In the Room Where Keats Lay Dying
Photo by the Author
In the room where the poet John Keats lay dying is a bed made of dark Italian walnut sized for one person. The headboard and footboard are identical and curved back away from each other, rising to the height of my lover’s chest who stands nearby. The mattress is firm and covered in a satiny, striped upholstery, green and cream in color, with matching bolsters at either end. It looks inviting, as if you would sit on it as much as you might lie there to sleep, but a sign asks you to refrain. The bed is dated at around 1820; Keats died February 23, 1821. Shaped the way it is, the bed is known in Italy as a barca a letto, a boat bed, though it is difficult not to regard it, too, as resembling a coffin.
But this is not the bed on which Keats lay dying. In his time, it was wrongly thought that a person with consumption infected everything around them, even their material possessions. Vatican law dictated that such possessions be destroyed upon their owner’s death. The bed on which Keats lay dying, along with everything else in this room where he died, including the interior walls which were scraped, was stacked outside the building near the Spanish Steps in Rome’s Piazza di Spagna, and burned. Today, only the decorative ceiling, the floor tiles, and the fireplace are original to the moment Keats drew his final breath.
When I stepped into the doorway of that room, something broke over me as if I stood at the entrance of a dream. I saw there, the bed in the far corner, a view case housing documents, a line of paintings along the wall, one of which was a painting of the very room I now gazed into. I crossed the threshold drawn to the light spilling in from the one window, the wooden shutters open, the heavy curtain pulled aside. I stepped forward to look out, and so I stood where Keats had stood, and looked out from where Keats had looked out, and saw what Keats had seen when he lived here, a singular view of those Spanish Steps, beside which, not so long after he looked, everything in the room around him was burning as he lay dead.
I did not know the room was here until I stood inside it, and I marked that dreamy sensation in my body only after. So I know it was authentic and not contrived, like someone setting up a camera to stage a shot of what they just missed. My lover and I only stumbled onto the Keats-Shelley House Museum upon arriving in the city, and thought it a quaint distraction before dinner. And we needed a distraction, as in that heavy way that being too happy falls into shadow, we had argued about a great many things that are nothing at all. It’s true, we both loved Keats’ poems, and certainly we loved that Keats was Keats, a name on which to fix our belief in the lineage and inheritance of writers writing, and so by stopping at the museum we were doing just what writers do: learning more about a writer we admired. And not just Keats, but Percy and Mary Shelley, Byron and Edward Trelawny, Wordsworth, for what it’s worth. And we saw such wonders too: a mask Byron wore at a carnival in Ravenna, Trelawny’s dagger used by Byron’s coachman to stab a man named Stefano Masi (the blade had since been cleaned of human blood), pages written in Wordsworth’s hand, Fournier’s painting of Shelley’s body burning and smoking on its funeral pyre, an 1826 copy of The Westminster Review open to Mary Shelley’s essay “The English in Italy.” I was prepared to see these books and busts, to stand beside my lover before these handwritten pages under glass, to pause at the paintings and placards on the walls. I was not prepared to stand inside the room where Keats lay dying.
In Keats short life—he died at age 25—he lived many lives, and knew well what it was to suffer, not just from the illness that broke him, but from the agony of love, especially love unfulfilled. He fell in love with two women in the final few years of his life (maybe dozens more, for who can say what passed through unexpressed): first Isabella Jones, with whom, he writes in a letter to his brother, George, he “had warmed with . . . and kissed.” And then a bit more than a year later, Fanny Brawne, through whom all his considerable romantic desires were subsumed. He wrote “Bright Star” for her as a declaration of his love, a sonnet in which, according to biographer Jonathan Bate, “sexual desire is purified into romance.” The poem ends with Keats’ ultimatum to himself, that he would live “Pillow’d upon [his] fair love’s ripening breast,/To feel for ever its soft fall and swell.” And if not, if he could not have Fanny for eternity, he would “swoon to death.”
