his last letter asks his friend Charles Brown to contact his remaining brother and sister, and it manages in the process to feel heartbroken, efficient, winsome--as if the whole person, in all his complexity, were speaking from the page:"'Tis the most difficult thing in the world [for] me to write a letter. My stomach continues so bad, that I feel it worse on opening any book. . . . Write to George as soon as you receive this, and tell him how I am, as far as you can guess;--and also a note to my sister--who walks about my imagination like a ghost--she is so like Tom. I can scarcely bid you good bye even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow."
Three months later, [John] Keats was dead, and Joseph Severn, the friend who had accompanied him to Rome, described the final moments:
from The Nation: Irritable Reachings: On John Keats
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