Ted wasteland in Hampus is a suburb in the north of London, which still retains many original natural features of English grasslands and hilly areas. Quiet environment, fresh air and proximity to downtown are exactly the "cultural areas" that poets and writers at home and abroad yearn for. Keats lost his parents and shouldered the heavy responsibility of raising his younger brothers and sisters early. His brother contracted tuberculosis at home and moved to this area to be taken care of by Keats himself. Keats, devastated by his brother's death, moved to Wentworth apartment at the southern end of the "wasteland" at the invitation of poet friend Braun, and now it has become the only Keats museum in Britain.
Wentworth residence
This is a two-story building with a courtyard and a basement. It is semi-detached and contains two units for two families to live in. It was built by Braun and Drucker, a scholar friend. Small scale, simple structure, fence courtyard wall, fence street gate and white house wall form an idyllic atmosphere. The indoor display of poets' daily necessities is simple and ordinary, and most of them are housekeeping items in the exhibits of celebrity museums. Only an engagement ring Keats gave his fiancee Fanny Braun was a witness to the poet's early love.
Keats 1865438+ moved here at the end of 2008 to share the East Unit with Braun. The following spring, the widowed Mrs. Braun and her daughters rented the West Unit. The eldest daughter Fanny 17 was pure and beautiful, and immediately won the hearts of young poets who loved beauty. The hedge in the yard is just a tree-lined passageway with a length of 1 0-20m and a width of1m. The lawn as thick as cotton around the house and the Chi Pan, a little farther away, are all places where they quietly drink love mead. This is about Keats' first and only serious love, which inspired generate, a talented young poet, to show strong double hopes and fly high. The most important poems in his life were written here and now. On the east side of the yard, there is a lonely plum tree, low and thin, with a withered fruit hanging on its branches, which is full of mature purple in the late summer sun. It is conceivable that in this beautiful background, this beautiful young couple once painted a beautiful picture, but unfortunately their love is not as mature as Plum, and plague and death hand in hand will separate them alive.
This plum tree is the body double of Keats' plum tree. In a letter to a friend, Braun said, "In the spring of 18 19, a nightingale built a nest next to my apartment, and Keats felt comfortable and happy listening to her cry. One morning, he moved his chair from the dining table to the plum tree on the grass and sat still for two or three hours. When he entered the room, I saw him holding some papers in his hand and stuffing them into the back of some books. " This is the song "Nightingale", which is called "magic" by Xu Zhimo and a musical. Stubborn British critics don't agree with the sudden rise of the star, and even maliciously ridicule him as a "London boy" faction, which is a fatal blow to the poet who is naturally sensitive and self-respecting, but as Byron said, it seems to be an exaggeration to kill a poet once. At this time, Keats suffered from terminal tuberculosis while taking care of his younger brother. In order to prevent emotional excitement from aggravating hemoptysis, he can't write or even meet Fanny, which makes a pair of lovers living next door close at hand. In such a hopeless situation of career and love, the pain of young poets can be imagined. Fortunately, he has real friends, who have carefully arranged for him and are accompanied by Jocheff Severn. Before the arrival of the wet and cold winter in England, he crossed the English Channel, crossed Naples by water and arrived in Rome after a month and a half of hardships.
My season and specific route from London to Rome are different from Keats', and with the benefits of modern transportation, the journey is convenient and comfortable. It's mid-autumn, but Rome is hotter than the summer in London more than a month ago. The high temperature in the red sun accelerates the heartbeat rhythm and pulse, which makes people eager to visit Keats in this ancient city.
The Spanish Plaza is in the north of the city center, and the noisy and quiet atmosphere is like a hot and cold climate compared with Hampus Ted. There is a fountain carved with huge fish in the center of the square, which is the masterpiece of the famous artist Bomini. Between the fountain on the high mountain on the north side of the square and Trinity Church, it is connected by 138 stone steps. Keats's old house, just to the east of the starting point of this famous Spanish staircase, is called "Little Red House", which literally means warm pink, which is common in southern Europe. It has four floors. It's as simple as Hampus Ted's Wentworth, but its color is a contrast.
Spain Square is one of the important attractions in Rome. The Italian who is good at playing up the temptation also said that if you throw a coin in the spring pool, you may meet a handsome Italian guy here. Now, like the Colosseum, Vatican Pope City, ancient city ruins, temples and so on, there are tourists everywhere. On the steps, there are many people sitting by the pool. Check the bottom of the pool carefully. There are some coins. Two local men with dirty clothes and messy hair, who can't tell their age and are kind, are carefully moving along the pool with spear hooks. Every time they found a coin, they immediately put it in their pockets vaguely. This made me unwilling to stay and quickly boarded the "little red room" on the third floor.
