February 23

1821, 2004


The Gazebo at Guy's Hospital in Borough where the apothecary
John Keats can be found on his lunch-hour

1821


Keats died today, in Rome, just twenty-five years old. 


Of consumption, though in those days they called it tuberculosis. 


His younger brother Tom had died of it just two years earlier, and John the trained apothecary had taken personal care of him throughout; so more than likely, if must have been contagious.
From my book: "A Small Drop Of Ink - a life of Lord Byron"


CANTO X

Keats died in Rome. Tuberculosis first,
Compounded by two brain haemorrhages.
He’d come to Italy to flee the worst
Weather for his condition, a pilgrimage
Too, to be with his fellow-peers in verse.
He coughed up blood. The mental ravages
Were almost harder. Until he asked “How long
Is this posthumous existence to go on?”

February the 23rd, 18-
21, just twenty-five years old, one
Of the greatest poets there had been
In any land or language. For Byron
And Shelley it was shattering. They’d seen
Him in Rome, were friends, admirers. “Adon”
They called him, “Master” or “Lord”, and Shelley
It was who wrote John Keats’ eulogy.

“I weep for Adonais - he is dead!
Oh, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years
To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers,
And teach them thine own sorrow, say: ‘With me
Died Adonais; till the Future dares
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity!’”


I would include the whole poem, but it is rather long - click here and read it at the Poetry Foundation.

As to Keats' legacy. There is the endless imposition of his verse on reluctant "A" level students, compelled to vivisect live matter until it lies mordant in an examination essay (no one else but "A" level students, and other poets, ever read poetry any more). There is the lovely house in Hampstead with its adjacent library (students there too, though few visit the house). And a really very charming memorial, the one photographed at the top of this page, in the back garden of Thomas Guy's House in Southwark.
Guy was the man who founded and left his name with Guy's Hospital, not a hundred yards from where that other glory of English poetry, Geoffrey Chaucer, set the opening of his Canterbury Tales, the Tabard Inn, next to the still-standing George Tavern, opposite the best food-market anywhere on Earth, Borough Market: go down the narrow side-street where the Uni of Beds has its Hall of Residence named Chaucer House (but surprisingly no plaque, no streetboard), and keep going, just a few more yards, through White Hart Yard specifically, onto Guy's campus of King's College, the Italianate Collonade of the old Counting House, known officially as The London Bridge Niche, with honour plaques to John Fry and Wittgenstein, a statue of Lord Nuffield...  and dominant amid all this splendour, seated lonely on a bench under a domed portico like the pianist Glenn Gould on his street-bench outside the CBC building in Toronto, John Keats (he was an apothecary at Guys Hospital in 1816): "sure a poet is a sage; a humanist, physician to all men" - Moneta's words in "Fall of Hyperion. A Dream", engraved on the bench. What a shame that poetry alone is insufficient as a cure for consumption.


An autumnal addition to this wintery obituary can be found on Sept 19, and several references to Keats on my Byron pages - see Jan 22 for the full list.





2004




charges against Katharine Gün dropped

Working on my one-act stage play “The Monologue of Michael Cohen”, which is all about whistle-blowing and the hypocricies of so-called freedom of speech, my diary for February 23 2004 begins:

 

“Just as I was beginning to question the plausibility, of the ending of Michael Cohen in particular, up popped this news item yesterday - and today, as if to offer me a psychic plaudit, the news that all charges have been dropped, the whistleblower acquitted, and in her case even before the trial opened, the prosecution declaring that it had insufficient evidence to proceed ha-ha!”


I had no idea who she was, mispronounced her last name like a rifle, oblivious to that Turkish umlaut on the "u", and later on posted what follows on this blog as an amber page, by no means certain the light on it would ever turn to green. 


Twenty years to the day later I have returned to it, in the light of the continuing attempts by the US government to release Julian Assange from his torture cell in Belmarsh Prison and extradite him to Guantanamo Bay, so that they can have their turn at paying tribute to his honest and honourable acts of whistleblowing. Trying to track down the above piece, which I copied incomplete, I was unable to find it, but found two just as satisfactory, which you can read here, and here.

For the information, despite all charges against her being dropped, Katharine was unable to find meaningful employment in the UK and moved to Turkey in 2020, the home of her Kurdish husband Yaşar Gün. Her tale has also been told in a 2019 movie, “Official Secrets”.





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