Viareggio, which holds Shelley’s monument, is a place of strange twisted plane-trees. The Piazza Shelley is a simple quiet square of low houses fronting a leafy garden and the sea. It leads out, curiously enough, from the Via Machiavelli. There is a bronze bust, which admirers cover with laurel, and an inscription which represents him as meditating here a final page to “Prometheus Unbound.” (Baedeker, comically mis-translating “una pagina postrema,” represents him as meditating “a posthumous page”!)
Not here, however, but in La Pineta is the place to muse upon Shelley. It is a thick, sandy pinewood with an avenue of planes. The pines are staggering about in all directions, drunk with wind and sun. Very silent was it as I sat here on a spring evening, watching the rosy clouds over the low hills and the mottled sunset over the sea. The birds ventured scarcely a twitter; they knew they could not vie with Shelley’s skylark.
Shelley’s epitaph in the Roman cemetery is like a soft music at the end of a Shakespeare tragedy.
“Nothing of me that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.”
What a curious and pacifying fusion of poetry and wit! It reconciles us to the passing back of this cosmic spirit into the elements by way of water. But what a jarring perpetuation of the world’s noises on the tombstone of Keats!
“This grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet, who on his death-bed, in the bitterness of his heart at the malicious powers of his enemies, desired these words to be engraven on his tombstone: ‘Here lies one whose name was written in water.’ ”
Water again! But water as chaos and devourer. How ill all this turbulence accords with the marble serenity of his fame, a fame that so far as pure poetry is concerned stands side by side with Shakespeare’s! We are a good way now from the twenty-fourth of February, eighteen hundred and twenty-one. A few years more and Keats will have been silent a hundred years, and we know that his nightingale will sing for ever. What profits it, then, to prolong this mortuary bitterness, to hang this dirty British linen on the Roman grave? The museum is the place for this tombstone—I could whisk it thither like the Doge Pesaro’s wall. Will it save the next great poet from the malice of his enemies? Will they speak a dagger less? Not a bodkin! The next great poet, being great and a poet, will appeal in novel and unforeseeable ways, and be as little read and as harshly reviewed as the marvellous boy of Hampstead whose death at twenty-five is the greatest loss English literature has ever sustained. Were it not fittest, therefore, to celebrate the centenary of this death by changing his epitaph for a line of “Adonais”?—
“He lives, he wakes; ’tis Death is dead, not he.”