NATUS IV AUG. MDCCXCH OBHT V m JUL. MDCCCXXn.
(Sfgtfiing o f Him tfiat dotfifade ‘But dotfi suffer a sea-cfiange Into sometfiing ricfi and strange
And there they sleep, as if their fates had said They shall not sleep alone;
The singer and the sung must fill one bed, And make their ashes one.
Alexander Anderson, ‘John Keats,’ 53-6.^
The graves of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley in what is commonly called the Protestant Cemetery, Rome, have attracted more poetic attention than any other graves of nineteenth- century poets. The non-Catholic burial-ground near Monte Testaccio, the Pyramid of Caius Cestius and the ancient city walls, was already documented as a picturesque attraction for English visitors before Keats’s interment there on 26 February 1821, and Shelley’s on 21 January 1823. The uneasy reception given to the literary work published in their lifetimes, their tragically premature deaths by consumption and drowning, and burial in Catholic Italy, all contributed to the Romantic myth of their deaths and its attraction as a poetic subject; the identification was most influentially made by Shelley himself in Adonais, the elegy for Keats he published in July 1821. Yet factual coincidences and literary associations fabricated a myth of poetic brotherhood, which coupled for eternity two men who scarcely knew each other. As Alexander Anderson expressed it in 1873, the traditionally solitary poet was destined not to sleep alone. A mysterious creative imperative which crafts life into art, defines Keats and Shelley in an exclusive relation; they are ‘singer’ and ‘sung’ fused in ‘one bed.’^ This coupling model has
’Anderson 1873, p. 14; see below, pp.144-9.
^Deep family vaults could suggest this kind of closeness, but burial of more than one person in a coffin was rare - usually children or mothers with babies.
been so powerful that the memorial plaques finally unveiled by Poet Laureate John Masefield in Poets’ Corner in 1954 were twinned tablets yoked by a flower garland.
In fact, the poets’ idiosyncratic characters are evident even in their individual grave- inscriptlons, and they are certainly not buried in ‘one bed.’ Keats’s burial-plot is in the flat area of the Old Cemetery, marked by a freestanding round-topped white marble headstone with a relief-carving of a half-unstrung Grecian lyre (see Figure 13, p. 142). Shelley’s austere horizontal white slab is at the top of a slope in the New Cemetery, recessed at the foot of a tower in the city wall (see Figure 12, p.120). Where Keats’s upright stone invites the visitor to a prospect of grass, scattered monuments, and the classical Pyramid of Caius Cestius, Shelley’s embedded stone is shrine-like and exclusive. Although both grave-inscriptions were written with a self-conscious eye to posterity, Keats’s wish for anonymity and the simple adaptation from
Philaster was mangled by his friends’ well-meaning attempt to defend his honour,^ while Shelley’s was confidently simple and authoritative, Ariel’s famous song claiming him for greatness.
In both cases a fraternally-protective male friend took responsibility for the grave and monument. Although Joseph Severn solicited Keats’s friends in Britain for designs, and Edward Trelawny acted on behalf of Mary Shelley, each finally designed the grave independently. Severn, who had nursed Keats through his final illness, and arranged the funeral, agonised for two years before finalising a monument and inscription, while Trelawny, who organised the cremation of Shelley’s remains, worked rapidly and decisively. Severn and Trelawny did not consult each other extensively, but Severn directed the original interment of Shelley’s ashes, and Trelawny offered ideas for Keats’s epitaph; yet these exchanges have less the air of cooperation in troubled times, than uneasy negotiation between opposing factions, with Trelawny as the champion of the ‘singer,’ and Severn the defender of the ‘sung.’
At first it appeared that Severn would disregard Keats’s death-bed epitaph; he planned a design and inscription themed on a ‘Greek seat, with his solitary lyre standing against it,’ alluding to the pastoral-poet’s vacant chair. Charles Armitage Brown reminded him of his duty, suggesting the lyre image be used alone and asserting that ‘In obedience to [Keats’s] will, I would have his own words engraven there, and not his name, letting the stranger read the cause of his friend’s placing such words as ‘Here lies one, &c.’ (Gay 1913, p. 18). Severn approved the epitaph in early 1822, replacing Brown’s ‘bitter anguish at the neglect of his countrymen’ with the more histrionic wording; but he prevaricated all year, waiting for drawings of a lyre in the British Museum.
