Hoisting our backpacks, my students and I start up a narrow staircase that points us left and right. In November 1820, John Keats and his friend Joseph Severn climbed these stairs to two small rooms above the Spanish Steps, ready to stay until the end, which they knew wouldn’t be far away. Nevertheless, they rented a piano. Getting that piano back downstairs must have been a nightmare. Not to mention the armloads of drapes and rugs, and the sheets and the pillows, and the mattress, stained with sad rings of blood. But it was the law: all movable furnishings of a consumptive’s sickroom, even the wallpaper, must be burned. And then, on a late February day in 1821, would have come the carrying-down of Keats’ small body itself: a twenty-five-year-old man, five feet tall and wasted to the weight of an adolescent, the luminous eyes closed for good.
When Keats and Severn arrived here, the small apartment was bisected by a heavy curtain: their landlady, Signora Angeletti, at the back, due scapoli inglesi in the front. Now it’s a cozy library lined with books and memorabilia: paintings, letters, locks of hair. Overlooking the Spanish Steps is the tiny room in which John Keats died. Stretch out both arms and you can almost touch each wall. There’s a narrow bed and a little writing table, yet only the large window and the fireplace and the ceiling, carved and painted with white daisies on a blue background, are original. In his last days Keats sent Severn to the Protestant Cemetery at the edge of Rome for some reconnaissance. It’s peaceful, Severn reported back, with little white daisies growing in the grass. Hearing this, Keats is said to have raised his eyes to the flowered ceiling and – every instinct tells me – smiled. I think, he said, I can feel them growing over me even now. What rueful complexities must have flickered in that smile.
Deathbed sketch of Keats by Joseph Severn, 1821. Via Keats-Shelley House website.
As a poet, Keats knew this himself: maintaining a steady, attentive presence in the face of any emotion can make the body a means of knowledge. Like the physician he once trained to be, he sits beside his own mind to take its pulse, diagnosing and participating in its interactions with the world. Sometimes he’s analogizing, as when praising his friend Leigh Hunt’s work in 1817: “that sentence about making a Page of the feelings of a whole life appears to me like a Whale’s back in the Sea of Prose.” (Great goal for a sentence, isn’t it?) Sometimes he’s rapt, transported, as in desire for his next-door neighbor and great love Fanny Brawne: “You have absorb’d me,” he writes in October 1819, “I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving—” Sometimes he’s transported by some other inwardness, as in a sketch by his friend and roommate Charles Brown, chin propped on his hand.
A child seeks the simple resolution, the absolute rule, the black or white. An adult knows it’s more complicated.
Dwelling in complication made Keats peculiarly wise and tough. His father died from a fall from a horse when he was eight. His mother left the family when he was nine, returning after four years to die of consumption. Young Keats kept vigil outside her sickroom, then hurled himself into his studies in futile hopes that his success could earn her life. At twenty-two, he was apprenticed as a dresser at Guy’s Hospital in central London. Keats’ job was to hold instruments, replace blood-soaked boxes of sawdust under the operating table with fresh ones, and hold down screaming patients. “My last operation,” he told Brown, “consisted in opening a man’s temporal artery. I did it with the utmost nicety, but reflecting on what had passed in my mind at the time, my dexterity seemed a miracle – I never took up the lancet again.” Very soon, he’d be nursing his younger brother Tom, also fatally consumptive, in a small room in Hampstead. On a bench just down the street from that room, friends would later find him collapsed and sobbing, having discovered the disease in himself. Riding on the outside of a coach – the cheap seats – in a storm had brought on a coughing fit he couldn’t deny. “I am not deceived,” he told Brown, who helped put him to bed. “I know the color of that blood, it is arterial blood – I must die.” It was February 1820. One year later, he’d be gone.
But my students and I know what he could not: that his poetry would be remembered, that it would move us to sympathetic tears, starting deep in our own nerves, almost two hundred years later, as the scrappy dreaming spirit of that small body crosses into our own. Standing in his room with them, I was startled to hear rain pattering the steps outside, although the sun was shining – a form of negative capability, two apparent contraries creating a third thing – sun and rain together turning the world rosy gold, seen forever through the light cast by a marvelous early mind, too early lost.
View from Keats’ window. Photo by Amy Weldon, January 2013.
A note: Thanks to the kind and knowledgeable staff of the Keats-Shelley House in Rome and to the sources I consulted – Stanley Plumly’s Posthumous Keats; Nicholas Roe’s John Keats: A New Life; Letters of John Keats: A Selection, edited by Robert Gittings; and Sally Brown’s essay “Suppose Me In Rome” in Keats and Italy: A History of the Keats-Shelley House in Rome. Thanks to Anita Miller for wonderful walking tours of Hampstead and to Ruth Caldwell for speedy and nuanced Italian consultation. I also never miss an opportunity of pointing readers to Dean Young’s poem “I See A Lily On Thy Brow” (in his collection Skid, 2002), which imagines John Keats as a medical student.
Amy Weldon is associate professor of English at Luther College and author of the forthcoming book The Hands-On Life: How to Wake Yourself Up and Save The World.
I pressed my bike’s pedal, and immediately focused on navigating safely through the motorized fleet. In my new city, bicycles are merely tolerated, like dual citizens by the U.S. government. Drivers often don’t “see” them, and when they do, they mistrust them.
For my parents—my father born in Budapest in 1895, my mother in Vienna in 1907—travel was an expression of their wish to see the world, but also of their status as cultured, leisured people, with enough disposable income to spend on nonnecessities.