The Grave of Keats

The speaker stands at Keats's grave in Rome. Free now of the world's injustice, the poet rests under a blue sky, 'The youngest of the martyrs', as beautiful as Saint Sebastian and killed as young. No cypress or yew shades him, only violets wet with dew. The last six lines break into praise of his proud heart, his sweet lips and his gifts as a 'poet-painter'. Answering the epitaph that says his name was 'writ in water', the speaker promises that it will last, kept green by tears, as Isabella kept her basil plant.

Key themes

• The poet as martyr
• Memory that outlasts death
• Youth and beauty cut off

The first eight lines describe the grave. Keats, 'Rid of the world's injustice, and his pain', 'rests at last beneath God's veil of blue'. Taken from life 'when life and love were new', he is 'The youngest of the martyrs', 'Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain'. There is 'No cypress' and 'no funeral yew' over him; instead 'gentle violets weeping with the dew' weave on his bones 'an ever-blossoming chain'.

The last six lines are a series of cries. 'O proudest heart that broke for misery!' 'O sweetest lips since those of Mitylene!' 'O poet-painter of our English Land!' The speaker then takes up the words of Keats's own epitaph, that his name was 'writ in water', and contradicts them: 'it shall stand'. Tears like the speaker's will keep his memory green, 'As Isabella did her Basil-tree', the plant watered with tears in Keats's poem Isabella. The word Rome at the foot places the speaker at the graveside.

• The speaker

  The mourner at the grave

  A visitor to Keats's grave in Rome who grieves for him as a martyr and a poet. He praises Keats's heart, lips and art, and vows that his own tears will keep the dead poet's memory green.

• Keats

  The poet in the grave

  The English poet John Keats, named only in the title, who lies 'beneath God's veil of blue' with violets growing over him. The speaker calls him 'The youngest of the martyrs', the 'poet-painter of our English Land', whose heart 'broke for misery'.

Every line is copied from the text and links to where it appears.

• "Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain."

  The poem

• "O proudest heart that broke for misery!"

  The poem

• "And tears like mine will keep thy memory green,"

  The poem

The Grave of Keats is a sonnet in the Flowers of Gold group of Wilde's Poems (1881), with the word Rome printed at its foot. John Keats died in Rome in 1821 and is buried in the city's Protestant Cemetery under a stone describing him as one 'whose name was writ in water'. The last line recalls his poem Isabella, in which a grieving woman waters a pot of basil with her tears. Wilde also wrote of the grave in a prose piece, The Tomb of Keats, published in the Irish Monthly in 1877.

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