One of my recent Netflix picks was Bright Star, the biopic about the poet John Keats and his lady love Fanny Brawne. I thought it was lovely–sad at the end, of course, but also unabashedly romantic.
I could now present to you a poem by Keats, but that would be too obvious. Instead, here\’s one about the poet.
Keats
by Christopher Howell
When Keats, at last beyond the curtain
of love’s distraction, lay dying in his room
on the Piazza di Spagna, the melody of the Bernini
Fountain “filling him like flowers,”
he held his breath like a coin, looked out
into the moonlight and thought he saw snow.
He did not suppose it was fever or the body’s
weakness turning the mind. He thought, “England!”
and there he was, secretly, for the rest
of his improvidently short life: up to his neck
in sleigh bells and the impossibly English cries
of street vendors, perfect
and affectionate as his soul.
For days the snow and statuary sang him so far
beyond regret that if now you walk rancorless
and alone there, in the piazza, the white shadow
of his last words to Severn, “Don’t be frightened,”
may enter you.
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