In fact, Keats would not have Fanny at all, but for a lock of her hair he kept close by. Bate and others assert their love went unconsummated. Keats’ poems and letters to Fanny are filled with extravagant expressions of his love, but also addled by jealousy and fears of an imagined infidelity. She was his rapture and his torment. His tenuous financial condition precluded marriage, and he would not live long enough to overcome it. Keats’ life, and love for Fanny, was rather like the knight whose story he tells in his poem “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” In the poem, a knight meets a beautiful lady who becomes the object of his love and his obsession. But just as the knight has now found the love he is searching for, he wakes alone in a place devoid of life, and discovers she is but a dream. Keats writes,
And I awoke, and found me here
On the cold hill side.
And this is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.
As he wakes, what is even more terrifying than losing his lover is the fact that he will not be able to forget her because he cannot forget the dream, the dream of perfect beauty, unattainable. The poet Robert Pack, one of my teachers, writes in his essay “Keats’s Letters: Laughter as Autobiography,” that “Keats considered it a living death to awake from such a dream, know that it is a dream, and also know that the dream can never be forgotten.” What is the knight to do but wander alone through the dead lands, forever, and without purpose.
My own lover stood with me in that room, just there, long blonde hair, dressed all in black, her back to me as she was looking at a painting on the wall. We had traveled a good distance together to get here, and we still had a good distance to travel to get home. Arriving here in Rome, I felt the soft allure of my own desire for something new, something worthy, something singing that I might carry home. Perhaps I yearned for something that might distinguish me and my journey from another’s, for something that was mine, for something to elevate my name. Outside, the public streets and squares of Rome were filled with travelers, more now every day than ever before, and the hope for something original is easily lost in that throng of the desperate, the insolent, the righteous, the unimaginative. And yet, was I any different, any better than they?
This idea that Keats is famous for — negative capability, the ability to remain untroubled while living with uncertainties, mysteries and doubts — goes far beyond its specific meaning. In Pack’s essay, he asserts that Keats believed strongly that the most important quality for a poet is empathy. And empathy is not a feeling but a project. Pack goes on to say that “Great men, Keats believed, possess or attain the ability to empty themselves of their own identities, to immerse themselves through identification in the lives of others.” To be a great man or a great person, to be a great poet, or perhaps a great traveler, your single identity must become a collective identity. Your individual body must become the world’s body. You do not shun them. You join them.
There in the room where Keats died, the light coming in that way, the indoor relief from the outdoor heat and humidity of late summer in Rome, my lover and I moved in silences. We each wanted to read and see what hung on the walls, to stand next to a bed that took the place of the bed where once Joseph Severn stood over the now quiet body, to feel what could be felt in such a place. There was nothing to say. Removed this way from the bustle and noise of the Spanish Steps below, it was as if we had entered a kind of heaven with air conditioning, where all the beauty of our hard days of traveling dissolved in each other’s sensuous forms. For those moments, at least, we were free of the entanglements and uncertainty of thoughts. It was just us, each to each, and Keats, wherever he was still in the room. I moved close and placed my hand upon my lover’s shoulder.
Kurt Caswell Kurt Caswell is the author of five books of nonfiction, most recently, Iceland Summer: Travels Along the Ring Road, with 35 full-color illustrations by artist Julia Oldham. Winner of a Foreword Indie Silver Medal for science writing, Laika’s Window: The Legacy of a Soviet Space Dog, tells the story of the first animal to orbit the Earth, the Soviet space dog Laika, who flew on Sputnik II in 1957. An Inside Passage won the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize. He is co-editor with James Perrin Warren of Going to See: 30 Writers on Nature, Inspiration, and the World of Barry Lopez. Caswell’s essays, stories and reviews have appeared in American Literary Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Ninth Letter, Orion, Prairie Schooner, River Teeth, Terrain.org, and other publications. He is professor in the Honors College at Texas Tech University, where he teaches writing, literature, and an intensive study abroad course walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain.