On the 200th Anniversary of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Death
The following essay first appeared as an introduction to a collection of essays titled ‘I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar’: Essays in Honour of Percy Bysshe Shelley on the Bicentenary of His Death, 1822 – 2022. The collection was published by Gothic Keats Press on 8th July 2022 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Shelley’s death. Both newcomers to Shelley’s life and writings and longtime Shelleyans alike will find the collection intriguing. All essays are free to read. You can find it here.
On the 200th Anniversary of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Death
The breath whose might I have invoked in song
Descends on me; my spirit’s bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar…
—Shelley, from the last stanza of Adonais (1821), his elegy on the death of John Keats
Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of the most brilliantly original poets of the Romantic age, drowned in the Gulf of La Spezia off the north-western coast of Italy on 8 July 1822, two hundred years ago today. Shelley was sailing from Livorno back to Villa Magni in Lerici under a “full glorious spread of canvas” when his boat, originally named the Don Juan but renamed to the Ariel by Shelley, was caught in a sudden and severe afternoon squall. The Ariel stood no chance against the violence of la tempesta di mare and sank beneath stormy Italian seas. Shelley was only twenty-nine years old when he died. His thirtieth birthday was less than a month away.
Porto Venere, Spezia, Italy (1878) by William Stanley Haseltine. The painting depicts a solitary vessel in stormy Italian seas in the Gulf of La Spezia, or the Gulf of Poets, beneath the ruins of Doria Castle and San Pietro, a Roman Catholic church built upon an ancient pagan temple. Just across the bay from Porto Venere is Casa Magni, Shelley’s last residence before his death.
Shelley was perhaps the most erudite and well-read of his generation, reading and translating works from Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, German, and even from Arabic in fragments. During the final months of his life, he was reading and making wonderful poetic translations of Goethe’s Faust and Calderón’s El Mágico Prodigioso for the first issue of the Liberal, a radical literary journal that was to publish original compositions between Shelley and Lord Byron, and to be edited by Leigh Hunt who had lately arrived in Livorno to bring the project to fruition. According to Thomas Jefferson Hogg, his friend from Oxford (read more about Shelley at Oxford in Colin Silver’s essay here) and collaborator in the blasphemously controversial pamphlet “The Necessity of Atheism” which resulted in their expulsion in 1811 (not necessarily for writing it, but for refusing to deny authorship), Shelley “was to be found book in hand at all hours, reading in season and out of season, at table, in bed and especially during a walk”. This insatiable desire and love for reading would remain with him up until the very last moments of his life.
For a writer who died so tragically young, Shelley left behind a literary legacy of almost inconceivable quality and quantity, from metaphysical lyrical dramas and revolutionary romance to everything in between. And although his poetry and prose contain an otherworldly music of unquestionable aesthetic beauty and artistry, especially in pieces such as his lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound (1820) and essay A Defence of Poetry (1840), Shelley was first and foremost an intellectual who thought deeply about the political affairs and philosophical ideas of his day. He believed writing could achieve real reform and societal change. Shelley was ambitious, an atheist and idealist, an artist and altruist, a philosophical visionary and materialist, and a “radical in every aspect of his life and thought”.
As a self-described “lover of humanity, democrat, and atheist”, controversial and rather dangerous words in the reactionary political atmosphere of Shelley’s time (see Graham Henderson’s essay here), his characterization as a radical remained with him throughout his entire life. Queen Mab (1813), Shelley’s first major poem, was a utopian political epic of visionary proportion that attacked established religion, the oppressive evils of monarchy and political tyranny, war, commerce, and even the institution of marriage. There are seventeen prose notes appended to Queen Mab that discuss his usual provocative ideas on atheism as well as his ideas on free love, wealth, and the advocacy of vegetarianism and animal rights — the latter two would later form the basis for Shelley’s essay A Vindication of Natural Diet, published in the same year. The seventeenth prose note of Queen Mab, essentially identical to Shelley’s A Vindication of Natural Diet, contains imagery of “raw horror” that still haunts me whenever I think about a carnivorous diet of dead animal flesh and the current abomination of animal factory farming and mass slaughter:
“Comparative anatomy teaches us that man resembles frugivorous animals in everything, and carnivorous in nothing; he has neither claws wherewith to seize his prey, nor distinct and pointed teeth to tear the living fibre. … It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation, that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion; and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust. Let the advocate of animal food force himself to a decisive experiment on its fitness, and, as Plutarch recommends, tear a living lamb with his teeth, and plunging his head into its vitals, slake his thirst with the steaming blood; when fresh from the deed of horror, let him revert to the irresistible instincts of nature that would rise in judgement against it, and say, Nature formed me for such work as this.”
