He read no more Jeremy Taylor. He read no more of anything. Wells and the Edinburgh Review would be judged in God's good time, whoever or whatever God was. He was to die without the consolation granted to the horniest-handed ploughman. He was content. It was enough to be born to the morning sun and the morning milk and account this waking a sort of triumph.
He was too weary to try to separate out the imagined, the dreamt and the quotidian real. Breathing became a craft to be practised with painful attention. If he slept the craft might be removed from him.
Many stood or sat by his bed. Llanos said he would go to England and speak to those left. Gulielmi said that Belli could not visit him, having now much on his mind, but he apologised for his brutal want of courtesy that evening so far back and wished to express admiration for such of a fellow-poet's work as he could, with Gulielmi's help, be brought to understand. The Princess Borghese, Pauline Bonaparte, came looking for the handsome Elton. Elton himself obligingly appeared, on his way to Switzerland, and coupled with her on John's bed, John obligingly tucking his feet up to make room. His own dear girl came in black and said that mourning altogether forbade even the most mildly wanton loveplay.
So that was acceptable and all was, in a word, well.
He had one dream or vision that shocked him at first with a sense of blasphemy, though it must be a sense borrowed from Severn, since he who did not believe could not well blaspheme. Christ pendebat from his cross and cried ABBA ABBA. Now John knew that this was the Aramaic for father father, but he knew better that it was the rhyme scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet octave. It came to him thus that the sonnet form might subsist above language, but he did not see how this was possible. Language itself was perhaps only a ghost of the things in the outer world to which it adhered, and a ghost of a ghost was a notion untenable totally. And yet it seemed that two men, of language mutually unintelligible, might in a sense achieve communication through recognition of what a sonnet was. Belli and himself, for instance. Then breathing became a craft to be craftily learnt again, a matter of catching the gods of unbreathing off their guard.
St Valentine's Day came, and with it Valentino Llanos to announce he would go to England soon. Then a week passed and two more days, and John knew his dying day had come, yet to achieve death might be a day's hard labour. Severn held him, as it were carrying him to the gate, but he could not bear Severn's laboured breathing, for it struck like ice. To put off the world outside – the children's cries, snatches of song, a cheeping sparrow, the walls and the wallpaper and the chairs that thought they would outlast him but would not, the sunlight streaking the door – was not over-difficult. A bigger problem was to separate himself from his body – the hand worn to nothing, the lock of hair that fell into his eye, even the brain that scurried with thoughts and words and images. It took long hours to die.
"I'm. Sorry. Severn. My weight."
"Nothing, it's nothing, rest now."
He tried to give up breathing, to yield to the breathless gods, but his body, worn out as it was, would not have that. It pumped in its feeble eggspoons of Roman air, motes in the sun and all, but there seemed to be nothing in his body to engage the air. The afternoon wore on to evening and his brain was fuddled and he groped for the essence he had called I. It fell through his fingers.
"John. John."
There was nothing there to make any answer. Severn dropped the body to the bed and the body gave out some teaspoons of fluid and a final sigh.
The quiet house became busy. The apartment was stripped of everything, and the children gaped at the carts outside in the piazza, on to which furniture, rugs, rolls of stripped off wallpaper were piled, to be taken off for the burning. Signora Angeletti presented a bill. "I have money enough, fear not, madam," Severn said. "Only enough, but enough." The plates and cups they had used, these he smashed with his cane, smashed and smashed while Signora Angeletti cried, "Accidenti."
The body was opened up by Drs. Clark and M.P. There were no lungs left. There were no lungs left at all. The lungless body was placed in a plain deal coffin and the lid hammered on by undertaker's men who coughed from the fumigation. A plot had been reserved in the Protestant Cemetery.
Belli came reluctantly, almost dragged by Gulielmi, to the Piazza di Spagna before dawn. The mourners felt the February chill, their breath visible in the lamps of the hearse and the carriages. The coffin was taken down the stairs and appeared at the door when Don Benedetto arrived on the square, ready to climb the Steps for early service. He nodded at Gulielmi and Belli. He knew them both.
"A very young man," he said. "A poet, was he not?"
"An English poet," Belli said. "Now dead of consumption."
"We know not the day nor the hour," said Don Benedetto, who was fat, hale, nearly sixty. "These Protestants," he added.
"He did not call himself a Protestant," Gulielmi said. "He was a saintly young man, but he was neither Protestant nor Catholic."
Don Benedetto puffed at that saintly. "Interred in the dark," he said. "Darkness to darkness."
"What," said Belli, "do you mean by that?"
"The unenlightened. We may not even speak of invincible ignorance. All those nations that have turned their backs on the light."
"He had," Belli said, "more light in his little toe than you have in your entire fat carcase."
"No," said Gulielmi. "Please. Not now."
"I know nothing of him," Belli said, "but that I am prepared to say again and again. Priests live by the letter and poets by the word. Do you not say anything about poets turning their backs to the light."
"You are understandably upset," the priest said, "and it is early and chilly and dark. I will pretend I did not hear what you said."
"Oh, I said it," Belli cried. "Wipe that sanctimonius smirk from your jowls or I will wipe it for you."
"Please," Gulielmi said.
"Bloodsuckers, preyers on the people, purveyors of gloom, fear and uncharity."
"You will hear more of this," Don Benedetto said. He began to climb the Steps.
"You will hear more, you mean," Belli cried after him. "Much more, bloated parasite." And then, to Gulielmi: "God forgive me, what gets into me?"
The cortège was ready to move off.
TWO
So John Keats died on February 23, 1821, and Napoleon Bonaparte died a little over two months later. Percy Bysshe Shelley, having presented Keats in Adonais as a sensitive plant choked by weeds but paradoxically surviving his killers in the form of a spirit of Eternal Beauty, was drowned in 1822, reduced to ashes on an heroic pyre, then, like Keats, interred in the Protestant Cemetery of Rome. Lord Byron, fighting for the independence of Greece, died in Greece in 1824. The intensest phase of the Romantic Movement was thus coming to an end.
Lieutenant Elton died in Switzerland a year and more after the death of Keats. Joseph Severn returned to England but went back to Rome, there to live long as British consul and to become a venerable Roman figure. Valentino Llanos visited England, met Fanny Brawne and Fanny Keats, John's sister, married the latter and took her to Spain when the political atmosphere there had grown more liberal. They lived happily. Dr Clark became physician to Queen Victoria and was knighted. Belli became a censor and wrote 2,279 sonnets in the Roman dialect, most of them coarse and obscene, many of them blasphemous. He never quite learned to reconcile the conformist and rebellious sides of his nature. Before he died at the age of 72 in 1861 he ordered his verse panorama of Roman life to be destroyed, but the order was, thanks to a liberal and far-sighted senior prelate, disobeyed. The sonnets were not published in Belli's lifetime and were known chiefly through Belli's tavern recitations of them. The Russian writer Gogol, who spent some time in Rome, heard Belli and was impressed. Sainte-Beuve in Paris heard about Belli and mentioned him in a Causerie de Lundi. James Joyce, the Irish novelist, who worked miserably as a bank clerk in Rome in the 1900s, seems to have read Belli, whose vast sonnet-sequence, presenting realistically the demotic life of a great capital city, may be regarded as a kind of proto-Ulysses. Belli can be seen as an underground link between the age of romanticism and the age of naturalism.