We seldom wish to learn the lasting lesson museums and their artifacts teach us. We seem insistent on owning the past and its crumbling objects, as if to forestall the reality of the mutability of all that is human. As the article points out, even in John Keats' day there was great controversy over who should possess the "Elgin Marbles."  When Keats had every reason to know his death was not many years off, he saw them in the British Museum. He wrote one of his great early sonnets in response:My spirit is too weak—mortality   Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,   And each imagined pinnacle and steepOf godlike hardship tells me I must dieLike a sick eagle looking at the sky.   Yet ’tis a gentle luxury to weep   That I have not the cloudy winds to keepFresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.Such dim-conceived glories of the brain   Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,   That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rudeWasting of old time—with a billowy main—   A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.I am glad that Keats could leave us a his own shadowy monuments. His poverty would have kept him from visiting Greece. His friends helped get him to the warmth of Rome, but he died three months later, at 25, 202 years ago next month.Return the marbles to Greece. Some claim Elgin saved them from turning to dust. Sooner or later, we and all our makings turn to dust. Such is the "undescribable feud" around the heart.

We seldom wish to learn the lasting lesson museums and their artifacts teach us. We seem insistent on owning the past and its crumbling objects, as if to forestall the reality of the mutability of all that is human. As the article points out, even in John Keats' day there was great controversy over who should possess the "Elgin Marbles."  When Keats had every reason to know his death was not many years off, he saw them in the British Museum. He wrote one of his great early sonnets in response:My spirit is too weak—mortality   Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,   And each imagined pinnacle and steepOf godlike hardship tells me I must dieLike a sick eagle looking at the sky.   Yet ’tis a gentle luxury to weep   That I have not the cloudy winds to keepFresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.Such dim-conceived glories of the brain   Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,   That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rudeWasting of old time—with a billowy main—   A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.I am glad that Keats could leave us a his own shadowy monuments. His poverty would have kept him from visiting Greece. His friends helped get him to the warmth of Rome, but he died three months later, at 25, 202 years ago next month.Return the marbles to Greece. Some claim Elgin saved them from turning to dust. Sooner or later, we and all our makings turn to dust. Such is the "undescribable feud" around the heart.

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