Love Letters by Timothy Liu
Love Letter
by Timothy Liu
To live with you—
unthinkable! Keats
wrote to Fanny Brawne—
spending three days
with her would fill him
with more delight
than fifty years
with another—knowing
butterflies only lived for
three summer days. Most
of their romance
consisted of watching
each other walking past
windowpanes—notes
and wildflowers left
on doorsteps. Nothing
cute about watching
his brother choke up
blood—something
John spared Fanny from
by sailing off to Rome—
leaving her with a ring
she wore for decades
after. It had gotten old
by the time she married
Louis Lindo and bore him
three kids who all moved
to Heidelberg. The ring
stayed on her finger—stone
of almandine, the gold’s
scrolled and shouldered
openwork hoop setting
not worth much
on the auction block
now a museum piece
after an undertaker
stripped it off
her finger, her hand
that wrote the last letters
Keats never opened—
words that remain
sealed inside a coffin
with the dust of his bones.
I visited the rooms Keats died in years ago, at the very foot of the Spanish steps off the Piazza di Spagna, where he died on February 23, 1821, at the tender age of 25. Keats and Fanny Brawne fell in love in 1818, he was 23 and she was 18. They became secretly engaged in 1819, but Keats had tuberculosis which he picked up from his brother who he nursed as he died. Keats sailed to Rome hoping that the warmer climate would cure him. Fanne wore his ring until she died in 1865. The opening lines of this poem are from a letter from Keats to Fanny. Her last letter to him was unopened because he could not bear to read them as he was dying, never written. There is something so poignant, beautiful, and tragic about this whole story — and the brevity of life, compared to the three summer days of a butterfly’s time, so marked.
