Daily Prompt: "Remain"
I was only there for nine months, but so many memories remain of my time in Rome. Another remnant of my time there is a box of fading slide photos that I ought to convert to digital, the better to illustrate blog posts such as this one.
In that box there are some slides that I took when I visited the Protestant Cemetery, which is close to the east bank of the Tiber in the southern district of the city centre.
It is in that cemetery where the mortal remains of two of our greatest Romantic poets rest: John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Keats came to Italy in the hope that the warmer climate would ease his consumption (for he had contracted tuberculosis), but after a difficult voyage the ship remained in quarantine for ten days as a precaution against cholera. Poor old Keats and his faithful companion, the artist Joseph Severn, didn’t arrive in Rome until November, and having missed the best of the weather, Keats’ condition grew much worse during the winter of 1820-21.
Keats lodged in a pink (or orange, depending on the time of day when you see it) stuccoed house on the edge of Piazza Spagna right up against the lower stairs of the Spanish Steps.
When I lived in Rome I passed Keats’ house almost every day as I lived in via Museo Clementi, close to Piazza Cavour and the quickest way to get to work was to cross Ponte Cavour and walk to Piazza Spagna and go into the Spagna metro station, then change at Termine, get off the metro at Basilica San Paulo. I also visited the house a couple of times, as it is now a museum dedicated to Keats and Shelley.
The Death of Keats
Keats died of tuberculosis at the age of 25 and is buried in the Protestant Cemetery. He did not want his name on his gravestone. Instead he is said to have requested this epitaph:
Here lies one whose name was writ in water.
Shelley's Elegy to Keats
In 1821 the poet Shelley was also living in Italy and when he heard the news he wrote one of his most famous poems, Adonais, an elegy for John Keats.
The fifty-second stanza of Shelley’s Adonais could be considered to be one of the finest verses of English letters. (Keep in mind when you read it that Shelley was steeped in Plato. He wrote a fine translation of Plato’s Symposium.) It is one of those verses that jumps out at you as it lifts the poem from the personal to the universal:
The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.—Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled!—Rome's azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.
The Death of Shelley
Shelley wrote the poem in April 1821 after which he was to remain alive for just over a year until he was drowned in a storm at sea off the Italian coast in July 1822.
When his body was washed ashore his friends cremated him on the beach, and his mortal remains were interred in the same Protestant Cemetery as those of Keats, where they remain to this day, under a gravestone with the legend:
“Cor cordium” (Heart of hearts)
and a fitting quotation from Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
All that remains for me to say now is that I hope enough days of my life remain for me to return to Rome and stand once more before the tombs of Keats and Shelley.
David Hurley
Sources
Posthumous Portrait of Shelley Writing Prometheus Unbound in Italy – painting by Joseph Severn, 1845, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley#/media/File:Joseph_Severn_-_Posthumous_Portrait_of_Shelley_Writing_Prometheus_Unbound_1845.jpg
Shelley, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley
Adonais, bartleby.com/41/522.html