When I have fears... / Keats's Grave

The Protestant or “Non-Catholic” cemetery in Testaccio is a pleasant half hour’s walk from the studio, across the Tiber. Well, it would normally be pleasant, but on the day I went I happened to witness a hatchback plough flush into a motorcycle at an intersection at which I was waiting to cross. The motorcyclist seemed to do a 720 on the spot before being pinned between his vehicle and the car; he then stood up, clutching painfully at his shoulder. He was lucky not to have been killed, as I saw it; after my nerves had settled, I considered it a strangely apt prelude for my visit to the necropolis.

It’s fair to say I’d psyched myself up for this trip. The cemetery is the resting place of the two English Romantics, Keats and Shelley, as well as that of the great German poet, Wolfgang Goethe, the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci and, as I discovered, the American beat poet Gregory Corso – among many others.

While it was Keats’ grave I was most interested in, it was probably Shelley’s that most moved me. I think this was because I’d placed so much importance on the former, that the latter took me somewhat by surprise.


You might recognise Ariel's lines from The Tempest. This place moved John Ruskin “to tears almost”; touched George Eliot “deeply”; Henry James considered it “a happy grave every way” and Wilde wrote a sonnet on both his and Keats’s grave.

Like burnt-out torches by a sick man’s bed
Gaunt cypress-trees stand round the sun-bleached stone;
Here doth the little night-owl make her throne,
And the slight lizard show his jeweled head.
And where the chaliced poppies flame to red,
In the still chamber of yon pyramid
Surely some Old-World Sphinx lurks darkly hid,
Grim warder of this pleasuance of the dead.

(from Wilde’s The Grave of Shelley)

(The nearby ‘pyramid’ to which Wilde refers is the tomb of Caius Cestius, minor Roman bureaucrat who died in 12 BC; it is about six to eight storeys tall, and is the only pyramid in Rome).

A few feet away from Shelley’s is the grave of Gregory Corso, Beat Poet whom Liam introduced to me all those years ago as an undergrad; I still remember him handing me two little books, one of Corso’s (the other was Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems), from City Lights, on the bus to UQ, perhaps around 1998.


If I’m reading the Latin correctly, I think Goethe is buried with his son; the grave is, like Shelley’s, between two massive cypress trees.


After these, it was to the oldest part of the cemetery, in search of Keats. The grave is in the corner, nearest to the main road. Keats arrived in Rome in November 1820, hoping to convalesce from his tuberculosis, but died four months later at the age of 25.


Oscar Wilde (here in 1877) visited the graves of the poets Keats and Shelley on the same day he had been granted audience with the Pope. It is said he prostrated himself before Keats’ grave more humbly than he did before the Pope – he remarked later that he considered Keats’ grave to be “the holiest place in Rome”.

I’ve recorded a recitation I made of Keats's sonnet, ‘When I have fears’, while standing before his grave, and though I made two minor errors, I’ll included it below as soon as I can sync the audio on youtube.

**

At sunset I thought I’d go to my favourite hill so far in Rome, the nearby hill of Aventino (photo, top). The views of the city (St. Peter’s straight ahead, the studio to the south, the historical centre to the north) are breathtaking. Plus, the magical orange grove and gorgeous little fountains are especially charming.

(Moonrise, Aventine hill)