Poets are the unacknowledged
legislators of the world.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
July 8, 1822, the death by
drowning of Percy Bysshe Shelley
|
One
of the greatest English-language poets, Percy Bysshe Shelley (b. 1792), drowned on this day, aged
only 29. Shelley was the eldest son of a British member of parliament and
grandson of a baronet; he was sent to Eton for his education, where he was
mocked and bullied as ‘Mad Shelley’, and later to
Oxford
University from which he was ‘sent down’ – expelled – for
circulating a pamphlet entitled The
Necessity of Atheism.
After eloping to Scotland with Harriet Westbrook he became
interested in the ideas of the anarchist
philosopher William Godwin ('The First Anarchist' as he is
sometimes known). He began
to visit Godwin’s house and fell in love with Mary Godwin, the sixteen-year-old daughter of Godwin by his first wife, the feminist writer Mary
Wollstonecraft, who had written A
Vindication of the Rights of Women and had died eight days after
Mary’s birth in 1797.
Smitten by Godwin’s daughter, his
marriage with Harriet in tatters, Shelley eloped to France with Mary Godwin
(Mary Shelley) and her
15-year-old stepsister Claire Clairmont. The sisters maintained a ménage à trois
with the poet in various parts of Europe for the next eight years. In the summer
of 1816, Claire urged that they should go to Lake Geneva (to be with the man of
her obsession, Lord Byron,
with whom she had previously had a one-night stand and to whom she later bore a
child). It was at Lake Geneva that, as a result of a bet to see who could write
the best Gothic novel, the brilliant young Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein.
In the Autumn of 1816, Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine in London. Two
years later, Shelley, pursued by creditors, suffering from ill-health, and
understandably a social outcast in England, took his lovers to Italy, “the
Paradise of Exiles” as he called it, where they could live more cheaply. In
Italy, he wrote prolifically much of the best poetry of his career. It was in
Italy, however, that he met his demise.
|
|
|
Shelley had often
forecast his death by drowning, yet he never learned to swim, nor to navigate.
While living at San Terenzo on the Bay of Lerici, he sailed in his small
schooner Ariel to Leghorn to welcome his friend, the English poet Leigh Hunt.
Off the coast of
Viareggio, Ariel sank and Shelley drowned, together with his friend
Edward Williams, and a young sailor boy, Charles Vivian. His fish-eaten body
washed up days later and, in the presence of Hunt and fellow poet, Lord Byron,
Shelley was cremated on the beach. Strangely, his heart would not burn and
Mary carried it with her in a silken shroud for the rest of her life.
The months
leading up to his drowning had been an intense and difficult time for Shelley
and his circle. In 1821 they had received news of the death of their friend
John Keats, the poet for whom Shelley wrote Adonais.
At Terenzo, Mary Shelley had suffered a dangerous miscarriage. Allegra, the
daughter of Byron and the highly strung Claire had suddenly died. Even before
Shelley’s death, the famous literary circle was unravelling.
There was a
rumour at the time that Ariel had been rammed by a fishing boat, whose
crew believed that the rich Lord Byron was on board with gold; years later a
fisherman confessed to this but no proof exists today. Another story told of a
boat pulling close and offering them help, but a voice, allegedly Shelley's,
was heard to cry ‘No!’. Another account, probably fanciful, has it that
local sailors shouted to Williams to lower the sails but a tall man,
presumably Shelley, stopped him from doing so.
Thus it has been suggested that Percy Bysshe Shelley might have
committed suicide, for we know from his letters that he was depressed at the
time. He was poor and his relationships were complex. The great John Keats had died
aged only 25. Shelley was also feeling overshadowed by the genius of Byron,
writing “'I have lived too long near Lord Byron and the sun has extinguished
the glow-worm”. Although we shall never know the truth of the young
genius’s death, he has left a legacy of some of the finest poems in the
English language.
Pip Wilson's articles are available for your
publication, on application. Further
details
Receive similar items free each day with a free subscription to Wilson's
Almanac ezine. Send
a blank email
Some words by
Shelley
Music,
when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live
within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped
for the beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.
How wonderful is Death,
Death and his brother Sleep!
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended
inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon
the present; the words which express what they understand not; the
trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the
influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged
legislators of the world.
A Defence of Poetry, 1821
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates on the memory -
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heap'd for the beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.
No man has a right to monopolise more than he can
enjoy; what the rich give to the poor, whilst millions are starving, is
not a perfect favour, but an imperfect right.
The cemetery is an open space among the ruins,
covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with
death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.
Adonais 1821, Preface – Shelley
writes about the Protestant Cemetery in Rome where both he and Keats were
buried
Stories
like these are what you will find
in the free Wilson's Almanac ezine
