Catherine Theis on “On Not Visiting Keats’ Grave”

On “On Not Visiting Keats’ Grave” from By a Roman

I grew up visiting cemeteries. During the long, hot Italian summer, at least one day was reserved for a trip to the cemetery and not our usual beach outing. My mother, aunt, sister, and I would hike up the dusty mountains outside my mother’s village to pay our respects to our dead relatives. We’d make a day out of it: washing gravestones, gossiping, arranging fresh flowers, picnicking. I remember sweeping off piles of dried-out pine needles, then pouring water over the blackened marble, only to reveal the shock-white of names and dates. 

There’s a whole tradition of poets making pilgrimages to gravestones. Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” comes to mind, as well as Oscar Wilde’s “The Grave of Keats,” Seamus Heaney’s “At Yeats’s Grave," and Henri Cole’s “At the Grave of Elizabeth Bishop.” My contribution to this necropastoral tradition, “On Not Visiting Keats’ Grave,” is the first poem in my book. But instead of a successful venture, this poem focuses on the failure to arrive. For many, such withholding (“no arrival, no sale”) might prove disastrous, but this deferral—this truancy of entry—means something. This suspension allows for the substitution—that is, the imagination—of a far richer experience. 

I’ve been to Rome many times now. The first time—the summer before seventh grade—I traveled by train from Milan with my mother, aunt, and sister. We had matching suitcases in navy blue with red leather accents. We spent three days visiting historical sites in the Holy City, though we did not go to the Protestant Cemetery to see the poet John Keats’s grave. At the time, I didn’t even know who Keats was, which is a curious thing to think about now, since I have spent so much time thinking about his poems.  

The last time I was in Rome was in July 2017 with my husband. It was hot. We weren’t married at the time, but soon would be later that year. We had just spent the previous week in Florence with my parents. It was a great trip for many reasons, many of which I won’t be able to detail here, unfortunately; however, I can tell you that we did spend a magical afternoon at the Marino Marini Museum in Florence. The museum wasn’t on our list of things to do. In fact, I didn’t even know such a museum existed. But when we stumbled upon it, I knew we had to go because I couldn’t unhear Frank O’Hara’s line from “Having a Coke with You” that goes “or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully / as the horse….” and naturally I needed to see the condition of both. 

Marini worked on a series of equine sculptures, two of which, “The Miracle” and “Little Miracle,” depict a horse and rider in various states of motion. Marini’s sculptures (a rearing horse, a rider falling backward) made an impression on me. Themes of falling, shock, and fear can all be felt in his work, as well as the joyously erect penis of his “The Angel of the City” sculpture that stands sentry outside the Venice Guggenheim. Obviously, we can read this falling as a tragic event, which I do, but I always read such destruction as inherently creative. This poem speaks to that orientation, how disintegration or decomposition might be our best window into reality. 

After we said goodbye to my parents in Florence, my husband and I travelled on to Rome, where the heat only intensified. We took to our room at an immaculate bed-and-breakfast near Vatican City. We rarely ventured out, much preferring the coolness of our room or the nearby Necropolis, though we did schedule a trip to the Protestant Cemetery as neither of us had ever been.