Shelley continues that the “monopolizing eater of animal flesh would no longer destroy his constitution by devouring an acre at a meal,” and that the “quantity of nutritious vegetable matter, consumed in fattening the carcase of an ox, would afford ten times the sustenance.” It is not insignificant that Shelley’s thoughts on diet, the ethics of animal welfare, and even agricultural sustainability — all of which were written over two hundred years ago — are just as pertinent today, perhaps even more so given the growing global scale of this all-devouring industry. After all, one of the worst health and economic crises of our times, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19), was, according to peer-reviewed research published in 2022, caused by intensive animal farming and the markets in which said animals are sold.
For a fascinating and extensive look into Shelley’s vegetarianism see Professor Michael Owen Jones’s essay “In Pursuit of Percy Shelley, ‘The First Celebrity Vegan’: An Essay on Meat, Sex, and Broccoli” within our collection here. His latest book, Frankenstein was a Vegetarian (2022), recently published in June by the University Press of Mississippi, is incredibly relevant to this most Shelleyan of topics.
Even Shelley’s very first publication, a Gothic novella called Zastrozzi (1810) published when Shelley was only seventeen during his last year at Eton, was not without controversy and, perhaps not surprisingly, contained his radical and “wickedly” atheistical ideas. Through the dialogue of the villain Zastrozzi, Shelley shares his atheistic perspective as well as thoughts on violence through revenge and suicide. According to Richard Holmes, my favorite biographer of Shelley whose writings I turn to often, Zastrozzi is “an early draft of the Satanic outcast, the damned atheist, who confronts his judges and remains unmoved in the final scenario, gaining, at the last, a heroic stature by default”. This figure of the “Satanic outcast” would become important to Shelley, and “sophisticated variations on him appear in nearly all the longer poems”. For more on the Shelleyan Gothic (both Percy and Mary), see Professor Nahoko Miyamoto Alvey’s new and brilliant essay “The Mountain that ‘Walks Abroad’” within our collection here.
Shelley’s radical and provocative ideas and writings such as these, especially with regard to his atheistic sentiments on institutional religion and God, made him many enemies, and when news of his death reached England, the conservative newspaper The Courier wrote, “Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned; now he knows whether there is a God or no”. It would seem that someone’s delicate ideological sentiments were offended by Shelley’s writing, and Shelley would have no doubt found such a stinging little obituary most amusing.
Byron, on the other hand, in response to such conservative attacks that shortly followed Shelley’s death, chose very different words and defended him, writing to his publisher John Murray, “You are all brutally mistaken about Shelley, who was, without exception, the best and least selfish man I ever knew”. Even before Shelley’s death, Byron was recorded saying, according to Thomas Medwin, that Shelley had “more poetry in him than any man living; and if he were not so mystical, and would not write Utopias and set himself up as a Reformer, his right to rank as a poet, and very highly too, could not fail of being acknowledged”. Though Byron and Shelley had a complicated relationship, they were close friends, and Byron was not known for paying compliments to anyone.
Shelley’s name would continue to be slandered and libeled after his death, and his future posthumous reputation would see a metamorphosis, and, in some viewpoints, go from bad to worse. In the Victorian era, Shelley would be viewed more as a sentimentalist and “love lyricist” rather than the radical poet and political revolutionary that he was, urged on by critics such as Matthew Arnold who absurdly wrote that Shelley “of actual life is a vision of beauty and radiance… but availing nothing, effecting nothing”, and, with regard to poetry, he was “a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain”. Nothing could be further from the Shelley of actuality. I think Harold Bloom says it best with regard to Shelley’s earliest attacks as the writer of “infidel poetry”:
“Perhaps it is inevitable that so passionately individual a poet will always make ideological enemies. Nevertheless, it is to be hoped that such enemies will in time cease to misrepresent Shelley’s poetry, and not continue to pretend to an aesthetic condemnation that is usually a mask for their own sense of moral and religious outrage.”
