Word: severn
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Easeful Death. One night in 1820, Keats and Severn sailed for Italy on the 130-ton barque Maria Crowther. Keats was dying...
...Severn was a kindly, religious, cheerful man with a spontaneous gift for admiration which, for the moment, focused on Keats. An artist and the one hope of a poor family, Severn gave up much to go with Keats. He had recently, at 25, won the Royal Academy medal. He was at the beginning of a money-making career when he told his father that he was going to take Keats to Italy. The old man knocked him down...
Terrible Pool of Blood. The long sea voyage was a horror. Much of the time it stormed. Once Severn, who was himself ill (he had had typhus and a liver com plaint), came upon Keats during a hemorrhage and stumbled away to the stern of the ship, because the sight of so much suffering was unbearable. "He heard again that ghostly cough ; he saw again the poor white face, the terrible pool of blood." In Rome poet and painter had rooms in the Piazza, di Spagna, before a magnificent flight of steps that led upwards to the twin-towered Church...
...Severn was the only person with Keats when he died. On Feb. 24, 1821, Severn wrote in his diary, which is included in Against Oblivion: "He is gone. He died with the most perfect ease. He seemed to go to sleep. On the 23rd, Friday, at half-past four, the approach of death came on. 'Severn- I - lift me up for I am dying. I shall die easy. Don't be frightened! Thank God it has come...
After Keats's death Severn slowly lapsed into the somewhat gamy society of Rome's British bohemians. (Even the English expatriates in Rome thought Lady Blessington was going too far when she married her dandiacal French lover to her 15-year-old stepdaughter to keep him at home...