Here lies one whose name was writ in water.

The line is the epitaph on John Keats’s grave in the Protestant Cemetery (Cimitero Acattolico) in Rome, where he was buried after dying of tuberculosis in February 1821 at age 25. Keats had gone to Italy in 1820 in hopes that the climate would improve his health, accompanied by the painter Joseph Severn. In his final months he was deeply anxious about his poetic reputation and asked that his name not appear on the tombstone. The epitaph was arranged by his friends (including Severn), reflecting Keats’s own sense that his fame and life had proved fragile and easily erased.

“Writ in water” suggests writing that cannot last: water receives marks only to dissolve them immediately. As an epitaph, it expresses Keats’s fear that his identity and work would leave no durable trace—an image of impermanence, self-effacement, and the vulnerability of artistic legacy. The phrase also carries a poignant irony: Keats’s poetry endured, and the very line meant to deny permanence became one of the most remembered inscriptions in literary history. Read this way, the epitaph dramatizes the tension between a poet’s private despair and the public afterlife of art.