(no subject)

What a strange path I took to get to you, O Jeanne.

You've been a long way away...Thank you for coming back to me.

You've made my life a song...Bless you for coming back to me at last.

(no subject)

In View of the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, James Wright

It is idle to say
The wind will blow your fingers all away
And scatter small blue knucklebones upon
The ground from hell to breakfast and beyond.
You will sit listening till I am gone
To seed among the pear trees. For my voice
Sprinkles a few light petals on this pond,
And you nod sagely, saying I am wise.
Your fingers toss their white cocoons and rise
Lightly and lightly brush against my face:
Alive still, in this violated place,
Idle as any deed that Cestius did,
Vanished beneath his perfect pyramid.

Almost seems like he's addressing a Keats/Shelley hybrid: Shelley told the wind to scatter his thoughts to seed something better. Keats said his name would be dispersed by water. Shelley's friend, quoting Shakespeare, said Shelley was changed into something else under a sea.

But I assume it is Keats he means: Keats was wrong and is still there, will be sitting there when Wright is gone to seed, whose voice left only petals in water (spelling his name at first?), rather than seeds in earth like the ones his body will nourish. Keats tells him he is wise--why? About Keats' name and work living on? But everyone knows that. About knowing that he, Wright, will disappear?

New Keats, out of his pale body, brushes Wright's face with his fingers: he is a presence Wright feels intimately--one with compassion for him (a trust Keats would have had some? another need?). Wright is alive, and idle (surely it is Wright and not Keats that is idle? or is idle some Whitmanian compliment? surely not that?) as Cestius. Does he damn with faint praise his own art by associating it with the pyramid? Perfect, but (ouch) pointless?

Weird how many ambiguities you need to straighten out with this one--though it seems to me you can. As though he really was convinced he shouldn't be read, that there was really no point. Who else directly addressed the graves? Shelley Keats', of course; Wilde; I'm convinced Dickinson without having seen them. I think I've read a number of others for Keats, popular, popular kid that he is.

Cats, statue. I found a feather by his stone, but pigeon I think.

(no subject)

Wilde on Keats' tomb:

As I stood beside the mean grave of this divine boy, I thought of him as of a Priest of Beauty slain before his time; and the vision of Guido's St. Sebastian came before my eyes as I saw him at Genoa, a lovely brown boy, with crisp, clustering hair and red lips, bound by his evil enemies to a tree, and though pierced by arrows, raising his eyes with divine, impassioned gaze towards the Eternal Beauty of the opening heavens. And thus my thoughts shaped themselves to rhyme:

HEU MISERANDE PUER

Rid of the world's injustice and its pain,
He rests at last beneath God's veil of blue;
Taken from life while life and love were new
The youngest of the martyrs here is lain,
Fair as Sebastian and as foully slain.
No cypress shades his grave, nor funeral yew,
But red-lipped daisies, violets drenched with dew,
And sleepy poppies, catch the evening rain.
O proudest heart that broke for misery!
O saddest poet that the world hath seen!
O sweetest singer of the English land!
Thy name was writ in water on the sand,
But our tears shall keep thy memory green,
And make it flourish like a Basil-tree.

Borne, 1877.

Water used to write in sand, rather than petals used to write in water.

(no subject)

Wilde on Shelley's grave:

Like burnt-out torches by a sick man's bed
Gaunt cypress-trees stand round the sun-bleached stone;
Here doth the little night-owl make her throne,
And the slight lizard show his jewelled head.
And, where the chaliced poppies flame to red,
In the still chamber of yon pyramid
Surely some Old-World Sphinx lurks darkly hid,
Grim warder of this pleasaunce of the dead.

Ah! sweet indeed to rest within the womb
Of Earth, great mother of eternal sleep,
But sweeter far for thee a restless tomb
In the blue cavern of an echoing deep,
Or where the tall ships founder in the gloom
Against the rocks of some wave-shattered steep.

Why tomb for one and grave for other? "Sun-bleached stone"--clearly neither had a subscription monument yet. This tribute is slightly sillier but much more professional, less personal, lacking the movingly inappropriate identification AND objectification lavished on Keats. How often are these combined?

(no subject)

George Eliot:

A spot that touched me deeply was Shelley's grave. The English cemetery in which he lies is the most attractive burying-place I have seen. It lies against the old city walls, close to the Porta San Paolo and the pyramid of Caius Cestius--one of the quietest spots of old Rome. And there, under the shadow of the old walls on one side, and cypresses on the other, lies the Cor cordium, forever at rest from the unloving cavillers of this world, whether or not he may have entered on other purifying struggles in some world unseen by us. The grave of Keats lies far off from Shelley's, unshaded by wall or trees. It is painful to look upon, because of the inscription upon the stone, which seems to make him still speak in bitterness from his grave.

***

Yesterday we went to see dear Shelley's tomb, and it was like a personal consolation to me to see that simple outward sign that he is at rest, where no hatred can ever reach him again. Poor Keats's tombstone, with that despairing, bitter inscription, is almost as painful to think of as Swift's.

Hesitating, like Wilde, at the idea of rest being appropriate for him.

(no subject)

Joyce:

His notes to Exiles (under Nora's initials):

13 Nov. 1913

Moon: Shelley's grave in Rome. He is rising from it: blond she weeps for him. He has fought in vain for an ideal and died killed by the world. Yet he rises. Graveyard at Rahoon by moonlight where Bodkin's grave is. He lies in the grave. She sees his tomb (family vault) and weeps. The name is homely. Shelley's is strange and wild. He is dark, unrisen, killed by love and life, young. The earth holds him.
Bodkin died. Kearns died. In the convent they called her the man-killer: (woman-killer was one of her names for me). I live in soul and body.
She is the earth, dark, formless, mother, made beautiful by the moonlit night, darkly conscious of her instincts. Shelley whom she has held in her womb or grave rises: the part of Richard which neither love nor life can do away with; the part for which she loves him: the part she must try to kill, never be able to kill and rejoice at her impotence.

From somebody on the web:

'The Dead' was written in Rome, a city in which the presence of the dead and of the past is uniquely overpowering. Joyce visited Shelley's tomb there with Nora, who 'responded with a string of morbid romantic associations that moved him deeply' (Maddox, 75). These concerned her dead sweetheart, the model for Michael Furey in 'The Dead'.

There aren't enough exclamation points. Right there that moment happened. And then the play too. Ibsen's horns and now this.

(no subject)

Hardy:

Rome: At The Pyramid Of Cestius
Near The Graves Of Shelley And Keats (1887)

Who, then, was Cestius,
And what is he to me?--
Amid thick thoughts and memories multitudinous
One thought alone brings he.

I can recall no word
Of anything he did;
For me he is a man who died and was interred
To leave a pyramid

Whose purpose was exprest
Not with its first design,
Nor till, far down in Time, beside it found their rest
Two countrymen of mine.

Cestius in life, maybe,
Slew, breathed out threatening;
I know not. This I know: in death all silently
He does a kindlier thing,

In beckoning pilgrim feet
With marble finger high
To where, by shadowy wall and history-haunted street,
Those matchless singers lie...

--Say, then, he lived and died
That stones which bear his name
Should mark, through Time, where two immortal Shades abide;
It is an ample fame.