the day before Keats set off on his walking tour of Scotland, and mentions his first major poem Endymion and his literary hero William Wordsworth, whom he intended to visit in the Lake District en route to Scotland.
We also have a copy of the Orationes Omnes of Tacitus bearing a young Keats’s signature and inscription, and the earliest extant manuscript of his poem ‘Song, In Drear Nighted December’ in the hand of his friend John Hamilton Reynolds.
How do Romanticism and Classicism meet in the poetics of the English poet?
A talented Latinist in boyhood, Keats had been a passionate reader of books on classical history, literature, and mythology, and among the books he treasured most were The Pantheon by Mary Shelley’s father William Godwin, John Lemprière’s Bibliotheca Classica, and Joseph Spence’s Polymetis, among others.
Moreover, classical themes and motifs permeate Keats’s poetry, and he’d spent his formative years as a poet not only reading Chapman’s Homer, but also sketching the Sosibios Vase from an encyclopaedia of antiquities and going to see the newly arrived Parthenon sculptures at the British Museum, an experience which inspired him to compose ‘On Seeing the Elgin Marbles’.
However, Keats is considered to be, first and foremost, a romantic because of his love and use of language, which is far more direct, heartfelt, and visceral, not to mention melodic, than the language used by poets of the so-called neoclassical age of English poetry, like John Dryden and Alexander Pope. At the end of the day, though, we should bear in mind that these literary-historical terms are often constructions after the event and retrospectively applied to poets. Keats didn’t consider himself to be a romantic poet, but I think he knew he was a poet working on the vanguard of language and the imagination.
Are there any particular verses of Keats which have remained in your heart more than others?
The poems I read and enjoyed by Keats when I was at school and university are lodged most firmly in my heart and mind, including the Odes and the sonnets. These days I appreciate hearing the poems as much as I do reading them, and it’s always a pleasure to hear them performed live in the museum by actor Julian Sands. His readings of ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ and Endymion have changed the way I think about these poems.
What salient feature remains of Keats as a person?
There’s a temptation to think of Keats as a perennially frail, tragic figure, and one who was destined to die young. In truth he spent most of his twenty-five years on Earth as a genuinely feisty spirit with a strong sense of humour. He was physically strong too, as attested by his walking tour of Scotland, which was no walk in the park!
2021 marks the 700th anniversary of Dante's death, as well as the bicentenary of Keats's death. In your opinion, is there any connection between the two poets?
Keats incorporated various themes, subjects and forms from Italian literature, including Dante, into his work, notably in his sonnet ‘A dream, after reading Dante’s episode of Paolo and Francesca’. Keats also owned and annotated a copy of the Inferno translated by Henry Francis Cary, from which he drew inspiration in attempting to write his own epic, The Fall of Hyperion.
The The Keats-Shelley House contains a rich collection of paintings, sculptures, manuscripts, objects and first editions of the works of Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron. What other important pieces we can mention?
The Keats-Shelley House is not a museum of great artistic masterpieces – although there are visual delights and treasures among its collection. Rather it is a place that viscerally connects visitors to the past through its art works, books, manuscripts and relics pertaining to the lives and works of the romantic poets. We’re particularly proud of our collection of relics, which range from the curious to the slightly macabre and include books that belonged to the poets, as well as personal possessions, such as Mary Shelley’s travel writing desk and Lord Byron’s clock, and human remains, such as locks of hair and even a piece of Shelley’s jawbone.
The English artists who visited Italy how imagine Rome and the Belpaese tout court? What did the Grand Tour represent for writers, especially romantics?
The romantics, like the generations of Grand Tourists who came to Rome before the Napoleonic Wars, came primarily to see the ruins of ancient Rome. They weren’t interested in renaissance palaces or baroque churches. Unlike the majority of the aristocratic gentlemen who came during the eighteenth century, however, the second-generation romantics came for personal reasons, to escape and explore, and not merely to see the sights of the Grand Tour before returning home to boast of their experiences.
The Keats-Shelley House is a place of life and energy. Most of the material in your collection is available in digital format on your website. There have always been many events and the annual visitors have always been numerous. How did you receive the recent news of the reopening of the museums, as Rome has become a yellow zone in Italy?
We are of course thrilled that the House was permitted to re-open to visitors from 1 February. It means so much to be able to open during the month of the bicentenary of Keats’s death in Rome. We can only hope we’ll still be ‘yellow’ on 23 February, the date of the bicentenary, so that some people will be able to visit.
In order to ensure that as many people as possible can share in our celebrations of Keats’s extraordinary legacy, however, we are launching a series of digital projects on the day of his bicentenary, including a new online tour of the museum with a personal guide, a CGI recreation of Keats based on the death mask and other portraits, and an immersive video story titled ‘The Death of Keats’ narrated by Sir Bob Geldof.
Which emotions do you feel in this wonderful place, the Keats-Shelley House?
Wonder, amazement, inspiration, and humility.
In the words of Stanislao de Marsanich, President of the Parchi Letterari, Italy’s literary parks “are the places themselves that communicate the same sensations that inspired many authors for their works and that the Parks intend to revive the visitor by developing interventions that recall the author, his inspiration and his creativity, through the enhancement of the environment, of the history and traditions of those who live in that place”. What do you think about the Parchi Letterari?
I’ve had the pleasure of exploring Arqua Petrarca and the Euganean Hills and it’s an experience I will never forget. Italy is a country of astounding natural beauty with a world-class, even unrivalled, artistic heritage. The downside of this is that Italy’s unique literary heritage is sometimes overshadowed by its achievements in visual art and architecture. The Parchi Letterari serve to remind the world of the rich legacies of Italian writers, and their relationships with the lands they loved.
Sito Keats-Shelley House
New online tour of the museum with a personal guide
Canale youtube con eventi virtuali e video panoramici (with a reading by Julian Sands)
Cover image by Assia Karaguiozova, designer artist, inspired by the words of John Keats placed on Keats's grave in the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome: ‘Here Lies One whose Name is Writ in Water’.
Foto credits: Keats-Shelley House
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