Campo Cestio, Rome

visited today, and yes ‘we stood before their graves just inside the walls of Rome’. No need to invent words to describe what these two ‘gentle’ men could do so much better.

Happy is England
John Keats

Happy is England!
I could be content

To see no other verdure than its own;

To feel no other breezes than are blown

Through its tall woods with high romances blent;

Yet do I sometimes feel a languishment

For skies Italian, and an inward groan

To sit upon an Alp as on a throne,

And half forget what world or worldling meant.

Happy is England, sweet her artless daughters;

Enough their simple loveliness for me,

Enough their whitest arms in silence clinging;

Yet do I often warmly burn to see

Beauties of deeper glance, and hear their singing,

And float with them about the summer waters.

ROME AND NATURE [Fragment]
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Rome has fallen,

ye see it lying

Heaped in undistinguished ruin:

Nature is alone undying.

note the cat grooming on Shelley’s grave

footnote:
The cemetery is home to minions of cats

She was by far the loveliest, and new it.

This one reminded me of your insolent barn cat ‘Ditto’