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 -"

"I gave her everything – my heart, I promised chastity despite all a soldier's soldier's -"

"Temptations, yes, I see. We had best go to some wineshop and -"

"Drink, yes, drab, yes, for they are all nothing, they are things to be used and then flung away. I gave her everything, I gave her all my love -"

Pauline Bonaparte glided through the twilight, two servants keeping their distance behind. She was exquisite in taffetas. She turned her great eyes frankly, as before, on Elton. Elton spoke. Elton said:

"Madame, vous ne me verrez plus. Je m'en irai demain. J'ai été blessé, oui, mortellement blessé par une femme. Malédictions à votre sexe, madame, un sexe tout à fait maudit, madame -"

Pauline Bonaparte seemed no whit put out, maledictions on her sex being truly tributes to the power of it. But John cut into Elton's bad French with his own mongrel Romance:

"Altessa, cara principessa, mon ami est souffrant, la sua inamorata non, ne, sa fiancée, vous comprenez, aime un altro. Her love is dead."

"It is my love that is dead, damn her."

Pauline Bonaparte, to John's surprise but Elton's incomprehension, spoke Latin: "Alma Venus, caeli subter labentia signa quae mare navigerum, quae terras frugiferentes concelebras -" Then she waved the citation away into the twilight with a graceful snaking of her arm. She said: "Lucrezio." Then, smiling brilliantly, she swayed off, servants keeping their distance after.

"What was all that about?" said Elton. "Who's this Lucrezio?"

"Lucretius," John said. "Strange, I'd never have believed she knew Latin. That was the opening invocation to Venus in De Rerum Natura. What she was saying was that love doesn't die, not in the bigger sense. Everything grovels to Venus. She'll have you yet, Isaac Marmaduke."

"I'm leaving tomorrow, I told you I was leaving."

"Yes, yes, but she'll have you yet. Alma Venus won't leave you alone for long."

They went down the Steps in silence for a while. Then John said: "I see it, of course, I see the whole picture. Quite a little poem. The divine Pauline reclines as Venus reclining for Canova, and Canova gives her those lines to learn and repeat over and over, stop her fidgeting. That accent, I should suppose, is Corsican."

"Damn her, damn all of them, bitches."

They turned into a side-street off the piazza and went into a tavern. There were smoky oil-lamps and a few other drinkers, big-shouldered sincerely voluble Romans who stared their fill, moving their big bulks bodily the better to stare, and then resumed vivid gesture-sauced colloquies. A crone who limped brought wine.

"You know what it looks like?" Elton said. "It looks like horse-piss."

"It tastes well enough. A little acidulous. Strange how things always read better than they taste. Acorns and cheese brick-hard in Don Quixote, the wineskin cooling in the leaves – no meal more delicious in print. Wine in poetry is superior to wine in a glass. What will you do?"