What is the message of John Keats’ epitaph?

Perhaps the most famous epitaph of all time is inscribed into the gravestone of the poet John Keats.

When he realized he was dying, Keats asked his friends to memorialize him with those words. He didn’t even want his name on the gravestone. Like a child tracing a shape into the surface of a pond, his name was meant to sparkle in the sun for a moment and then disappear.

All his life, Keats had been surrounded by death. His entire family had been afflicted with consumption, which in the 19th century had no cure, and they had preceded him in death. When he began to cough up blood, he knew his time was coming and determined to live out his last days in Rome, writing poetry and taking in the last precious days of beauty that were left to him.

Keats took a room near the Barcaccia fountain. I imagine him sitting by an open window, listening to the water moving over the stones and writing his final odes. It’s a melancholy image, to be sure, but I’m not writing this essay to make everyone sad and depressed. I’m writing it as a memento mori.

To look death directly in the eye is unpleasant. We like to pretend we’ll be young forever. The other day, I assisted with the entrance of a few of my parishioners into a Third Order of Franciscans. I was surprised to learn that as part of their preparations for their vows they had to create their wills. Why? To get them thinking of someday making a good death.

This, in his own way, is what Keats was doing in his house by the fountain. He understood that his own time was passing and used the remaining time to seek out eternity. In his mind, the truth of our eternal destiny is discovered by contemplating beauty. Even though we are but tracings in water, we can only begin to participate in that beauty if we are willing to acknowledge our own passing nature. In a letter to a friend, Keats writes, “How astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties on us...I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from my infancy...”

In acknowledging his own departure, he is given back the time. He is given back everything.

How different this is from how most of us approach death! We ignore it, distract ourselves, and refuse to speak of it. But in refusing to contemplate death, we also lose the poignancy of our lives. We don’t prepare for a good ending and lose the goodness of the journey.

This doesn’t mean the topic is pleasant or even neutral. Death carries a vicious sting. One of Keats’ poems, “To Autumn,” is one of those poems that people have claimed they cannot read without tears in their eyes.

It’s a testament of beauty written by a departing man. Gone is the summer with its golden haze and branches laden with fruit. Now is the dying of the season, the apple cider press beside which, “Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.”

This poem was on my mind recently as I walked with my wife and children through our local park. Forest Park here in St. Louis is larger than Central Park in New York City and it once hosted a World’s Fair. It’s a patchwork of meadows and woods. A river winds through it among victorian pavilions and under stone bridges.

We walked a gravel path along the river in the evening golden hour. Families were in the meadows with their picnics, young couples drifted down the river in boats, and near the reflecting pool wedding parties congregated for pictures. Our youngest daughter hopped from rock to rock along the shore. The fountain in the middle of the pool sang a lullaby for the setting sun. It was all so beautiful it made my heart hurt.

"While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;"

It was beautiful, in part, because my children are growing up and the time, I get to spend with them is short. That day was perfect, and I will never get it back. It’s a treasure I hold in my memory, but I could only know the beauty of that day by living it, by passing through it. My faith in God tells me that he is reconciling time to eternity, but until we enter the gates of the New Jerusalem our lives remain a journey. We are in motion whether we like it or not. We are born and die whether we like it or not.

“Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?”

I cannot read that line without something inside me breaking. We must allow ourselves to be vulnerable like this. This is how we open ourselves up to grace.

Keats sees “full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn.” I don’t know what he has in mind with this particular image, but when lambs in late autumn are a sign of conflict, of life and death. Their presence on the green hills is a comforting sign of life, but those lambs are destined for the slaughter. Christ, Our Lamb, destined himself for the slaughter. In his death is our life. In his fall is our spring.

If our names are writ in water, they are also written into the hearts of the ones we love and, most of all, written into the heart of Our Lord. And if our hearts break at the thought of death, it is through the breaking that eternity enters in.