Category: General

Beauty in Death: St Pancras Old Church

Tucked neatly between St Pancras International and St Pancras Hospital, the small and wonderful St Pancras Old Church and its gorgeous churchyard ooze a feeling of enigmatic beauty. But what is it that makes this location so strangely alluring?

The old church is not something you’d expect to find in central London. Obvious for the area of one of the largest train stations in one of Europe’s biggest cities, everything around King’s Cross and St Pancras International is gigantic, overwhelming, industrial.

And if you think of a church in the area, chances are you’d be more inclined to conjure images of St Pancras Church in your mind – the Greek Revival church with its ionic columns and eerie caryatides on several sides of the building. The thing is, this church is comparatively new.

A bit of history…

The beautiful St Pancras Old Church, on the other hand, is ancient – and rather small. As the newly built up areas around St Pancras, especially near Euston Road, were beginning to boom, the parish quickly decided that it was time for a larger church, so in 1816 they began building the new St Pancras Church.

The old church, on the other hand, is believed to be one of the oldest sites of Christian worship in England. In earlier times the parish of St Pancras stretched almost the whole way from Oxford Street to Highgate. The local population abandoned the site in the 14th century and the church was left to its demise, with services only held about once a month at the end of the 18th century. When St Pancras Church was completed in 1822 its predecessor lost its status as a parish church.

Today, St Pancras Old Church is the parish church of Somers Town and a popular go-to place for people seeking a bit of peace and quiet – rather fascinating considering its central location. But it’s also a spectacular place to visit for arts-enthusiasts.

A lovely churchyard…

Shaded gently by many lovely mature trees, the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church also has a fascinating history. It was a popular burial place for many Roman Catholics from around London, including French refugees, the last resting place of composers Carl Friedrich Abel and Johann Christian Bach, as well as sculptor John Flaxman. There’s even a memorial tomb for Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, the writers and philosophers who are today probably more widely known as the parents of Mary Shelley.

But the churchyard’s greatest allure is its peaceful nature. Because of its variety of trees and green spaces and sweet looking gravestones, it’s just a nice place to be. It’s ideal to rest and sit down for a while, perhaps while reading the odd book or contemplating the old stones that decorate the entire area.

A literary background

For literary enthusiasts, St Pancras Old Church is an equally important place to visit. Jerry Cruncher in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities is a body snatcher who makes his way to the churchyard at night to steal some corpses for dissection at medical schools.

It was also here that the future Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley planned their marriage at the grave of Mary Wollstonecraft. The Shelleys, of course, would go down in literary history as one of the greatest collaborating couples.

The Hardy Tree

The Hardy Tree, one of the Great Trees of London, is probably the most spectacular of sites to visit if you happen to go to the churchyard. The large ash tree’s roots partially reach out from the soil, forming their way through a pile of neatly arranged headstones surrounding it, making both rock and wood an intricate part of each other.

Such an odd sight deserves an explanation. The tree gets its name from Thomas Hardy – obviously nowadays known for his great novels such as Tess or Jude, as well as his poetry – who worked here at a young age in the 1860s. He oversaw the excavation of the graveyard while the Midland Railway built the London terminus. Since many of the gravestones were in the way, they placed them in a linear fashion around the tree. More gruesomely, as the railway tracks were being built, many corpses would have been exposed to the open air, so Hardy had to excavate them before the building began – possibly one explanation for the generally gloomy tone in his novels and poetry.

Closing Thoughts

If you’re around King’s Cross or St Pancras International, be sure to visit St Pancras Old Church. If not for the sake of the church itself, then certainly because of its eerie and unnatural churchyard. It’s beautiful and uncanny, and you’re certain to love it.

There’s just something fascinating about cemeteries – especially those overladen with as much history as St Pancras. Perhaps it’s also a fascination with the morbid and death which draws us to the kind of appreciation of ceremonies related to laying people to rest.

