Memories of romance

Yesterday I walked over Golders Hill Park and Hampstead Heath to visit the Keats House, where the poet John Keats lived before leaving for Italy in an ultimately vain attempt to recover from tuberculosis. The disease had killed his mother and brother before him. Tuberculosis was known at the time as consumption or 'phthisis' from the Greek for wasting. When I reflect on the fact that he died aged 25, his poetic achievements seem outstanding, and his loss seems such a waste too.

I spent a while in the garden of the house afterwards and my mind travelled back sixteen years to a trip I had made alone around Europe, partly in pursuit of the romantic poets. I went to the Château de Chillon on Lake Leman where Byron set his poem "The Prisoner of Chillon" and where his scrawled name still remains carved in the wall; I went to the Villa Diodati near Geneva where Byron and the Shelley's and Dr Polidori sat up telling ghost stories, the genesis place of Mary's "Frankenstein" (and I was thrown out of the garden - it is a private house); I went to Pisa where Shelley lived and wrote "Adonais"; I went to Rome and to the rooms by the Spanish Steps where Keats died; I went to Rome and to the Cimitero acattolico where Shelley and Keats are buried (and now Gregory Corso too).

The Protestant Cemetery is a beautiful place, when I was there a rain shower came and went and the Autumn sun that followed returned the water to the sky in twisting spirals of mist between the gravestones and the trees. Shelley himself wrote that "It might make one in love with death to be buried in so sweet a place", and so he was - the stone of his tomb engraved with lines of Arial's song from The Tempest: "Nothing of him that doth fade/But doth suffer a sea change/into something rich & strange". Shelley drowned off the coast of Tuscany aged 29.

In the course of my trip I also had the chance to see how wasted modern youth could get too.


Wasted Youth

For John Keats

“I always somehow associate Chatterton with autumn”
John Keats Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, (September 21st 1819)

“The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais (1821)


In Pisa, in the palace
where Shelley wrote Adonais
they shoot up heroin now
and syringes group in the
corners of the ruins
grasses growing through them
as they continue from the cracks.
Spent little cylinders
flecked with the rust of blood.
The view from the gallery
is part antique, part industrial
and it’s ugly where it’s not frozen.
The surface of the Arno
flotsam forming letters
legends dissipating in the flow.

In Hampstead in the garden
by the plum tree twice replaced
unseasonal flowers are in bloom beneath
where the older tree shaded only grass
and a place for a chair.
Rest for a small brown bird
with a song science calls unremarkable.
The lawn here well tended
wealth and fame of patrons of the arts
securing pleasance and the friendly
shadow of a library.
Here lived a friend
he called close with a candle
to witness a droplet of breath
on his bedsheet
flecked with the rust of blood.


IMAGE: Keats House, Hampstead; Shelley's Tomb in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome (1873) by Walter Crane [actually shows Keats' gravestone]; Sketch of the Dying Keats (1821) by Joseph Severn.