However, it is perhaps just as tragic as his early death that his reputation as a radical poet was not more scathing and critical. Much of Shelley’s highly original and controversial poetry and prose that today forms the basis of his unrivaled reputation (the writings that he most wanted published and read during his lifetime) was not published until after his death. This is another tragedy, especially if one considers Shelley’s literary passion that he devoted his life to. The Mask of Anarchy, Shelley’s response to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 which has been called “the bloodiest political event of the 19th century on English soil”, was a visionary poem that called for peaceful protest and nonviolent revolution. The day after Shelley read of the event (he was in Italy from 1818 until his death) he wrote to his publisher that “the torrent of my indignation has not yet done boiling in my veins”. Fueled by genuine outrage Shelley wrote his poetic “dream vision” quickly, finishing it in a little over two weeks. He sent it to Leigh Hunt with the desire for it to be immediately published in Hunt’s The Examiner. Sadly, fearing seditious and blasphemous libel charges, The Mask of Anarchy would not see publication until 1832, ten years after Shelley’s death.
Death on a Pale Horse (1796) by Benjamin West. Although Shelley draws heavily from the Book of Revelation, it is possible Shelley was familiar with West’s 1817 painting (based on the 1796 version above) which was both exhibited and written about at the time.
Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.
And he wore a kingly crown,
And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow this mark I saw—
‘I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW.’
In some instances, his work would not see publication until long after his death — such was the sad fate of Shelley’s longest essay, and perhaps most brilliant political prose work, A Philosophical View of Reform. As with The Mask of Anarchy, Shelley wanted A Philosophical View of Reform published and read, writing to Charles Ollier in December 1819 that it was “an instructive and readable book”, and again in May 1820 to Leigh Hunt that it was “boldly but temperately written — & I think readable — It is intended for a kind of standard book for the philosophical reformers”. Shelley wrote A Philosophical View of Reform in 1819-20, yet it would not be published until a full century later in 1920. A literary tragedy, indeed.
Holmes sums up nicely what the piece communicates, writing that it “promulgates universal suffrage, radical reform of the Houses of Parliament, women's rights, disestablishment of the Anglican Church, formation of trade unions, and reform of marriage laws and conventions (including the promotion of contraception)”. Two hundred years later and it is still relevant in today’s world. Shelley’s line about poets as unacknowledged legislators, though first appearing in A Defence of Poetry (1840), was first written with his Reform essay:
“It is impossible to read the productions of our most celebrated writers, whatever may be their system relating to thought or expression, without being startled by the electric life which there is in their words. They measure the circumference or sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, at which they are themselves perhaps most sincerely astonished, for it [is] less their own spirit than the spirit of their age. They are the priests of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present, the words which express what they conceive not, the trumpet which sings to battle and feels not what it inspires, the influence which is moved not but moves. Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
As the 200th anniversary of Shelley’s death loomed nearer and nearer these past several months, works such as The Cenci (1819), his tragic verse-drama that Shelleyan and Keatsian Henry Buxton Forman called a “tragic masterpiece”, which was also Shelley’s only published work to see a second edition during his lifetime; Epipsychidion (1821), his piece of dualistic esoterica that he wished to be published only for the “esoteric few” in an edition of only one hundred copies, which, according to Michael O’Neill, “suggests the degree to which he felt isolated from a popular readership”, and a poem that Harold Bloom calls Shelley’s “most original”; Hellas (1822), Shelley’s dramatic response to the Greek rebellion against Ottoman rule and his last work to be published during his lifetime; and, lastly, The Triumph of Life (1824), Shelley’s Dantean hellscape that William Hazlitt called a “Dance of Death”, his last major work that was left unfinished in obscure manuscript at his death, were all read and re-read with a passionate enthusiasm.
