Rome - December 28, 2011 - Hyperion, Keats-Shelley House

Keats-Shelley House, Spanish Steps, Rome

This post skips ahead, but only by a few minutes, it was however on my mind today with recent events at the university hospital (nothing bad, just events!). 

The Piazza Mignanelli opens into the Piazza di Spagna with the so-called boat fountain and the Spanish Steps.

Attached to the Spanish Steps is the Keats-Shelley House with it's strange history of a couple of brief tenants.

The Keats-Shelly house was built at the same time as the Spanish steps (1723-25) and is located on the south side. It was here that the poet John Keats would die of tuberculosis in 1821 at the ripe old age of 25. He requested to be buried under an unmarked grave with the words: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Which was done (he’s over in the protestant cemetery) because the romantic poets were ever so dramatic.

I had to stand here, in a place I have stood many times before, (ok, like three or four times before) in the days when Keats and Shelley were just obnoxious things to check off a reading list, and recite to myself one poem by Keats (or at least a little bit of it).

Out of the miniature red leather bound book of Keats poems that was given to me at school by Sister MacLeod; Hyperion was a favorite of mine.

Shelley comes later in our Italian tour and will be posted when we hit the ruins of the forum (...My name is Ozymandias, king of kings...you get it. If not Google it!). In fact Ozymandias kept coming up, baths of Trajan, Herculaneum, Pompeii...it was hard to run into a point where it was not relevant. Towards the end I think my travelling companion was going to hit me over the head if I even started to stare remotely over a landscape and say under my breath: "My Name is Ozymandias, king of kings...."

Here is Hyperion by John Keats, spelling is correct, just British (so you can stop yelling at me for my extra "u"s and "re"s instead of "er"s.

Hyperion, John Keats

Saturn is fallen, am I too to fall?
Am I to leave this haven of my rest,
This cradle of my glory, this soft clime,
This calm luxuriance of blissful light,
These crystalline pavilions, and pure fanes,
Of all my lucent empire? It is left
Deserted, void, nor any haunt of mine.
The blaze, the splendor, and the symmetry,
I cannot see – but darkness, death and darkness.
Even here, into my centre of repose,
The shady visions come to domineer,
Insult, and blind, and stifle up my pomp. –
Fall! – No, by Tellus and her briny robes!
Over the fiery frontier of my realms
I will advance a terrible right arm
Shall scare that infant thunderer, rebel Jove,
And bid old Saturn take his throne again.