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Haunting Music

With Halloween drawing ever nearer you’re probably spicing up the mood already with horror films or haunting music. But what makes the soundtracks so scary, and what are some of the most effective pieces? Let’s have a look at the theory and science behind creepy noises.

What makes haunting music put you on the edge of your seat while listening? Why are some horror movie soundtracks so horrifying? Without a solid understanding of music theory, it probably seems like a mystery, but even then, you definitely feel it while listening. Dissonant chords and shrieking notes always have an uncanny effect.

It’s difficult to know why this is the case, although we’re gradually gaining an understanding. Artists discovered long ago that major chords generally create positive emotions, whereas minor chords create negative ones. This is a rather simplistic view and isn’t always true, but by and large, it’s the case.

Dissonant chords, on the other hand, create a sense of uneasiness. Due to their eerie nature, composers for a long time deliberately avoided using them. With the rise of polytonal and atonal music that became a thing of the past, but they still produce a jarring effect whenever you hear them.

New Findings – what makes sounds scary?

In 2012, Daniel Blumstein from the University of California produced a study suggesting that the reaction to haunting sounds is biological in nature, since they evoke instinctive emotional responses. He discovered that the music resembles animal distress calls. Baby marmots, for instance, screamed in a nonlinear chaotic noise when caught. An animal’s scream, a child’s cry and a dissonant chord all trigger a response in humans, making us think our children – or ourselves – are being threatened.

As part of the research, participants rated music segments based on emotional stimulation. Blumenstein correctly predicted that they ranked music with nonlinear elements as more stimulating and stated they linked it to emotions such as fear or sadness. Furthermore, tracks where the pitch was raised higher provoked even stronger emotional reactions.

But he also discovered that the reaction is dependent on the context. When listening to haunting music alongside ‘boring’ images, the participants rated it as less stimulating. Also, some music is associated with scariness just by social engineering. The singing of children’s nursery rhymes, for instance, only seems scary to us because horror films have put them into frightening situations in the first place – so they seem haunting by association.

Haunting Music in Films

It goes without saying that horror movies wouldn’t be as effective as they are without the use of sound effects. Alfred Hitchcock even said that one third of the reason Psycho was a great hit was based purely on the music – and personally, I’d be inclined to agree.

But it’s a bit of an artform in itself, creating music for horror films. Some are subtle and create a slight sense of uneasiness, others are just brilliant tracks which make you feel uncomfortable. Others are less effective and just produce loud noise, which never really works.

But enough theory: let’s look at some scary pieces from classical and film music to give you some goosebumps!

Modest Mussorgsky – Night on Bald Mountain

There’s a reason this music makes practically every list of ‘top 10 scariest classical music’. It drips brilliance from every pore, starting with the chilling, quick-paced violins at the start and the horns underlying the music with a sense of the approaching end of days. It’s haunting music from start to finish and will keep you from sleeping at night. Probably no surprise, then, that it was used for the segment with the devil in Disney’s Fantasia.

Bernard Herrmann – Theme from Psycho

One word: uncomfortable. Probably one of the best horror soundtracks of all time, this immediately puts you in an eerie position where you’re afraid to look behind you out of fear that something might be lurking there. Without this track, Psycho wouldn’t be what it is. With it, it is brilliant. Screeching sounds which move unstoppably onward at succinct points during the movie really make this an unforgettable sound which will haunt you for a long time.

J.S. Bach – Toccata and Fugue in D Minor

Honestly, as much as I love this piece, I think it’s largely considered haunting music by association through its use in horror films more than anything else. While it largely uses minor keys, it’s quite timid on the dissonant side and actually has a few uplifting moments. Nevertheless, overall it’s lovely, quick-paced, always entertaining and just plain beautiful, with some generally horrific moments in there. And the sound of an organ always sounds a bit haunting, I suppose…

Mike Oldfield – The Exorcist theme

This is a strange one. The track itself isn’t as much scary as it is minimalistic and in a constant loop of producing an eerie, otherworldly feeling – perhaps more mysterious than outright frightening. I think the reason the film works effectively with its music is because of it’s hardly ever present – instead, the film offers you a silent build-up with regular conversations and a gradual build-up of dread, with the soundtrack really just giving you a hint at the underlying haunt.

