Themes
The poet as martyr
Wilde's central image is religious. Keats is 'a Priest of Beauty slain before his time', and the painting that rises before Wilde's eyes is Guido's St. Sebastian, the boy saint pierced by arrows yet gazing towards 'the Eternal Beauty of the opening heavens.' The sonnet makes the comparison explicit: Keats is 'The youngest of the martyrs', 'Fair as Sebastian and as foully slain', now 'Rid of the world's injustice and its pain.'
A poor grave in a city of tombs
Wilde frames the grave with two kinds of monument. The pyramid of Caius Cestius, a man 'of small note', has outlasted the ruins of time, and Rome buries popes, emperors and saints in 'porphyry wombs' and baths of jasper. Against this stands Keats's 'common-looking grave' and 'time-worn stone', a 'mean grave' for 'so great' a poet. The contrast makes Keats's own epitaph, a name writ in water, both true and unjust.
Flowers for a memorial
The flowers on the grave carry the piece. Wilde notes the violets, daisies and poppies, and links them to Keats's remark that his 'intensest pleasure' was 'watching the growth of flowers' and to words spoken 'in some strange prescience of early death', 'I feel the flowers growing over me.' In the sonnet those same flowers replace the cypress and funeral yew, and the last lines promise that tears will make his memory 'flourish like a Basil-tree.'