THREE
The bells clashed on John Keats trying to still the anguish in himself by looking out of the casement on to the noonday magic of the piazza. Flower-carts blazed, their hues somehow sharpened by the bell harmonics seething from the Church of the Trinitá dei Monti. Artist's models, men, women, children, lounged in easy grace on the steps, waiting for or resting from employment in this piazza of painters, clad in the bright raw costumes of the regions of Italy. Trying to still the anguish that had come upon him on the very second page of the volume of Alfieri. Such words did not help his condition: "Unhappy me! No solace remains but weeping, and weeping is a crime." No more Alfieri. Tasso? To go back to Tasso, poet of his boyhood, though now in the original sunlit language that foggy English blurred, would but be to be reminded that the ambition to be as great as Tasso could never now be fulfilled. He felt two slow tears, criminal, sluggishly coursing but wiped them soon. Were Severn here he would be over-sympathetic and try to insinuate in some trite Jesus consolation, but Severn was working at what he called his art in his room. So John now took from its hiding place within the pages of Tasso the manuscript sonnet (with coda) that Gulielmi, along with a literal translation, had given him. The poet's name was not to be disclosed, for the poet had abandoned his poem in hot shame, breast-beating.
The poem was in the Roman dialect, not easy to understand, but two known words leered out – cazzo and that glorious dumpendenne - like a whore's eyes from an alley, bringing to his own cazzo or dumpendebat that quickening he had always associated with the creative itch. The poem was but an obscene catalogue, a rhymed dirty glossary, ennobled (stiffened?) by the stringency of its form. But why not? He went to the table, found foolscap under the book-pile, sharpened a quill, dipped in the ferrous ink, began to paraphrase:
Here are some names, my son, we call the prick:
The chair, the yard, the nail, the kit, the cock,
The holofernes, rod, the sugar rock,
The dickory dickory dock, the liquorice stick,
The lusty Richard or the listless Dick,
The old blind man, the jump on twelve o'clock,
Mercurial finger, or the lead-fill'd sock,
The monkey, or the mule with latent kick.
He smiled at himself, finishing the octave – John Keats, lush or mawkish quite-the-little-poet. What would the Edinburgh Review say of this? Would Leigh Hunt print it in the Examiner and go to jail again on behalf of Free Speech? This will never do. He took breath and dove at the sestet:
The squib, the rocket, or the roman candle,
The dumpendebat or the shagging shad,
The love-lump or the hump or the pump-handle,
The tap of venery, the leering lad,
The handy dandy, stiff-proud or a-dandle,
But most of all our Sad Glad Bad Mad Dad.
And what to do with this – send it to brother George and sister-in-law Georgiana to read, breath of home, under the sumacs or sequoias, savage Indians who had not read Rousseau whooping warlike all around? Read it to Severn and have him run off screaming to pack his bags? The coda now, just like Milton in his Late Enforcers of Conscience if that was the right title.
And I might add
That learned pedants burning midnight tapers
Find Phallus, apt for their scholastic papers,
And one old man I know calls it Priapus.
His wife has no word for it but a sigh -
A sign that Joy has somehow past her by.
Or would "failed to satisfy" be better? Change "Joy" to "Life"? No matter. Well, could there be purer art than this well-wrought urn of elegant impurities? It was for no audience. Art at the last was between the artist and his god.
The ink dried, no need for sanding, while he read it through again. So his last poem would be no more than an obscenity, though might not obscenity be another name for homage to those primal and universal urges that Society amp; Religion, as Shelley had said once at Hunt's, clok'd through Fear? A primal urge denied all but those who could drab without shame or remorse, taking their salvatory mercury after as he had once done, following that night at Oxford best forgotten. For there had to be Love. He was ready to weep again, and then his self-pity was transformed to anger. But there on the table was his Anatomy of Melancholy, which was full of as it were comfortably tooth-sucking-after-dinner injunctions to season all with laughter. If Robert Burton were here he might read this tailed sonnet with gusto.
After dinner John went for his walk on the Pincio and found Isaac Marmaduke Elton already there under the ilexes, looking out towards the grape-hued cupola of St Peter's in the citron light. John tapped his left breast where the sonnet nested, smiled to himself, wondered whether this soldier might -
"I have a thing here," he said, "which may amuse you." But Elton, whose straight back he had addressed, turned stiffly in what John divined was a posture of distress and passed a fist rapidly over his eyes. "What is the matter? Some bad news -" The death-sentence for this soldier who had thought his lungs to be improving? Elton sighed and made a shrugging gesture he had, probably not by intention, picked up here in Rome. He said:
"Tomorrow I go to Naples, thence to sail to England. They say I am better. Much better," he repeated in bitterness.
"I am glad, though selfishly sorry as well. I shall miss our walks and talks. You don't seem very happy at being much better."
"This," Elton said, and he thrust a paper at John with a straight arm as in a drill movement. "There is still light enough for you to read. And there is not much to read."
"Her name is what? I take it to be her - I cannot quite – The signature is all cramped together."
"Augusta. Her name is Augusta. Not that it matters."
Augusta was Georgiana's other name. The letter, though, was not of the kind that Georgiana could ever write, not an intrepid girl daring the same fevers and arrows as her husband John's brother in America's wilderness. This was a spoiled young miss. "Dearest Marmaduke, you will recall how you gave me leave to regard myself as free from the obligations of our betrothal amp; how I said no I will wait for ever if need be. Mama has talked much of this amp; much prais'd your goodness amp; braveness amp; magnanimity -" Silly girl, silly uneducated miss. And so, John distractedly noticed, he was a Marmaduke after all. Probably Marmadukes received letters like this more often than Isaacs. "- I cried much but see how she is right that I am the eldest amp; have obligations to her amp; to papa amp; to Jane amp; Emma amp; Lizzy. So I accept that our engagement is at an end amp; now I am engag'd to be married to -" Some soldier or other, a fellow officer of dearest Marmaduke.
"I'm sorry," John said. The letter ended with something about loving dearest Marmaduke eternally like a brother and perhaps everything would be put right in heaven. Ever your loving.
"Accursed, accursed, they cannot be trusted, not one of them. And to think it should be him. And to receive that now -"
"The thing to do is not to let this set you back. You owe it to your health not to – I mean, to fall into a melancholy is the very worst thing -"