György Ligeti – Requiem (esp. II Kyrie)

This piece works from so many different angles. First by association, since the Kyrie Eleison – in English ‘Lord, have mercy’ – within a requiem already has a sense of desperation in it. Second, it’s one constant dissonant chord with more and more layers building upon it. Third, the sound of shrieking human voices to uncomfortable instrumental aspects makes it sound horrific. Just envision this being the sound of billions of lost souls yearning, screaming, begging for mercy on judgment day…

John Williams – Jaws theme

To finish off with another soundtrack which makes excellent use of build-up, this one is also a great example of haunting music. It starts out quietly with low notes, but builds up rather quickly with quiet, but increasingly louder bangs and dissonances and a variety of instruments which always sound threatening – culminating in the moment the strings come out and produce a shrieking effect. It captures perfectly the threat that lurks underneath the water surface.

Closing thoughts

There you have it, some thoughts and examples of haunting music! Can you think of any other pieces I’ve left out that need to be mentioned? Then please leave me a comment! Otherwise, if you liked this article, then feel free to click on one of the tender buttons below to share it on the social media of your choice.

Top 10 Horror (or Horror-like) Classics to Read this October

October is here at last! The leaves are taking on beautiful shades of brown, yellow and red. They begin to fall and give you that autumn-smell, reminding you of how gorgeous the world can look even as nature reminds you of decay and death. What better time to read some of the best horror classics literature has to offer?

Although Halloween is a particularly America-focused holiday, there’s something about the time of year which makes it particularly apt to that feeling of desolation, gothic, and uncanniness making you want to read or watch something horrifying – or at least unsettling.

For that reason, I’ve selected 10 of the best horror classics to read or re-read this October. They’re in no particular order since they’re all good, and the selection is based entirely on my own taste, rather than any objective measurement of quality (after all, it’s very subjective).

Why classical horror?

You might be wondering – and rightly so – why I’ve selected almost exclusively writing from the 19th and early 20th centuries, with one exception. The reason is mostly because it’s always nice to go back to the classics to see where the inspiration of contemporary authors came from.

Furthermore, despite their age, all of the entries on this list are still perfectly readable to a contemporary audience. That way they enable you to experience the sense of uneasiness that our ancestors felt themselves. Also, I’m an old-fashioned bore.

Frankenstein

While Mary Shelley’s spouse may be the better poet, she was undeniably the better prose writer, and her Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus from 1818 deserves its place as one of the greatest horror novels of all time. Although it might be very different from what a reader who only knows the movies would expect, it nevertheless represents an eerie exploration of questions about good and evil, life and death, societal issues and the dangers of technological progression.

Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde

Another book which is fundamentally different from all film adaptations, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is rightfully one of the most well-known gothic novellas out there. The story is told from the perspective of a lawyer who investigates the eerie occurrences happening in London in the late 19th century. Capturing an uncanny flair of the unknown, tackling issues of privacy and publicity and good versus evil, this is an excellent read for someone looking for an air of mystery.

Dracula

What a surprise! Another novel which has been turned into many adaptations, but this time with some which are closer to the source material than in the works mentioned above. But its fame is deserved, since Bram Stoker’s Dracula is an excellent piece of eerie writing, capturing succinctly the nature of vampires and establishing many of the common tropes found in contemporary Vampire-laden fiction (sadly usually for worse rather than better). Told in an epistolary manner, it always maintains the sense of horror you’d expect from this classic.

