JOHN KEATS’ LAST POEM WRITTEN IN ROME ON 21st February 1821*
(From The Imagination Of The Writer)

I am fading, fading fast, *****,  my love eternal
Far away from you and home
I am dying, the hours I am counting
In what I liken to my grave that is Rome.

All that I seek in this dark loneliness is solace
Moments of respite thinking
Of you and our  past exchanges of affection
Dissolved by fate with our hopes descending

Unto the oblivion that had been pre-ordained
Tears are comfortless and what is to come
Is but this pain that seared love must bear unknown
Only self-felt and suffered without end that renders my heart  totally numb.

I can’t understand and it defies reason
The human heart should bear so much pain
While the tranquil stars hold so steadfast and the song
Of the nightingale drifts so sublimely in every sweet refrain.

Youth once gaily clothed in such beauty but now
Grows spectre-thin and here is but fret and fever
Where the old and infirm hang  their heads down
In tearful reminiscences  of happy days that have fled forever.

And now,  my *****, my only love, you alone in this
The saddest schemes of things should share
This my life so wretched , lost, unfulfilled and joy-bereft
I beg forgiveness, only  remember my poems—sorrow let us silently bear.


John Keats one of the greatest English romantic poets died on 23rd February 1821 in Rome,  aged twenty-five