'Nay look not down, nor lick thy dainty wrists -

For all the wheezy Asthma – and for all

Thy tail's tip is nicked off – and though the fists

Of many a maid have given thee many a maul,

Still is that fur as soft as when the lists

In youth thou enter'dst on glass-bottled wall.' "

Belli made a cabbage of his face, as though, for a large audience, enacting nausea. "Such noises. Th and tch and rdst and glsbtld. English has no music."

"May it not be that Italian has too much music?"

Belli thought about that. "Write a sonnet in Tuscan about a cat," he then said, "not that any poet should or would, and you would have the creature presented through a lithe and sinuous melody of exquisite verbal configurations."

"This is an old battle-scarred cat, its ears nicked, full of asthma. It is no feline odalisque. Try those last two lines in Italian and see what you get. Let's see. 'Pur'ora morbido é il manto tuo come ai di' delle lizze che giostravi tra cocci di bottiglie a co' di molti muri dt cinta.' "

"That's not poetry."

"Nor is it cats fighting on a wall. Poetry or not, it's still too musical. Our language is full of damnable chiming bells."

"On cue." Belli grinned as the Angelus started. "You timed that well, you had your eye on your watch." He went over to the window and opened it to let the bell-clash swagger in. He leaned on the sill to look down on buying and selling Trasteverines. "Look down on our buying and selling Trasteverines," he said. "How do they think of the Angelic Annunciation, if they think of it at all? A girl called Maria slurping her noonday minestra, probably with the Angelus clanging outside, the angel whizzing in like a wasp through a broken window to tell her that a bird has laid an egg in her belly. How would your Misiter Kettis like that, the respectable cat-loving Englishman?"

"The joke could not be conveyed in English. The English do not call a penis a bird."

Belli turned his back on the sky and bells and harlequin-pied street-scene with actor's swiftness. "There I go again. I must attend to what I say. I am not serious enough. God forgive me." It was a little too much like acting, Gulielmi thought, and not good acting. Belli had been merely an amateur actor. Also amateur billiards-player, amateur poet. In what then was he professional? Minor officer in the Stamp Department of the Government of the Holy City? He would not admit where his professionalism lay or could lie, would he but cease to resist its pull. It lay precisely in the image of a slattern called Mary slurping her soup and the Archangel Gabriel buzzing in like a wasp, in the conveying of that image in the soiled language of the streets. It lay in a perhaps never to be written sonnet on a Roman cat, mauled, torn and randy, ready to piss on any cardinal's robe that offered. Something better than Keats could ever do. Gulielmi said:

"For God's sake, what do you mean by serious?"

"Eternal truths," Belli said too promptly, "impressive spiritual essences, God and country and the roaring giants of history. Not, by Bacchus, cats."

"Cats are the eternal truths, and the taste of noonday soup, and farting, and snot, and the itch on your back you can't quite reach to scratch. Rome as those lying and cheating bastards down there, not Rome as the imperial or the papal essence. Think of all those odes to Bonaparte, where are they now? The reality, and you can read of it in the Gazette de Francfort, is a swollen body on St Helena and the cancers working away in it."

Belli bunched his fine face, shrugged, belched out a Roman beeeeeeh, became upright and handsome and serious. "A balance should be possible. Between the claims of the physically transient and the spiritually permanent. But finally it is the spirit that counts, since, as you say, there is a dying body on St Helena. Poetry should hymn the spirit and not talk of asthmatic cats."

"We've had too much spirit, I think. I think the time is coming when sonnets must be written about the pains of constipation."

"You go too far as ever, but I forgive you. I am due back now at the office. When shall we eat supper somewhere?"

"I think we ought to eat supper with this young poet. He is altogether aimable, totally simpatico. You will like him."

"I speak no English. He speaks no Italian."

"A little. He's reading Italian. He has a volume of Alfieri."

"That will make him very gloomy."

"He also has some French. Less than you, true, but some."

Gulielmi did not say that John Keats also had a fair copy of a rejected sonnet-with-coda written by Belli, a regretted dirty joke, the something regrettable that got into him and out again. He said instead:

"We could give him supper in some osteria. This Scotch doctor is starving him for his stomach's sake."

"Let him read his Alfieri and learn serious Italian. Then perhaps we can talk seriously about the great tragic themes and the difficult art of rhetoric. But cats' claws, no. Fighting on walk and getting nicked ears, no. Shameful triviality." The bells clashed on.

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: