The first months of 1821 marked a slow and steady decline into the final stage of tuberculosis. His autopsy showed his lung almost disintegrated.[72] Keats was coughing up blood and covered in sweat. Severn nursed him devotedly and observed in a letter how Keats would sometimes cry upon waking to find himself still alive. Severn writes,
Keats's grave in RomeKeats raves till I am in a complete tremble for him[71]... about four, the approaches of death came on. [Keats said] "Severn – I – lift me up – I am dying – I shall die easy; don't be frightened – be firm, and thank God it has come." I lifted him up in my arms. The phlegm seem'd boiling in his throat, and increased until eleven, when he gradually sank into death, so quiet, that I still thought he slept.[73]
John Keats died in Rome on 23 February 1821. His body was buried in the city's Protestant Cemetery. His last request was to be placed under a tombstone bearing no name or date, only the words, "Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water." Severn and Brown erected the stone, which under a relief of a lyre with broken strings, includes the epitaph:
This Grave / contains all that was Mortal, / of a / YOUNG ENGLISH POET, / Who, / on his Death Bed, / in the Bitterness of his Heart, / at the Malicious Power of his Enemies, / Desired / these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone / Here lies One / Whose Name was writ in Water / Feb 24th 1821
The text bears an echo from Catullus LXX:
Sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti / in vento et rapida scribere oportet aqua (What a woman says to a passionate lover / should be written in the wind and the running water).
Francis Beaumont also used the expression in The Nice Valour, Act 5, scene 5 (? 1616):
All your better deeds / Shall be in water writ, but this in marble.
Severn and Brown added their lines to the stone in protest at the critical reception of Keats's work. Hunt blamed his death on the Quarterly Review's scathing attack of "Endymion". As Byron quipped in his narrative poem Don Juan;
'Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle Should let itself be snuffed out by an article. (canto 11, stanza 60)
Seven weeks after the funeral, Shelley memorialised Keats in his poem Adonais.[74] Clark saw to a planting of daisies on the grave, saying Keats would have wished it. For public health reasons, the Italian health authorities burnt the furniture in Keats's room, scraped the walls and made new windows, doors and flooring.[75][76] The ashes of Shelley, one of Keats's most fervent champions, are buried in the cemetery and Joseph Severn is buried next to Keats. On the site today, Marsh wrote, "In the old part of the graveyard, barely a field when Keats was buried here, there are now umbrella pines, myrtle shrubs, roses, and carpets of wild violets".[68]
