| Friday, October 12, 2007 2:26PM | | | | The Protestant Cemetery of Rome | Posted By: Anthony Valerio
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| Tags: The Protestant Cemetery of Rome, John Keats | What's in the air today of young Johnny Keats?
Sitting on the Spanish Steps and on a bench, beside a cat, in the cemetery where lies John Keats, and a thousand others, Shelley's ashes and Antonio Gramsci's, and the remains, somewhat beneath Shelley, of Gregory Corso. It's a long way from Greenwich Village or even San Francisco to the Protestant Cemetery of Rome. But it is to Keats' grave that the school kids and tourists gravitate. There is no name on his grave. Sit on the Spanish Steps next to Keats' residence, through the wall where he'd suffered, far from England and Fanny, and watch the anonymous, fleeting strangers, and feel him. On a bench where a stray cat has come, collection boxes around for the cats, the entrance fee. Nearby Mount Testaccio was an ancient dumping ground for broken crockery, and broken pots strewn all around the cemetery. Temptation to touch one, even take it away, but one does not, just as one does not take time that has passed. From his room beside the Spanish steps, his last days, Keats told his good friend Joseph Severn to go to the cemetery and report back to him about the flowers, the daisies that would bloom upon him, while he himself wrote the words for his gravestone:
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 engraved on his
Tomb Stone
"Here lies One
Whose Name was writ in Water."
Feb 24th 1821
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