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In September 1820, John Keats sailed for Italy in a vain attempt to restore his health. He was
accompanied by a young friend, Joseph Severn, in whose arms he was to die on 23 February 1821. Severn stayed on in Rome building a successful career as a painter and, after a period in England, eventually becoming British Consul. He died there in 1879. Sue Brown, who is writing a book about Severn, recently spent a few days in Rome visiting some of the places associated with him. She writes here about the pleasures and occasional frustrations of following in the footsteps of Joseph Severn
The quest for Joseph Severn in Rome inevitably starts at the Keats-Shelley Memorial House at the foot of the Spanish Steps. Here Keats and Severn lodged for the three months before Keats' death, with Severn setting up his easel in what is now the entrance lobby to the Museum and sketching out a picture for the Royal Academy `The Death of Alcibiade', and Keats confined for much of the time to the small room overlooking the Steps. It is this room which most vividly evokes a sense of that anguished time. In it Severn laboured to light the fire in the morning and get the kettle boiling only a foot away from the bed on which Keats lay contemplating the trompe l'oeil roundels painted on the ceiling, longing for his "posthumous existence" to end and feeling the flowers already growing over him.1
I had asked to see Severn's reminiscences of Keats' last days written many years later in an article in "The Atlantic Monthly" in 1863. The House was busy with researchers, as well as thoughtful visitors, that day, but Catherine Payling, the Curator, kindly arranged for me to read it in the only available space, at a desk in the Keats Room. Studying Severn's account in the very place where Keats had lain exactly 181 years before was, as the Italians might say, "suggestivo". To my right, Severn's drawing of the dying Keats "3 o'clock Mng-drawn to keep me awake"- smaller than I had imagined, but more powerful too. And beside it the almost incoherent, unfinished letter in which Severn told Charles Brown of the...