The Turn of the Screw

This one actually isn’t as plagued by film adaptations the same way the previous ones are – except for one, which is quite brilliant. I’ve written several times about this gorgeously eerie and uncanny story on my blog, so I won’t go into too much detail. Featuring a plot set in an isolated old mansion with creepy kids and a possibly insane governess with some ghostly encounters, this novella will send shivers down your spine – quite an accomplishment for Henry James whose plots are often impressionistic and drawn-out.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

One of my favourite horror-like stories of all time, Oscar Wilde’s only novel is a wonderful work asking the readers how far they would go to achieve eternal youth – and thus all the splendours and possibilities for hedonistic action that would entail, making this one of the most contemporarily relevant books on this list. With a focus on pleasure-seeking and implications of saucy action (although it hardly ever becomes too explicit), this book is suspenseful from start to finish and frequently raises issues of beauty, the arts, good and evil, and it contains a plot so ingenious that it makes me envious. Not to mention that Lord Henry is one of the wittiest ‘moral guides’ in a novel to date. It might not be straight-forward horror, but in a society as obsessed with looks and youth as ours, Dorian’s fate is sure to deliver you a sense of dread.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

While I’m generally not the biggest fan of Washington Irving, this story of merely 40-or-so pages is a particularly short read which will nevertheless give you plenty of build-up, suspense, and horror. It’s creepy, odd and short. It has also inspired several adaptations (one short by Disney as far as I know, and one full-length feature which is so bad it’s hilarious), making it probably one of the most unusual entries in my list. Certainly well worth a look if you have an hour to kill.

The Haunting of Hill House

Written by Shirley Jackson in 1959, this is the most recent entry on this list. Relying more on a form of psychological terror than classical gothic horror, the plot centres around an eighty-year-old mansion at an unknown location. Exploring the now classical trope of someone exploring supernatural occurrences in a haunted house, it probably inspired a whole range of subsequent books and film adaptations, even if they rarely openly acknowledge the influence. For those seeking a clever book which undermines the poltergeist cliché, this is a great read.

The Phantom of the Opera

Sadly much less known than Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical of the same name, Gaston Leroux’s novel was actually Webber’s inspiration. Written in the early 20th century, it tells the ghostly story of an opera house being haunted by a phantom called… Erik… who has a curious interest in the musical events of the theatre and especially a longing passion for the young soprano Christine Daaé. While I can’t vouch for the French original, the English translation I read was well-written. It has a creepy tone and a decent sense of horror throughout.

Anything by Edgar Allan Poe

I never said this would be a particularly original list! But it’s impossible to make a selection of the best classical horror reads without a reference to Poe. So many poems and short stories of his will make you afraid to go to sleep at night. ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’? A gorgeous account of insanity. ‘The Black Cat’? Beautifully dark and creepy. ‘The Raven’? A lovely eerie poem with one of the best uses of long trochaic lines in all of literature. And all of his writing is perfectly accessible to a contemporary audience. Not all are gothic in nature, but most of them are. All of them are excellently entertaining. His bizarre detective stories starring Auguste Dupin even became the blueprint for master detectives like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. For one of the best Poe-experiences, be sure to check out Vincent Price performing ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’!

Anything by H.P. Lovecraft

Probably another obvious choice, Lovecraft’s stories are just… bizarre. Whereas Poe deals with more ‘classical’ horror themes such as isolation or terror, Lovecraft goes into the strange realm. Every story features an exploration of the horror of the unknown, the potential threats that it can entail, and overwhelming otherworldly powers which humans cannot even begin to understand. While I can’t recommend them as wholeheartedly as Poe’s stories (just because he doesn’t write quite as well), they nevertheless ooze brilliance. They’re great because they give you that sense of uncanny uneasiness you feel when confronting things beyond comprehension.

Closing words

This should give you plenty of reading material to get you through the month! Unless you’re a creepily quick reader or have too much time on your hand, I suppose…

But there’s one film which is so ghastly, so horrific that it puts all these horror classics in its shadow. Something so terrible that I cannot even mention it here… I’ll just quietly leave you a link – click if you dare.

