On 23 February 1821 John Keats died in Rome. A year earlier he had written to his fiancée Fanny Brawne: "If I should die, said I to myself, I have left no immortal work behind me — nothing to make my friends proud of my memory — but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d."
The English poet died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. “I shall soon be laid in the quiet grave – thank God for the quiet grave,” he told his friend Joseph Severn, in whose arms he died. “I can feel the cold earth upon me – the daisies growing over me – O for this quiet – it will be my first.”
Keats gave instructions for his headstone to be engraved with the words “Here lies one whose name was writ in water”, and visitors to Rome’s Protestant Cemetery can still make a pilgrimage to see it today. But far from being “writ in water”, Keats’s words continue to echo, with a host of writing and events lined up to mark the 200th anniversary of his death. Read here.
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