KSH is a tiny museum right next to the Spanish Steps, where Keats lived and died in 1821. The museum has beautifully preserved the house as it was in Keats' time, including the small bedroom and bed where he died of tuberculosis.
Julian Sands gave a wonderful performance, informal and friendly, infused with his enthusiasm for Keats and Shelley's work and sensitive to the nuances of language and meaning. I love reading poetry, but 'On First looking into Chapman's Homer', 'Ozymandias', 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' and 'To a Skylark' are almost over-familiar to those of us who studied literature in the 20th century, and my tastes have moved on to other writers, in and outside the canon. But hearing someone read these poems with passion and understanding and vigour was almost like hearing them for the first time, but with a delicious layer of knowing, and remembering what is was like to discover them as a teenager.
The last poem of the Keats section of the program was one I hadn't seen before - his last poem, a fragment written in the margins of a manuscript, short, unfinished but full of potent images of mortality and contradictions- is it chilling and/or comforting?
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chilly thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.
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