It’s testament to the hold that John Keats has on the English imagination that though he died, in 1821, aged 25 and leaving only two volumes of his poetry in print, 10 or 12 plaques or stones commemorate the geography of his short life from birth in Moorgate, London, to death beside the Spanish steps in Rome. Taken together, they form the basis of a route of pilgrimage I’ve always found worth the while and that draws me back, time and again, to Keats House, just off Hampstead Heath in London.
My grandparents – my dad’s mum and dad – were both committed pilgrims and I have so many memories, while they quested over the sacred sites of Gujarat and Rajasthan, of being pulled along and never really understanding what the point of it was. In my 20s, though, on Keats’s trail, I came to feel something like what they must have felt in that coming together of Jain iconography and encounter with place. The cinematic quality of Keats’s writing puts us right there in the landscape beside him and, piece by piece, the landscape is transfigured by his vision.