Following in the footsteps of Shelley, as I had done in Switzerland six years prior at Villa Diodati on the bicentennial of Lord Byron’s now infamous proposal that “each write a ghost story” which would lead to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Dr. John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819; also Ernestus Berchtold, published in the same year), I traced the shadows of Shelley’s last three years of life through the grand Romantic biography of Richard Holmes’s The Pursuit (1974), looking for deeper meaning and inspiration behind his poetry. Inevitably, I was led back to earlier work such as Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude (1816), his dream-vision quest poem of visionary idealism and apparent self-destruction; “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” which, according to Mary Shelley, was “conceived during his voyage round the lake [of Geneva] with Lord Byron” in 1816; and “Mont Blanc”, his other Rousseauvian poem of 1816 that both describes a sublime portrait of Alpine landscape and, with a typically provocative Shelleyan skepticism in a divinity, the “awful doubt” of a creator God that organized religion believed responsible for such otherworldly portraiture. This earlier work further reminded me of the development and genius of Shelley’s poetic imagination, both in terms of the autobiographical and the intellectually speculative.
Although each piece is masterful, and dark passages from Alastor, The Cenci, and The Triumph of Life have inspired my own writing throughout the years, there were particular lines of dualism and conflicting transcendence in Epipsychidion that I found particularly intriguing. In a letter describing the piece, two years after it was written, Shelley calls the poem “an idealized history of my life and feelings” and, more importantly with regard to the dualistic aspect of mortality and immortality and even ideas of love and idealized love, “I think one is always in love with something or other; the error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal”. The following lines of Shelleyan duality spoke to me at the time of reading in a rather singular voice of numinous luminosity:
In many mortal forms I rashly sought
The shadow of that idol of my thought.
And some were fair—but beauty dies away:
Others were wise—but honeyed words betray:
And One was true—oh! why not true to me?
[…]
Young and fair
As the descended Spirit of that sphere,
She hid me, as the Moon may hide the night
From its own darkness, until all was bright
Between the Heaven and Earth of my calm mind…
And there I lay, with a chaste cold bed:
Alas, I then was nor alive nor dead:—
For as her silver voice came Death and Life,
Unmindful each of their accustomed strife…
[…]
We shall become the same, we shall be one
Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two?
One passion in twin-hearts, which grows and grew,
‘Till, like two meteors of expanding flame,
Those spheres instinct with it become the same,
Touch, mingle, are transfigured; ever still
Burning, yet ever inconsumable.
Until, “ever inconsumable”, it consumes itself, for such duality between “Death and Life” and “[One] Spirit within two frames” cannot sustain such a fleeting and idealized existence, and thus leads to the inevitable conclusion of “one annihilation”:
One hope within two wills, one will beneath
Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death,
One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality,
And one annihilation.
However, as much as the aforementioned stanzas and poems spoke to me within their own unique light, one piece stood out as a sort of bright star amongst all the rest. The piece was Adonais (1821), and my last reading of Shelley’s elegiac masterpiece was in February of 2021, just days before the 200th anniversary of the death of John Keats, the very poet Shelley’s pastoral elegy is dedicated to. As I both mourned and honored Keats during his heartbreaking bicentennial, I could not help but to see allusion after allusion to Keats while reading Adonais, especially as the eternal poet of “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819) in lines such as “the lorn nightingale / Mourns not her mate with such melodious pain”, perhaps in relation to Keats’s line “Forlorn! the very word is like a bell / To toll me back from thee to my sole self!”, and again in a later stanza that alludes to both the nightingale as “night’s sweet bird” but also to the duality of dark and light:
He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light
Keats Listening to a Nightingale on Hampstead Heath (1845) by Joseph Severn. The nightingale is seen illumed by the moon in the top left corner of the painting.
