Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal – yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
From, John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn, 1819
Most men would be buried beside their wives, or vice versa. John Keats is not. First, he had no wife, though he was engaged to a woman who figures greatly in his story. So, beside him, in the English cemetery in Roma, lies Joseph Severn, a painter. No, this is not an “outing” of Keats as a gay man; it’s much better than that, and differently uplifting.
Roman candles burn bright and they burn out quickly. That was Keats, dead at age twenty-five, an age when most men today are still in grad school, or going to clubs and rock concerts. By the time he died Keats was already pretty much assured a place in the poetic pantheon. By the time he was twenty-one he had two major books of poems published and had written a play.
The wonder is that he was able to do that much. Keats was a sickly guy with a grim pedigree; a parent and his brother were already dead of consumption—tuberculosis. Keats, small and frail, had nursed his brother through his last days, so he knew what was up when he himself began to cough up blood. Lots of people died of TB and other pulmonary disorders in those days, and London, famous for its fogs, which were really carbon-laced smogs, could do you in about as quickly as any large 19th-century city of the time that heated homes and powered factories with coal.
Like most high school students, I remember Keats mostly from his odes, to a nightingale, and to a Grecian Urn, in particular, but I couldn’t remember a line when I stood in the room in which he died, a room overlooking the renowned Spanish Steps in Rome, where Roman papagallos tried to pick up pretty female tourists with lines like “do you like pizza,” not lines like O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung / By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear, / And pardon that thy secrets should be sung / Even unto thine own soft-conched ear. The Keats House, actually a flat on the second floor of the building, is where the star-crossed poet coughed his final sanguinary cough. There are Keats memorabilia there, but the furniture is not original; 19 th Century Roman law required that when someone died of consumption the furniture was burned and even the wall-paper was stripped from the rooms.
Consumption was a terror of the times and Keats was advised to get himself to Italy, where Rome was considered to have the best weather for tubercular lungs. It was a three-week sea voyage to get to Naples, where they landed and were quarantined for ten days, during which Keats was only able to, write letters. Keats was accompanied by a young English painter, Joseph Severn, who traveled up to Rome and shared the rooms at 26 Piazza di Spagna with the ailing poet.
The fate of Keats is actually bracketed by two love stories, one romantic-erotic, the other of heroically selfless friendship. Fanny Brawne was the object of Keats’s infatuation. She lived nearby him in Hampstead and the poet was smitten with her. They had become engaged by the time he got sick and had to set off for Rome, but Fanny did not accompany him. There is the suggestion that Keat’s condition was exacerbated by his passion for Fanny, and also his jealousy over her preference for parties and balls. Keats could work himself up pretty good, as his letters attest, so maybe it was best that she did not go along, although other thinking on the matter suggested that the separation and his longing and suspicion were responsible for his relapse in Rome.
The other love story is brotherly. Joseph Severn was what anyone would term a “saint.” Obviously, it was suspected by many at the time that tuberculosis was communicable, but Severn stayed by Keats’s bedside, making him breakfast, getting his other meals, forsaking his own work, and risking his own life. He did this for some months, seemingly without complaint, assisted only by visits from Keats’s doctor, a reputed specialist in consumption.
Keats’s medical treatment merits some elaboration. The poet had studied to be an apothecary. But it was considered a great advantage that Dr. James Clarke, a Scotsman, and author of a major study on consumption was living in Rome, and was an admirer of the poet. One would think this would give Keats the best chance. But when Keats began coughing up pints of blood Clarke did what then seemed to be the most common treatment of the time—he bled him. On top of that he recommended that he be fed very little. Then he left Severn to deal with an anemic, starving patient. Keats got so bad off that he asked Severn to give him his bottle of laudanum. Laudanum was a popular drug during the Victorian era, an opium-based painkiller prescribed for all sorts of ailments. It was even given to infants, often killing them. But it was addicting and too large a dose was fatal. Keats knew that and intended to kill himself. Severn refused and hid the laudanum, only extending the misery of the last stages of consumption.
Keats expired in Severn’s arms on the evening of February 23, 1821. Severn was duly canonized by the friends and admirers of the poet. He stayed on in Rome for many years, painting, and later serving as a consular official. But his final earthly reward was to be given a grave, fifty-eight years later, in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery near the Pyramid of Caius Cestius, beside the poet for whom he risked his own life.
Both Fanny Brawne and Joseph Severn (he was a good, but not great painter) would have passed into obscurity had their lives not been illuminated by the brief, bright, but blood-stained arc of the life of John Keats and its literary immortality.
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©2006, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 3.12.2006)