John Reynolds, Dying, Remembers John Keats "Friend of Keats"-carved on Reynolds' headstone
The Isle of Wight’s my final way station:
consumption perched on my chest, hissing,
“Move, and pain will rip you like a kestrel.”
John came here to write Endymion
at the start of his too-short career.
it’s a fitting charnel house
for me to brood upon my daughter:
so small, I had hoped Death might miss her.
He overlooks no one.
If only I had possessed John’s courage,
and not slunk off from Poetry to Law—
a calling I had as much aptitude for
as a pig for preaching!
I lost myself in labyrinths of Chancery:
unholy spawn of Greed and Procedure.
Just as well I have no strength
to look out my window.
I’d see a dead-wall
like the crypts of Inns of Court,
not the surf John described in letters.
I make my wife read the yellowed pages,
and see his face, rosy as Homer’s dawn.
I pray we meet again, dear friend:
to sit in the Library of Paradise
where you’ll compose odes praising
angel and imp with equal delight,
to make the seraphs laugh and rage,
my daughter clap tiny hands for joy.
But what if there’s only damp ground,
dreamless sleep? My tombstone must suffice:
to tell men I lived and died,
and was friend to immortal John Keats.