Even the title, although interpreted as a variation of Adonis, the youthful mortal beloved by Aphrodite in Greek mythology (Shelley had modeled the poem’s form of pastoral elegy on Bion’s Lament for Adonis, which he had translated), can also be interpreted as a rather clever allusion to Keats’s melodious night-bird, and perhaps to even Keats himself, for in Ancient Greek, the word ἀηδών (aedon) can be translated as both nightingale and poet (figuratively). However, during 2022’s reading, while deep in contemplation on the death of Shelley, I saw Shelley himself appear within the poem throughout, once as a “frail Form, / A phantom among men” and as “pardlike spirit” both “beautiful and swift”, which, uncannily, were the very words he would later use to describe his doomed vessel the Ariel. Shelley also compares himself to Actaeon, Cain, and even rather “blasphemously” to the humanistic sufferings of Christ.
Keats is my original poet of poets, and it was his life and writings that first set me on my way toward Romantic travel and poetic adventure (and misadventure), a sort of mythopoeic quest of profound inspiration and obsession which led to my incurable literary disease of cacoethes scribendi. Although Shelley most certainly inspired later travels, especially through Switzerland and Italy, as well as a newfound love affair with sailing, it was Keats’s voice from beyond the grave—and Keats’s voice alone—that encouraged me to leave a lucrative career in government to pursue a life of Poetry & poverty, as I like to call it.
This Keatsian self-biographical sidenote is important, for even Shelley recognized Keats as a great poet, writing that “if [Keats’s] Hyperion be not grand poetry, none has been produced by our contemporaries”, and, in the Preface to Adonais, a poet “to be classed among the writers of the highest genius who have adorned our age”, and “Keats’s new volume has arrived to us, & the fragment called Hyperion promises for him that he is destined to become one of the first writers of the age”. The last quote is poignant to the point of disbelief. When Shelley’s decomposed body washed ashore ten days after the Ariel was lost, he was unrecognizable; the only way he could be identified was by parts of his clothing and Keats’s final volume of poems in his pocket, “doubled back, as if the reader, in the act of reading, had hastily thrust it away” before the sudden storm engulfed his boat. Reading Keats’s poems may have been Shelley’s last moments of tranquility on this earth before the “cloud of the tempest” enveloped him in darkness.
Shelley himself referred to Adonais as “a highly wrought piece of art, perhaps better in point of composition than anything I have written” and “the least imperfect” of his poems. And although Shelley poetized Keats’s death in such a way that suggested (falsely) that it was “savage criticism” of his poetry that killed him, the vitriol Keats received for Endymion (1818) in particular, Adonais is still an incredibly moving piece that honors the memory of John Keats beautifully. It is as Northrop Frye wrote, that the “hatred of genius by mediocrity is a death-principle in society”, and that Shelley’s Adonais is “imaginatively correct even if the Quarterly reviewer did not actually infect Keats with tuberculosis”.
Shelley, perhaps recognizing this hatred or envy of genius, wrote in June of 1821 that he had “received the heartrending account of the closing scene of the great genius whom envy and ingratitude scourged out of the world”, and how he had “dipped [his] pen in consuming fire for [Keats’s] destroyers”. Here is Shelley composing poetry as a “consuming fire” with the image of destruction. Does this sound familiar? In Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry, also written in 1821, he writes that poetry, neither able to be contained nor obedient, is a “sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it”.
In the Preface to Adonais, Shelley writes that Keats was “buried in the romantic and lonely cemetery of the protestants in [Rome]”, known in Italian as Cimitero Acattolico (Non-Catholic Cemetery) but widely referred to in English as the Protestant Cemetery. Shelley’s three-year-old son, William “Willmouse” Shelley, to whom Shelley, according to Holmes, was “most intensely attached” and the only one of his four child who appeared in his poetry, died in Rome on 7 June 1819 and was buried in the same “mouldering and desolate” cemetery, supposedly not too far from what would be Keats’s grave less than two years later. In a rather heartbreaking coincidence, Shelley had already written about this “solemn cemetery” in a letter to Thomas Love Peacock, just six months before his beloved Willmouse would be buried there:
“The English burying-place is a green slope near the walls, under the pyramidal tomb of Cestius, and is, I think, the most beautiful and solemn cemetery I ever beheld. To see the sun shining on its bright grass, fresh, when we first visited it, with the autumnal dews, and hear the whispering of the wind among the leaves of the trees which have overgrown the tomb of Cestius, and the soil which is stirring in the sun-warm earth, and to mark the tombs, mostly of women and young people who were buried there, one might, if one were to die, desire the sleep they seem to sleep. Such is the human mind, and so it peoples with its wishes vacancy and oblivion.”
