'On visiting Wentworth Place'( A poem-Tell me what u think!)

[Matt]

I remember the day well
Creeping upstairs to someone's heaven
Your hell
It looks pale blue in my mind, the wall
But I think that it was just the cold
Or was it you?

I'm sorry my mouth stayed shut
And no tears ran down my face
But I'd read it all before,
Everything but the cold
Was it you?

Perhaps you came,
Like every cliche
And tried to talk to desperate me
Perhaps you sat in the corner
Watched, smiled and sighed

Perhaps you didn't.
Was it you?

[Rich]

Great poem, Matt.

My answer would be, "Yes, it was Keats!"

Of course it was him.

I visited Wentworth Place myself in 1991 while on Honeymoon. I remember going upstairs to the room where Keats first spat out blood and realised it was carterial, saying, "This is my death warrant." The room was quiet, but the words seem to be echoing about the place.

Tears did run down my face as I sat under the tree at the front of the house where I was told Keats went to write his "Ode to a Nightingale". How amazing. My mind was blank in the euphoria.

Thanks for sharing your wonderful poem. I hope it inspires others to visit Wentworth Place.

Rich

[Becky]

I, a philistine, went to Dickens house instead. A mistake.

I did go to the old surgery nearby though, and now thoroughly understand why Keats never became a doctor.

You visited Keats house on your honeymoon? Such devotion! You can sit lovingly under any tree you like, you know, and experience similar sensations to the one in the poem, although I admit there isn't the same thrill.

[catlover]

My dream is to visit wentworth place someday and I am sure I will feel the same emotions as expressed here.A friend however did visit there a few years ago and picked the leaves from the tree where he wrote the famous ode to an nightingale and sent it to me with a photo of the house.It now sits on my book shelf carefully preserved and I treasure it as much as anything valuable.

[Malia]

I was able to visit Wentworth Place when I was studying at Durham University back in 1995-1996. I visited in the Fall of '95--the perfect time to see the house as it was early autumn (a season I often associate with Keats) and the leaves were just turning.

I had wanted to see the house for years and when I finally found myself standing in front of it, my first sensation was utter giddiness. Yet, the minute I stepped through the front door, that sensation flew away and a strange numbness came over me. I noticed how the wallpaper in many of the rooms was water stained and how the little sapling outside the front door (the tree that was meant to represent the tree under which Keats wrote the Ode to a Nightengale) seemed as if it was struggling to stay alive. The original letters that they kept under glass covered with thick curtains to keep out the light were thin and brittle with age. The lock of Keats hair I saw in another display case was faded. It seemed to me that everything around me called out for release--to be let go. It made me think of Keats in his last days, desperate to be done with this world. And it made me think of how desperately we try to keep Keats, the man, alive with things--objects. Objects and people fade away--it's a part of the "light and shade" of life (a very natural part of life and integral to Keats's poetic philosophy I believe).

But, as I walked through the house and then wandered the heath that he walked, I realized that what lives on forever is the philosophy, the thought, the poetry of the man--of Keats. His relics seemed to call out for death. But his work will live on. That is true immortality. That's the immortality I think that Keats strove for. And it is the immortality that he achieved.

[Saturn]

Excellent writing there my friend and I agree with you about trying to hold onto relics of artists, celebrities etc. - the immortality of the body is impossible but the immortality of great literature ensures Keats will never be forgotten.

I visited the Keats-Shelley museum in Rome and while it was a thrill to be in the same space that Keats once occupied, all the relics and trinkets did seem like they were calling out for release as you say. We are a curious species, humanity - magpies with sentiment.

Ovid once wrote:

"So much for an epitaph. My books make a more enduring
and greater monument…”

And so it is for Keats