An ode that stayed

It began in school, this mild obsession, sparked by a picture in a poetry textbook. A sketch of John Keats, head tilted and crowned with curly hair, hand supporting his chin, clad in a cuffed white shirt, dark eyes staring into the distance. To be honest, there wasn’t much to choose from for a teenage girl — TS Eliot looked sternly grim, WH Auden wrinkly and, well, old, William Blake a bit of a silver-haired Santa, Philip Larkin a balding goggle-eyed septuagenarian. (Come to think of it now, why were there only male poets in our Elective English syllabus?) Keats, though, was eternally youthful. He died at 25; hence bestowed, like all artistes who pass away young, with an air of tragic glamour. He wrote romantic poems with lines like ‘Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast.’ And then, of course, there were his odes. All six composed in 1819, in quick, frenetic succession. ‘On a Grecian Urn.’ ‘On Indolence.’ ‘On Melancholy.’ ‘To Psyche.’ ‘To Autumn.’ ‘To a Nightingale.’

In school, we studied the last two, taught by a forbidding Bengali lady — shall we call her Ms SS? — who pretty much thought our class of three (Elective English wasn’t fashionable those days; also everyone was terrified of Ms SS) was a gathering of the lowest, scummiest philistines on the face of the earth. (It didn’t help that my classmates, seated on either side, dozed off at any chance they got. I stayed awake mainly to nudge them in the ribs.) It is odd what stays with you. Hot Assam afternoons, air heavy with monsoon humidity, deciphering ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness/Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun.’ But it was ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ that, for me, was a revelation. ‘Tender is the night,’ I remember repeating softly. And that moment, in a white room filled with rows of empty desks, Ms SS at her table, I understood the poem. The references made coherent sense, and the world suddenly seemed clearer, as though a viewfinder had slipped into place. Verse six. That I committed to memory, and recited to anyone who would give me a hearing, patient or otherwise. ‘Darkling I listen; and, for many a time/I have been half in love with easeful Death/Call’d him soft names in many a musèd rhyme/To take into the air my quiet breath/Now more than ever seems it rich to die/To cease upon the midnight with no pain.’ I was all of 17 . Grasping, unexpectedly, small slivers of truth about loss and life.

A decade ago, when I first moved to London, the city where Keats was born and lived most of his short life, I looked for his house. Tucked away in Hampstead Heath, at 10 Keats’ Grove, a charming white-walled Georgian place, set into a wide curving lawn. It’s been turned into a museum, with a café and shop (where you can buy ‘vintage’ prints of his poems, and fridge magnets), but the rooms are spectacularly intact — displaying his letters to Fanny Brawne, the girl he loved, her engagement ring, his small, eclectic library, and, rather morbidly, a copy of his death mask. At the time, along with a ticket, I was given a one-year student pass; I could return whenever I liked. And I did. Mostly to sit in the garden and read and pretend to write, shaded by the plum tree (fourth or fifth generation of the original under which Keats wrote ‘Ode to a Nightingale’), bringing along friends and family visitors, attending the annual Keats festival with other stalkers, I mean enthusiasts.

When I was in Rome a few years ago, I looked up his residence at 26 Piazza di Spagna. Stricken by tuberculosis, he travelled to Italy in the hope that a warmer, drier climate would help cure him. The place is tiny, his airless bedroom’s only redeeming feature is a wide window overlooking the Spanish Steps outside. Eventually, on another visit, I found his grave. Keats is buried in Cimitero Acattolico, the ‘non Catholic’ or Protestant Cemetery, outside the (then) walls of the city, a peaceful place haunted by cypress trees. His tombstone is unadorned, engraved with a simple Greek lyre (with four of its eight strings broken ‘to show his classical genius cut off by death before its maturity’ as his friend Joseph Severn later interpreted it), and the words — ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water.’ Below that, a date: Feb 24, 1821. In my excitement, I snapped a picture and updated my location on Facebook. Except it read ‘Janice Pariat was in Keats’ grave’ — spurring many tender comments from friends, asking if I was alright. Or sane.

This summer, I found myself in Hampstead once again. The streets still looked familiar, and wound temptingly down to Keats’ Grove. The plum tree was taller, my one-year pass had long expired, but everything looked exactly the same. I didn’t enter; I felt I’d already seen everything I had to see. ‘Tender is the night,’ I repeated softly as dusk faded around me.

Janice Pariatis the author of Seahorse

Follow Janice on Twitter @janicepariat

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