Severn’s only connection with Shelley was through the tribute in the Preface to
Adonais,^ but in January 1821 he found by request a grave-site for Shelley’s ashes, and ’ Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster, or Love Lies a-Bleeding, V.iii.80-2:
Your memory shall be as foul behind you As you are living, all your better deeds
Shall be in water writ, but this in marble. (Gurr 1969, p. 100) See also ‘Greek Source of “Writ in Water” ’ (Lahr 1972-3, pp.17-18).
^‘[Severn’s] conduct is a golden augury of the success of his future career — may the
unextinguished Spirit of his illustrious friend animate the creations of his pencil, and plead against Oblivion for his name!’ (Shelley 1984, pp.26-7; Adonais references are to this edition).
organised the funeral. He was granted permission to erect Keats’s monument on 8 March 1823, but when in April Trelawny arrived to see Shelley’s grave, Keats’s epitaph still seemed in doubt. Trelawny suggested line 324 of Adonais, "Whose master’s hand is cold, whose silver lyre unstrung,’ and that Keats’s remains be called ‘spoils’:^
the word spoils — for that is all Death has of a being we trust has written on brass — and one would like associating — two such master spirits as Shelley & Keats — and it would be a tribute to the former’s feeling & affectionate lament of Adonais ... one would wish to mingle their great names more closely together — (Gay 1913, p.19).
Here Trelawny constructs by literary association the friendship Keats had avoided in life.^ Although Trelawny flatteringly describes the poets as equals, ‘master spirits’ and ‘great names,’ Keats’s grave appears as an advertisement for Adonais, or at least paying back a ‘tribute’ to Sheiiey’s feeling. Severn ‘professed’ approbation, but the idea was not pursued, and he spoke disparagingly of Trelawny afterwards; in fact this intervention forced Severn to act.
In turn, Trelawny disapproved of Severn’s choice of grave for Shelley; insufficiently distinguished from the other few graves in the bare New Cemetery, he reinterred Shelley’s ashes in what he described as "the only interesting spot.’ Although acting for Mary Shelley, Trelawny also strengthened his own association with Shelley. Continuing the Roman theme of the cremation, with its salt and frankincense, he planted laurel and cypress to screen the grave, edited almost to oblivion the Latin epitaph sent by Hunt on Mary’s behalf, and chose the significant lines from Ariel’s song on his own initiative. The epitaph from The Tempest l.ii.402-4 evokes the eerie atmosphere of Shelley’s poetry, and cunningly associates him with the great tradition of English literature; but it is also a personal allusion to Shelley’s pleasure in the quotation, which Trelawny spontaneously declaimed as they prepared the boat in which Shelley drowned.® Much as Severn’s subjective view framed and changed Keats’s epitaph, Trelawny’s inscription alluded to the tragic sailing adventure and his snatching Shelley’s unburned heart (‘cor cordium’) from the funeral pyre.
This edgy, aggressive-defensive fraternal relationship between the posthumous poets finds its first and most accompiished form in Sheiiey’s Adonais: An Eiegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion, etc. The poem is generally read as a self-reflexive elegy in which Keats’s death allows Shelley to discuss his own literary (im)mortality, or the elegist displaces the dead poet by a virtuoso performance.^ Shelley’s preoccupation with the effects of harsh criticism - to the point of diagnosing consumption as a physical manifestation of mental pain - famously depicted Keats as the victim of Shelley’s own afflictions, and contributed to the
'The metaphor of ‘spoils’ is used for William’s body in ‘The Choice,’ so this allusion may derive from Mary Shelley’s talks with Trelawny. See below p.126.
^As a confidante of both men, Leigh Hunt was well placed to observe Keats’s suspicion about Shelley’s friendly overtures (Hunt 1860b, v.ll, pp.201-2).
®See Bennett 1995, p.128.
‘‘In a letter to Maria Gisborne Mary Shelley said ‘Adonais is not Keats’s, it is his own elegy, he bids you there go to Rome’ (Gay 1913, pp.24-5). See also below pp.122,139,147, Curran 1983, pp.165- 82, and Heffernan 1984, pp.295-315.
younger poet’s poor critical reputation/ I do not present a comprehensive reading of Adonais
here, but address how the elegist’s relation to Keats combines fraternal and paternal characteristics and suggest why the Protestant Cemetery confirms and problematises this relation.
