"Too Happy, Happy Tree/ Thy branches ne'er remember/ Their green felicity*"...

NO TALKING SHOP, NO DAILY GRIND. Paris, 42 rue de l’Yvette. Monday 3 March 2014, thirty-five minutes past ten. According to his best friend who was with him when he died in Rome, ‘nothing seemed to escape him’, namely the genius John Keats, the English poet overcome by tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five years and four months, ‘…[not] the motions of the wind’, the painter Joseph Severn continued, ‘[nor] the colour of one woman’s hair, the smile on one child’s face’, etc. To enjoy the work of the man who had written on his grave, ‘Here lies one whose name is writ in water’, it couldn’t be easier. Just give €6.50 to your favourite bookseller and in exchange he will give you Seul dans la splendeur, the paperback Points edition of Keats’s selected poems . It’s a masterpiece, wonderfully translated by Robert Davreu. (*Extract from the poem ‘In drear-nighted December’.) Buddha bless you!