The Grave of Keats (1873) by Walter Crane. Before leaving Rome in 1873, Crane wrote, “I had, too, some little commissions to finish. Among these was a drawing of Keats’s grave at the Protestant Cemetery, which I had undertaken for Mr. George Howard, for whom the previous spring I had done a drawing of Shelley’s tomb.”
Mary wanted Percy’s ashes interred in the same grave as their beloved Willmouse, but when it was learned that the particular site had been closed to further burials in August of 1822, it was decided to exhume little Willmouse’s remains instead so that father and son could be buried together. Sadly, and rather disturbingly, when the gravesite was identified, it was opened only to discover a skeleton of a full-grown man. Joseph Severn, friend and companion to Keats during his last days in Italy while dying from consumption, oversaw this macabre operation and, understandably, was “anxious to shield Mary Shelley from the knowledge”. Percy’s ashes would be interred alone, without his son’s remains, in the new section of the cemetery “beneath one of the antique weed-grown towers” of the Aurelian wall in March of 1823. Percy, perhaps recalling his earlier visit, continues in the preface to Adonais that “among the ruins” the cemetery is “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”.
The Grave of Shelley (1872) by Walter Crane. The grave of Shelley is located in the background, “beneath one of the antique weed-grown towers” of the Aurelian wall. In the same letter before leaving Rome in May of 1873, Crane continues, “Working in that restful garden, beneath the murmur of the cypresses, one might almost feel the spirits of the poets still haunted the place, and could understand the feeling expressed by Shelley that ‘it might make one almost in love with death to think that one should be buried in so sweet a spot.’ As an ardent admirer of both poets I was proud to offer my small tribute to their genius and memory.”
Lastly, and quite importantly, as it relates to Adonais, it is difficult not to see remnants of poetic prophesy written in the final stanza with regard to Shelley’s own death just a year later. Shelley, as a spirit in the form of a boat, is driven out into stormy seas, “Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng / Whose sails were never to the Tempest given”, the skies are torn apart and broken by the storm’s violence until, in a moment of concluding transcendence (both annihilation and immortality), he is “borne darkly, fearfully, afar”. Mary Shelley recognizes the similarities as well, and in the “Note to the Poems of 1822”, she writes:
“A year before, he had poured into verse all such ideas about death as give it a glory of its own. He had, as it now seems, almost anticipated his own destiny; and, when the mind figures his skiff wrapped from sight by the thunder-storm, as it was last seen upon the purple sea, and then, as the cloud of the tempest passed away, no sign remained of where it had been — who [would not] regard as a prophesy the last stanza of the ‘Adonais’?”
The image of “pour[ing] into verse all such ideas about death as give it a glory of its own” is rather haunting, and yet beautiful. I do not subscribe to the supernatural idea that Shelley somehow had “anticipated his own destiny” in a sort of poetic prophesy, as Romantic as it may be, nor do I believe that Mary truly believed this — she was writing poetically about her beloved poet. After all, she more than anyone knew how inspired Shelley was by the water, writing that his “favourite taste was boating” and that “much of his life was spent on the water”. Mary continued, “On the shore of every lake, or stream, or sea, near which he dwelt, he had a boat moored”. It was only natural that boats and water and even storms would appear throughout his poetry.