The Preface is rich in praise for Keats; it places him ‘among the writers of the highest genius who have adorned our age’ - yet this claim Is also dependent on our assumption of the writer’s authority (Preface: Shelley 1984, pp.24-7).^ At the time of Keats’s death, although not yet thirty, Sheiiey’s precocious writings, two marriages, five children, scandals, lovers, migrations, family squabbles and deaths made him feel old beyond his years, exaggerating the modest six year age-gap between them. With this authority Shelley republishes his ‘known repugnance’ to the tired literary models of Keats’s ‘earlier compositions’ to substantiate his objectivity - yet the Hyperion fragment is ‘second to nothing that was ever produced by a writer of the same years.’ Thus Keats was old enough when he died to have progressed in his literary career and made significant accomplishments; but still he died ‘in his twenty-fourth year.’ Shelley’s praise is hedged around by qualification and counter-assertion, and relies on the eiegist’s strong presence. We are never allowed to forget the living author, nor the dead poet’s youth; his genius was ‘delicate and fragile,’ a ‘young flow er... blighted in the bud.’
These adjectives of immaturity and beautiful frailty are supported in the poem by a succession of female mourners.^ Adonais is the son of Urania, the ‘mighty Mother’ (10), her ‘youngest, dearest one’ and the ‘nursling of thy widowhood’ (46-7). This vocabulary of superlative tenderness strongly suggests the parental voice of child-elegy, as does the mutually- reiiant relation of ‘nursling’ to widow.'* This apparently affectionate infantilisation is modulated by an allusion to Keats’s ‘Isabella,’ which reads the relationship as one between lovers. The poet was ‘Like a pale flower by some sad maiden cherished, / And fed with true love tears, instead of dew’ (48-9). Keats is compared to the basil growing over the head of Isabella’s murdered lover Lorenzo, the ‘young palmer in Love’s eye.’® In Keats’s poem the pot of basil is a fetish, a symbol of unfulfilled sexual love which is the young woman’s only consolation in bereavement; yet it also represents this relic of the lover as a baby. As Isabella’s virgin cheek ‘Fell thin as a young mother’s, who doth seek / By every lull to cool her infant’s pain’ (35-6) when she pined for Lorenzo in life, after his death she sought his body to ‘sing to it one latest lullaby’ (340). She nurtured the basil with tears, and nursed it ‘patient as a hen-bird’ ‘breast[ing] its eggs’ ’ In the Preface, the fatal review is a ‘poisoned shaft,’ and its archer ‘a most base and
unprincipled calumn'ator’ and ‘murderer.’ In the poem, ‘Our Adonais has drunk poison — oh! / What deaf and viperous murderer could crown / Life’s early cup with such a draught of woe?’ (Sheiley 1984, pp.24-5; 316-18).
^Thomas Medwin suggested that Shelley was reading Keats shortly before drowning: ‘he had in haste thrust a volume of Keats’s Poems [in his pocket], open at The Eve of S t Agnes, a poem which he wonderfully admired, and after the death of his brother poet, carried
continually about with him’ (Medwin 1913, p.399). The volume had belonged to Leigh Hunt, who later told Browning that Sheliey would return it to him in the afterlife.
^Sheiley 1984, pp.27-51. In Henry Weekes’s 1854 memorial (Christchurch Priory, Hampshire) Shelley’s body is supported by a female mourner (Read 1982, p.178). Compare Figure 14, p.155.
“See above p.90.
^Keats 1820, p.49, 2. Lorenzo was murdered by his lover’s cruel and vindictive brothers, so Shelley may intend a parallel with Croker and other critics. Compare II, p.62.
Figure 12. The grave of Percy Bysshe Shelley. This 1956 picture shews chrysanthemums and roses left at the grave which detract from the slab’s austerity. See pp.117, 128.
(471, 470). Shelley’s brief allusion could immortalise Keats’s poem along with its poet, but it also describes Adonais mothered by a lover. This emphasis on immaturity is confirmed by the stanza’s ending:
Thy extreme hope, the loveliest and the last. The bloom, whose petals nipt before they blew Died on the promise of the fruit, is waste;
The broken lily lies — the storm is overpast. (51-4)
This vocabulary of waste does not describe the death of a male poet, but the premature deaths of babies, children and women. He is the ‘pale flower’ nursed by a grieving virgin, the frost bitten ‘bloom’ which will never come to fruit, the ‘broken lily.’ Elsewhere he has a ‘young spirit’ (76), blood ‘like the young tears of May’ (215), or is a ‘gentle child’ (235).