Did you enjoy this article? Did I miss something you think I should have included? Then please leave me a beautiful comment so that I can get back to you! Otherwise, if you’d just like to show me your appreciation, please click on one of the tender buttons below. That way you can share it on the social media of your choice. Have a lovely October everyone 🙂


Depicting suffering: Vincent van Gogh

An inner drive towards greatness meets utter rejection from society. Let’s have a brief look at Vincent van Gogh’s infamous life, his struggles, and his ultimate victory.

Today’s society regards Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) as one of the greatest painters who ever lived. He worked tirelessly and vigorously, producing over 2100 artworks within a single decade. All of them are now worth a fortune, with recent sales reaching over $66 million for a single painting. He’s still associated with myths about his madness, difficult personality, and the moment when he cut his own ear off.

His style, often classified as post-impressionistic (probably, in part, because he was inspired by and reacted against the impressionists), is known for its vivid use of colour. With beautifully accurate brushstrokes he breathed life into his art. It contains a sense of immediacy and urgency almost unparalleled by other artists.

Despite this, however, he remained unrecognised. Most of his contemporaries even considered him a failure, a lunatic, a nuisance. He was incapable of making enough money from his work to sustain himself, instead relying on his brother Theo. Only through the discovery of his letters with Theo do we know his theories and ideas about art.

The myth lives on

Needless to say, with a stellar ascent to fame after his death in contrast with his disastrous lifestyle before committing suicide – suffering not only from poverty and depression but also from psychotic episodes and delusions – he fed the myth of the romantic tortured artist. The real Van Gogh led a life with less glamour than the media often portrays.

His paintings remain excellent, however, whether romanticised by the media or not. With so many pictures around you are unlikely to run out of gems of his to discover. I’ve selected three to present to you today that you might not have seen previously. And they may even surprise you with the prevalence of darkness in the repertoire of an artist usually known for his ingenious use of colours.

I’ll steer clear of selecting some of his most well-known work – such as his Sunflowers series, The Starry Night, or the Wheatfield with Crows, because you probably already know them. Instead, I’ll draw your attention to some of his lesser-known work. I’m hoping to show you parts of him that are slightly less obvious to the public.

Prisoner’s Round (after Gustave Doré)

A copy of Doré’s Newgate Exercise Yard, Van Gogh painted this at the Saint-Paul asylum in Saint Remy, where he admitted himself after a series of breakdowns. The asylum functioned in part as a prison, meaning that he wasn’t allowed to leave the confinements to seek inspiration elsewhere.

The viewer is greeted by a particularly dark palette, with dark and cold tones dominating the picture, giving it a slightly sickly feeling. The expressions on the prisoners walking around are unclear, but the little you can make out demonstrate a sense of isolation and depression – which is further enhanced by the small number of windows and the staleness of the walls surrounding the area. An excellent portrayal of claustrophobia.

Hospital at Saint Remy

Van Gogh also painted this picture at the asylum, this time of the building itself, hidden behind various trees and with some people roaming around. Van Gogh was later allowed to leave the asylum while still staying there since the wardens considered him less dangerous than his fellow inmates, but at first he was forced to paint only what he saw through the bars in his room.

Hospital at Saint Remy is a bit more typical for Van Gogh than Prisoner’s Round, but despite the more vibrant colours, the darker tones and a sense of suppression through the overbearing number of branches in the upper half of the painting still dominate the picture. He painted the asylum itself in a bright yellow: perhaps a sign that he was hoping to find a relief to his mental anguish?

Road with Cypress and Star

Composed roughly a year after his more famous Starry Night, this painting is another beautiful portrayal of a night sky. It contains all the nervous brushstrokes we came to know and love in his other painting. The curving road with travellers seems more full of life and progress than the peaceful depiction in Starry Night.

