(image via daisypies)
One of the later Romantics’ enduring themes is that nature always wins. This is, ultimately, the message of Shelley’s “Ozymandias” – that no matter how much temporal power and wealth you manage to amass, nature is going to tear it back down in the end. Keats and Shelley especially deal with this aspect of Romanticism more than their forbears and I suspect that their seeming shared belief in it is one reason why they were so close. I also think it belies a bit of an anarchist streak in them that I wholeheartedly endorse.
The painting of Shelley at the Baths of Caracalla is somewhat famous, and it’s a spot that both poets frequented before their deaths. I’ve read somewhere a letter from Shelley to Keats, exhorting him to come to Caracalla, not because of the therapeutic quality of the baths, but in order to simply experience the sight of one of Rome’s great engineering marvels being reclaimed by the forest.
Which is what the big-r Romantic in me feels when I see something like the picture above.