When Shelley finally enters the poem as the ‘phantom among men’ (272) he like Keats is a mixture of weakness and strength; but his weakness indicates mature struggle and adult weariness rather than immaturity. The living poet wanders in the wilderness like Actæon; where the classical youth was turned into a hart as punishment for seeing Diana naked, ‘his own thoughts, along that rugged way, / Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey’ (278-9). If Shelley sees his fate as self-consuming, at least he fathered these powerful thoughts, and while his head is garlanded by pitiful ‘faded violets’ (290), he still holds the virile caduceus of poetry.^ Youth is of course a significant factor in the pathos of Keats’s death, so Shelley can recuperate his death as an escape from adult disillusion - he ‘now can never mourn / A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain’ (357-8); but dying ‘in his twenty-fourth year’ Keats was barely more than a child to Shelley.^
Images of childishness are a minor theme within the achievement of Adonais, yet combined with haunting signs of the material body, and the concrete site of the Protestant Cemetery, they suggest the emotional force of an underestimated biographical factor. The Shelleys were in Rome when their eldest son William caught malaria and died on 7 June 1819 aged three-and-a-half.® Shelley wrote to Peacock the next day, ‘it seems to me as if, hunted by calamity as I have been, that I should never recover any cheerfulness again’ (Jones 1964,
'The stranger claims fraternity by exhibiting his ‘branded ... brow’ (305), ‘like Cain’s or Christ’s’ (306). Cain’s fate as the first murderer was first associated with injurious critics: ‘the curse of Cain / Light on his head who pierced thy innocent breast’ (150-1).
^Compare Bloom’s remark that ‘poets, confronting the imminence of death, work to subvert the immortality of their precursors, as though any one poet’s afterlife could be metaphorically prolonged at the expense of another’s. Even Shelley, in the sublimely suicidal Adonais, a poem frighteningly transcending mere disinterestedness, subtly divests Keats of the heroic naturalism that is Keats’s unique gift’ (Bloom 1975, p.151). I suggest that Shelley’s stance is to deny Keats as a ‘precursor,’ and this suicidal impulse is a rhetorical attempt to preempt Keats even in death.
^As well as Mary’s two miscarriages, the Shelleys’ younger daughter Clara had died of malaria in Venice on 24 September 1818, and they had travelled on, fearful for the health of the other children. William St Clair distinguishes between the Shelleys’ attitude to an
undifferentiated two year-old girl, and to the three year-old boy William whom they ‘allowed themselves to love as an individual’ (St Clair 1989, pp.461-4). However, I would read this behaviour (if it is true) as rationalism in recognising the emotional gap to be filled on the death of a child, rather than Insensitivity. See above pp.74-5 and n for Jalland and Pollock’s opposition to this model derived from Lawrence Stone.
v.ll, p.97). Mary wrote in their journal on 10 October 1822 that ‘in truth after my William’s death this worid seemed only a quicksand, sinking beneath me’ (Feldman and Scott-Kilvert 1987, p.438). William was buried in the Old Protestant Cemetery, a short distance from the plot Severn chose for Keats two years later.
Shelley did not revisit the Protestant Cemetery between William’s death and writing
Adonais. In representing Keats’s death, Shelley drew on his loving memories of his child buried in the same place, and this association influenced the anxious subtextual references to materiality and decay and the surprisingiy specific treatment of the Cemetery; Shelley identified Keats as a son as well as a brother and alter-ego.
The stanzas set in the Cemetery (48 to 51) fall almost at the crisis of the poem, and present a modern death within the city of fallen classical ideals (426-7). While the ancient culture is debased, Adonais joins an intellectual elite ‘Who waged contention with their time’s decay,’ and won immortality. The speaker guides the reader through the ancient city to the grave, in a strategy from topographical literature which was to be much imitated in tribute- poems. The speaker exhorts us ‘Go thou to Rome,’ a place of dreamy idealism and ‘wilderness,’ a sublime landscape where greenery covers ‘The bones of Desolation’s nakedness.’ A new guide takes over from the speaker:
the Spirit of the spot shail lead Thy footsteps to a slope of green access Where, like an infant’s smile, over the dead
A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread. (438-41)
The focus changes from subiime generality, to an intimate domestic mood, which can be traced intertextually to two fragments Shelley wrote in 1819 ‘To William Shelley.’ The poems are directly addressed to the child, and the father caressingly repeats the terms of address, ‘thou,’ ‘thee,’ and ‘thy,’ to simulate contact with his dead son.^ In the longer fragment ‘My lost William’ (Sheliey 1904, p.581)^ the poet searches for his child, seeking reunion with the soul who