Keats came all the way here sick and died three months later. All his utensils, including wallpaper and wooden doors and windows, were burned and disinfected. Nowadays, the display in the memorial hall is not what it used to be. Only the fireplace in the narrow hut that doubles as Severn's bedroom, where he occasionally cooks for Keats, seems to have obvious traces of fireworks rekindling. In order to refresh Keats, Severn temporarily rented a piano and personally played his favorite Haydn symphony on it. This document signed by Severn is still in the exhibition today. The whole third floor was originally shared by them and the landlady, but now it has been transformed into a library-style museum, which houses a large number of precious manuscripts, books and relics by writers such as Keats and Shelley. From an old landscape painting on the wall of the exhibition room, we can see that this area was originally formed according to the mountain situation, and the dirt road is very poor, which is quite primitive and cold. /kloc-After the 0/8th century, it gradually flourished and became a gathering place for literati. George Eliot, Goethe, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Browning, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Wilde and Joyce all stopped. But regardless of the length of time, they have never had a life-and-death relationship with this place like Keats. Another place that is really directly related to Keats' death is the Protestant cemetery.
The next morning, I went to the southern tip of Rome very early. In the cemetery, near the ruins of the ancient Roman wall, the tall tomb named Caius theseus Pyramid is slightly northwest, and I finally found Keats' resting place! He occupied a corner of the cemetery wall, about ten meters in Fiona Fang, with tombstones stored side by side, Keats' tomb on the left and Severn on the right. Keats' unswerving artist friend came to live with Keats after burying him for 56 years. After the two tombstones are equidistant, there is a small tombstone, which is the tomb of a premature baby in Seven. Savenby Keats is two years older. When he met Keats, he was already a painter favored by the Royal Academy of Art.. From his portraits of Keats and Shelley, we can see that he had great skills, but he died with his friends for the safety of his friends and regardless of his own interests. The letters he wrote in Keats' dying diary were plain, but the true feelings recorded were so sad that they could make people cry like beautiful lyrics.
On the left and right sides of this group of three-legged tombstones, two towering Gu Song trees stand at the arch, facing a section of fence in the cemetery, which is covered with vines and flowers, and at the foot of the wall is a beautiful and neat flower bed. On the other side of the wall on the left, Keats' embossed profile head and poems engraved by later generations are decorated:
Keats' Tomb in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome
Keats! If your baby's name is really "written in water",
That little drop should have dropped from the mourner's cheek;
A sacred sacrifice; Those heroes pursue
Dazzling wars are often futile.
Go to sleep! This appropriate inscription is even more dazzling.
This corresponds to the inscription on Keats' tombstone. According to Keats' last wish, his tombstone has no name, but it is engraved with "Young English Poet". The following two lines are the main words: "There is a man sleeping here, and his name is written in the water." These are Keats' last words.
A rare genius, who died young at the age of 25, is like a falling meteor in the sky! Keats, who is modest and introverted, is not cynical and does not complain about his fate, but he still laments that his fame has not been achieved and his life is like the morning dew. Neither he nor Severn expected the name behind him to be so prosperous. This is probably because his name is constantly rewritten by the tears of those who love him.
At the other end of the wall of this cemetery, at the foot of the ruins of the ancient Roman wall, there is Shelley's grave. Shelley also chose this beautiful place for himself before his death, and unexpectedly soon became Keats' permanent neighbor. These two English poets who died in a foreign country, together with Byron who died in Greece, can be called the last three masters of English romantic poetry. They were equally handsome and talented and died young. In fact, Keats' weak position is different from that of his two elders in family background, only in his early death. In the world nearly 200 years ago, limited by the medical level and people's lifestyle at that time, the life expectancy of human beings was much lower than today, 50 or 60 years old. Byron died at the age of 36 and Shelley died at the age of 30, both of which are well known and can be said to have died young. Keats was the only one who really died young. Shelley wrote a poem "Aduming" immediately after his death, and it is no exaggeration to compare him to a beautiful teenager who died young and made Venus unrequited. People usually say that these three poets are good friends, Byron and Shelley, Keats and Byron are actually not at fault, but they don't think highly of their poems, although Byron did write articles praising them; Even Shelley, Keats only met him by chance. On the last day Keats went to Rome for medical treatment, Shelley and his wife, who lived in Pisa, sincerely invited him to that place to get more beneficial care, but they didn't accept him. The usual explanation is that Keats was humble and aloof, but he did have a number of close friends, such as Brian and Severn, and he also got along well with the representative figures and activists of romantic literature at that time, such as Hunter, Hertz Park Jung Su and Lamb. Therefore, these three post-romantics should still be regarded as representing the highest achievements of this literary movement in the field of poetry, rather than relying on personal relationships.
However, from the perspective of personal temperament and work style, Keats seems to be very different from the first two. He doesn't have those main themes, and he lacks such magnificent momentum. He poured out his heart with the dedication of cuckoo crying blood, pursued and completed truth, goodness and beauty, turned ordinary into magic, turned the past into new life, and turned language into music, thus crossing the trend and times; Coupled with his short life, he asked for less and paid more, and later generations will always send him an ordinary love outside the poetic realm.
Sitting quietly on the bench next to the tomb for a long time, watching a group of lovers coming and going silently, I can't help but have some imaginary questions in my mind: if Keats has a holiday in the next year, he has experienced fame, marriage and dusk scenery ... his mind suddenly derailed, and he suddenly flew down from the top of the plum tree in Wentworth apartment and stared at the withered purplish plum.