My Annus Mirabilis

My dearest One,

Your tearful gaze at our parting torments my every waking thought. It has broken my heart beyond mending. I vowed to make a clean break, to neither write to you nor read any of your letters after my arrival in Rome, but my need for you has o’rewhelmed my weakening resolve.

Is there no elixir nor medicine I might imbibe to make me happy in thy absence or evict your constant presence from my wearisome heart? Three full months in Rome and still I think of you both day and night. I cannot sleep and my appetite has abandoned me.

How can this be? I have not written a single verse since my arrival. All my skills are as nothing when my thoughts are bent solely on your loveliness and the approaching hour of my death. And to think I believed that I could never leave you, not even at my doctor's beckoning.

But I could not have endured another hour of the company of our uncouth friends when all my desire was bent upon thee alone. How you can ever find joy in such ungentlemanly company as Dilke and Brown’s I will never apprehend.

If not for their influence on you, I might never have left. But both sickly and ill humored, I make poor company indeed. If only I filled your thoughts in like manner as you fill my own, nothing could have separated us!

I did hope the wonders of the eternal city might ease the sting of our unhappy parting. But to me they are no more than token relics and admonitions, ancient warnings that I shall never see my fair one ever more. Now my days are filled with sighings and laments, your ghostly memory haunting my waking thoughts and disturbing my dreams.

Why did I leave you? Am I a cur who hides when its breath begins to rattle within its throat? Your letters sit unopened upon my little desk, tied with a bit of ribbon. That promise to myself at least I have kept. For how could I read your fair hand and not be crushed with endless regrets?

You are filled with joie de vivre much like I am weighed down by poor health and failed promise. How unlike we two are and yet still so much in love. You are melody and mad pursuit of ecstasy while I am a mournful funeral march. Even the food here is tasteless without your tender hand in mine, my Belle Dame sans Merci.

How sanguine some men are at the prospect of their deaths, even to die martyrs for God or in defense of honor and nation, I only now begin to embrace. How often have I imagined suffering for my faith or some noble cause, to be the hero of an epic ballad rather than merely the author of one.

But such terrors have these thoughts wreaked upon my poor soul! That is, before the love of you overcame all thoughts of my former fears. You are my great and noble cause, dear one. Your smile has filled my breast with courage like the great men of old.

Love is my religion; love is my nation. Love is the one thing that I might die for. I could and would die for you, my dearest Fanny.

And yet you are home in dreary England, and I glower here in sunny Rome, trying to think of other things, of poems I still wish to write, of places I wish to visit now that I'm finally residing in the city of my dreams. But all is for naught, for only you live now in tablet of my memory. Such splendid misery is my love for thee.

You have said it yourself often enough, Be gay, Johnny and stop your brooding. Walk with me in the garden in the late afternoon and feel the sun warm your back. And I always did ... I could never refuse you.

If only you knew the pain that daily wracks my body and the distemper that torments my soul. You have such splendid health and optimism; how can you know my sufferings and temperament when they are so unalike from yours?

I am very jealous and cross when I consider you gaily visiting town with our indelicate and loathsome friends. I cannot abide their company and their bickering and how it hurt me to see you reveling in it.

If only I could have you all to myself and away from the temptations that I cannot abide or share with you! If you were with me now, I could write again like I did at Wentworth Place when I saw you daily.

Ode to Psyche, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode to a Grecian Urn. They were all inspired by you. All written only for you: every rhyming couplet, every transcendent expression, every poetic feeling born of your vibrant grace, your buoyant energy, your apple-blossom cheeks.

If you were with me now, my star might finally soar into the firmament to join the other great poets of this age. But, alas, I fear it cannot be.

Truth is beauty, beauty is truth,–that is all.

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

Our time together seems a dream and our separation a nightmare. You were my annus mirabilis. Without you I am no more than mist scattered by a breeze. Shakespeare hath said it with greater beauty and sorrow than I:

A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;

Before, a joy proposed; behind a dream.

All this the world well knows; yet none knows well

To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

When at last I take my final rest, a final vespers will I sing for thee, my lady fair, and then make an end of poesy and all my dreams.

The Lord bless you—

J.K.