‘Salute,’ said Rawcliffe. He shuddered at the first draught, found the second blander. ‘Tell me, Enderby,’ he said, ‘How old would you say I am?’

‘Old? Oh, about fifty.’

‘Fifty-two. And when do you think I stopped writing?’

‘I didn’t know you had stopped.’

‘Oh, yes, a long time, a long time. I haven’t written a line of verse, Enderby, since I was twenty-seven. There, that surprises you, doesn’t it? But the writing of verse is so difficult, Endeby, so so difficult. The only people who can write verse after the age of thirty are the people who do the competitions, you know, in the week-end papers. You can add to that, of course, the monkey-gland boys, of whom Yeats was one, but that’s not playing the game, by God. The greatest senile poet of the age, by God, by grace of this bloody man Voronoff, But the rest of us? There are no dramatic poets left, Enderby, and ha ha, certainly no epic poets. We’re all lyric poets, then, and how long does the lyric urge last? No bloody time at all, my boy, ten years at the most. It’s no accident, you know, that they all died young, mainly, for some reason, in Mediterranean lands. Dylan, of course, died in America, but the Atlantic’s a sort of Mediterranean, when you come to think of it. What I mean is, America civilization’s a sort of seaboard civilization, when you come to think of it, and not a river civilization at all.’ Rawcliffe shook his head in a fuddled gesture, the Frascati having wakened the sleeping Strega. ‘What I mean is, Enderby, that you’re bloody lucky to be writing poetry at all at the age of – what is your age?’