Van Gogh was preoccupied with cypresses during this time. He mentioned them in letters to Theo, comparing them to Egyptian obelisks. While I don’t know whether Van Gogh knew about it, many artists use cypresses as a strong symbol of death. Through its lurking in the painting, we can say that he felt this dark presence constantly watching over him. This is in contrast with the otherwise rather pleasant looking depiction. I adore the crescent moon and the curvature of the road. While I find the stars less vibrant than in Starry Night, it is still an ingenious depiction of the sky.

Closing Thoughts

That should be enough fanboying for one day! Van Gogh was a brilliant painter to bless us with his genius despite his early death at 37. Oh, by the way: the ear thing might have been an accident during an argument with his housemate Paul Gauguin. But we’ll probably never know for sure.

Sadly, London is generally not the best place to view Van Gogh’s art (comparatively), but the Tate is starting a new exhibition on the 27th March – 11 August 2019, bringing together 40 of his works to demonstrate the inspiration he got from his stay here and how he inspired other artists in London – something incredible to look forward to!

Anything I forgot to mention or that you disagree with? Then please leave a comment below! Otherwise, if you enjoyed this article, why not share it on the social media of your choice? Then click on one of the tender buttons below.

Beauty in Death: Visiting Keats’ Grave

What do you do when you know your life is going to be cut short? Or worse: what do you do when you’re dying and you believe the thing you cared most about is worthless?

John Keats (1795-1821) was an utterly tragic figure. Scolded for his poetry during his lifetime, he contracted tuberculosis at an early age. He moved to Rome in hopes of recovery, but to no avail: just several months after moving there, he died. Due to the negative criticism he received on his work, he passed away believing that his life had been a complete failure.

Keats’ life and poetry are heart-wrenching. He wrote gorgeous stuff, and we can only imagine how his poetry would have developed had he been allowed to live for a bit longer. But he did die too young, at only 25, making his life one of the great tragedies of the 19th century.

With the overwhelming amount of poetry out there, it’s not very often that you find time to think a lot about a single poet. Keats hasn’t been on my mind substantially for a couple of years now, but I was drawn back to him by reading Thomas Hardy’s ‘Rome at the Pyramid of Cestius Near the Graves of Shelley and Keats’ on the tube the other day.

A Roman Holiday…

The poem immediately took me back two years. We were on a short one-week trip to Rome, spending as little money as possible, staying in a small hotel in the bohemian district of Trastevere and living on cheap pizzas for £5. We avoided spending money as much as possible, exploring the city entirely on foot.

And what a trip it was. I insisted that we’d visit Keats’ grave, not knowing whether it’s too much of a nerdy thing to do and whether my girlfriend might find it weird. We were travelling somewhat in Oscar Wilde’s footsteps, as it were, who said that it was the ‘holiest place in Rome’. She agreed.

It’s an eerie thing, approaching the non-Catholic cemetery where he lies. A wall surrounds the entire area, and there are no indications as to the location of the entrance. So, you find yourself walking around, possibly in the wrong direction, in the hope that you’ll get there.

The Cemetery

But the cemetery is worth it, once you’ve found it. Cypress trees cover the entire cemetery alongside beautifully crafted gravestones of various shapes, some of them hundreds of years old. That’s to say nothing of the huge amounts of blue wild flowers everywhere you look. Even without Keats’ grave, I would suggest that it’s probably the prettiest cemetery out there – even prettier than Highgate (and with the added plus that the entry is free).

The most striking thing you’ll notice is the complete silence. Nobody goes there. Unlike the more popular tourist destinations, such as the Vatican, the Forum or the Colosseum, you’d be hard pressed to find a single tourist wandering around. Only cats will disturb you as you try to decipher the names on the old gravestones. They play a fundamental role in creating the cemetery’s atmosphere – there’s even a fundraising campaign to feed the cats who live there.

As you follow the signs towards Keats’ grave, you will, of course, also pass Shelley’s gravestone. At some point, the forest-like maze of tombs and graves stops, and you enter an open lawn with just the odd tree or gravestone here and there. Finally, you see the great pyramid of Cestius.

