Page 104 - DENG203_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_IV

Unit 6: Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats

6.1.6 Death Notes

The first few months of 1821 marked a slow and steady deterioration into the last stage of
tuberculosis. John Keats was covered in sweat and was coughing blood. Severn nursed him
faithfully and observed in a letter how Keats sometimes cried upon waking to find himself still
alive. Severn writes,

“Keats raves till I am in a complete tremble for him...about four, the approaches of death came
on. [Keats said] ‘Severn—I—lift me up—I am dying—I shall die easy; don’t be frightened—be
firm, and thank God it has come.’ I lifted him up in my arms. The phlegm seem’d boiling in his
throat, and increased until eleven, when he gradually sank into death, so quiet, that I still
thought he slept.”
John Keats died on 23 February 1821 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome. His last
wish was to be placed under an unnamed tombstone which only had the words (in pentameter),
“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Brown and Severn erected the stone, which
under a relief of a lyre with broken strings, consists of the epitaph:
“This Grave / contains all that was Mortal / of a / Young English Poet / Who / on his Death Bed,
in the Bitterness of his Heart / at the Malicious Power of his Enemies / Desired / these Words to
be / engraven on his Tomb Stone: / Here lies One / Whose Name was writ in Water.
24 February 1821”
There is a difference of one day between the official date of death and that on the gravestone.
Brown and Severn added their lines to the stone in protest at the critical reception of Keats’s
work. Hunt blamed his death on the Quarterly Review’s scathing attack of “Endymion”.
As Byron quipped in his narrative poem Don Juan;
’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle
Should let itself be snuffed out by an article.
(canto 2, stanza 60)
Seven weeks after the funeral Shelley honoured Keats in his poem Adonaïs. Clark saw to the
planting of daisies on the grave, saying that John Keats would have wanted it. For public health
reasons, the Italian health authorities scraped the walls and burned the furniture in Keats’s
room, and made new doors, windows and flooring. Joseph Severn is buried next to Keats and
the ashes of Shelley, one of Keats’s most avid champions, are buried in the cemetery. Telling
about the site today, Marsh wrote, “In the old part of the graveyard, barely a field when Keats
was buried here, there are now umbrella pines, myrtle shrubs, roses, and carpets of wild violets”.

6.1.7 Reception

When Keats died at the age of 25, he had been writing poetry seriously for only nearly six years,
from 1814 until the summer of 1820; and publishing for only four. In his lifetime, sales of Keats’s
three volumes of poetry possibly amounted to only 200 copies. Keats first poem, the sonnet O
Solitude came in the Examiner in May 1816, while his collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St.
Agnes and other poems was published in July 1820 before he last visited Rome. The solidity of
his poetic apprenticeship and maturity in such a short time is just one outstanding feature of
Keats’s work.
Even though creative during his short career, and now amongst the most studied and admired
British poets, his reputation is dependent on a small body of work, centred on the Odes, and only
in the creative outburst of the last years of his short life was he able to show the inner intensity
for which he has been praised since his death. John Keats was certain that he had not made a
distinct mark in his entire lifetime. Aware that he was dying, he wrote to Fanny Brawne in

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