But who on earth was Cestius? Some rich Roman with too much time and money on his hands. Hard by you see the true appeal of the place: the grave of one poet who thought too little of himself. If only he had known to what fame he’d rise post-mortem…

Reaching the Grave

And then, you feel at peace. Absolute peace. You’re standing there, in the shade from the wall behind you, and the trees beside you, looking at Keats’ grave, and beside it, his best friend Joseph Severn’s, who was with him throughout his final days, looking after him, comforting him, talking to him.

I think Hardy captures the spirit succinctly in his poem, where he says that Cestius did a great thing

 

In beckoning pilgrim feet

With marble finger high

To where, by shadowy wall and history-haunted street,

Those matchless singers lie…

 

Shaded from the sun, enjoying the peace you’ll find nowhere else in Rome, you will be reminded of a depressed soul who thought that nothing he had ever produced would be worth anything to anyone anywhere. Hence, his inscription:

This grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet, who, on his deathbed, in the bitterness of his heart at the malicious power of his enemies desired these words to be engraven on his tomb stone: Here lies one whose name was writ in water. 24 February 1821.

Keats felt so humbled that he didn’t even have his name engraved on his own gravestone. He wished merely to be known as ‘one whose name was writ in water’ – that is, that his name is so fleeting and unimportant that he will be forgotten by everyone.

There’s something incredibly touching at the sight of that. As moving as Joseph Severn’s placement beside him is, it does little to soften the blow from the utter solitude and sadness Keats must have felt in his final years – despite the undeniable beauty of his work, which would only be discovered in the years after his death.

Uplifting Notes

But it’s not all dark. As horrible as his death must have been, the love people show him even so many years later is uplifting. There are people who regularly place flowers at the gravestone, and the wonderful people at the Keats and Shelley House next to the Spanish Steps work hard to preserve the memory. Beside a bench by the grave there’s a heartfelt inscription:

 

Keats! If thy cherished name be “writ in water”

Each drop has fallen from some mourner’s cheek;

A sacred tribute; such as heroes seek,

Though oft in vain – for dazzling deeds of slaughter

Sleep on! Not honoured less for Epitaph so meek!

 

As uplifting as these things are, however, Keats’ life reminds us of the struggle for meaning most of us suffer from at one point in our lives, and how quickly a life can end without fulfilment. Keats believed he had failed utterly, but the reception of his work shows us that he was one of the greatest poetic minds who ever lived.

At least he got to be buried in the place of his choice. Aware of his imminent death, he sent Severn to scout out the area and to see whether it’s a nice burial ground. When Severn reported about the blue flowers and the quiet atmosphere, it was Keats’ wish to lie here – as though the soul and the place belong together.

Final Impressions

Keats’ grave is a wonderful place. It captures a whole range of emotions at once, just through his tragic life story, the tranquillity of the place, the peace through the absence of tourists, and the fact that it is also one of the greenest spots in Rome. No question about it: it is the holiest place in Rome.

It would be unfair of me to finish this article without quoting from the master himself. I think his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ represents the nature of the cemetery best since it’s essentially a meditation by a depressed speaker who tries to escape by taking joy in the song of a nightingale. Towards the end of the poem, he returns to his dire situation, feeling overwhelmed by the darkness of his existence:

 

Forlorn! The very word is like a bell

To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

Adieu! The fancy cannot cheat so well

As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.

Adieu! Adieu! Thy plaintive anthem fades

Past the near meadows, over the still stream,

Up the hill-side; and now ‘tis buried deep

In the next valley-glades:

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

Fled is that music: – Do I wake or sleep?

 

Have you been to Rome? Did you visit Keats’ grave? Then please share your experience in the comment section! Otherwise, if you enjoyed this post, why not share it on the social media of your choice? Just click on one of the tender buttons below!