And yet, imaginary ideas of prophetic poetry and auguries of death aside, one cannot deny the parallels in the ending stanza of Adonais to that of Shelley’s own tragic end. Again, the imagery is both haunting yet beautiful, poetical (literally) yet heartbreaking. It is a conflicting duality, and it is perhaps somewhat “visionary” in a Shelleyan sort of dualism between “Death and Life”, and of “one immortality” yet “one annihilation”. Such dark fantasy was only made more haunting by very real nightmares and what seemed to be premonitory visions of impending death that tormented Shelley during the final weeks of his life. In a letter just a month after Shelley’s death, Mary writes that “nervous sensations and visions as bad as in his worst times” had returned, possibly brought on by Mary’s life-threatening miscarriage on 16 June, and continues to paint a rather terrifying picture:
“In the middle of the night I was awoke by hearing [Shelley] scream and come rushing into my room; I was sure that he was asleep, and tried to waken him by calling on him, but he continued to scream, which inspired me with such a panic that I jumped out of bed and ran across the hall to Mrs. [Jane] Williams’ room. … He said that he had not been asleep, and that it was a vision that he saw that had frightened him. … What had frightened him was this. He dreamt that, lying as he did in bed, Edward and Jane came in to him; they were in the most horrible condition, their bodies lacerated, their bones starting through their skin, their faces pale yet stained with blood… Edward said, ‘Get up, Shelley, the sea is flooding the house, and it is all coming down.’ … Suddenly his vision changed, and he saw the figure of himself strangling me — that had made him rush into my room — yet, fearful of frightening me, he dared not approach the bed, when my jumping out awoke him, or, as he phrased it, caused his vision to vanish.”
Befittingly to Shelley’s consistent duality of mind, one of this life “which thou beholdest”, one of death’s disembodied other with the “shadows of all forms that think and live”, what Shelley saw that night was a phantasmagoria of two visions within a single nightmare. Edward Williams, who spoke to Shelley in one of the visions about the sea flooding the house and who would drown with him just days later, records the event in his journal, “Shelley sees spirits and alarms the whole house”. The morning after the nightmare, Shelley tells Mary about having “many visions lately”, including one in which he apparently met the phantasm of his own doppelgänger, Shelley’s Zoroastrian “evil twin”. This “figure of himself” met Shelley as he was walking on the terrace of Villa Magni and asked him, “How long do you mean to be content?”
How They Met Themselves (1860) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Often in folklore, meeting one’s doppelgänger is thought to foreshadow one’s death. Strangely enough, Rossetti painted this particular version of the doppelgänger while on honeymoon with Elizabeth Siddal. Tragically, Siddal would die just two years later at the age of 32 from an overdose of laudanum. It was possibly suicide.
Familiarity is a phantom all its own, haunting the mind’s poetic imagination with “strange, sublime and beauteous shapes”. A memory forms within my own mind, and I am reminded of a mysterious stanza from Prometheus Unbound, one of Shelley’s most brilliant works and a piece that has stayed with me ever since my first inspired reading:
Ere Babylon was dust,
The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,
Met his own image walking in the garden.
That apparition, sole of men, he saw.
For know there are two worlds of life and death:
One that which thou beholdest; but the other
Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit
The shadows of all forms that think and live
Till death unite them and they part no more;
Dreams and the light imaginings of men,
And all that faith creates or love desires,
Terrible, strange, sublime and beauteous shapes.
However, while researching and writing this introduction in recent days prior to the bicentenary, I was even more haunted by something Shelley wrote in a letter to John Gisborne on 18 June 1822, just twenty days before his death. Shelley writes:
“[My boat] is swift and beautiful, and appears quite a vessel… We drive along this delightful bay in the evening wind, under the summer moon, until earth appears another world… If the past and future could be obliterated, the present would content me so well that I could say with Faust to the passing moment, ‘Remain, thou, thou art so beautiful’.”
Moon Path by Ivan Aivazovsky (1817 – 1900).
These last words give me chills. I find Shelley’s Faustian reminiscences as unsettling as the uncanny circumstances that darkened the weeks before his death. The passage is from Goethe’s Faust, which Shelley was translating at the time for the Liberal, and the meaning behind these words are important. The passage, translated here by Shelley as “Remain, thou, thou art so beautiful”, comes from the scene where Faust is sealing the pact with Mephistopheles, and if he is ever satisfied enough and wants a particularly “beautiful” moment to “remain”, then the pact is complete and he must die, forfeit his soul, and spend an eternity in Hell. Shelley, inhabiting the “delightful bay” of Lerici, while “reading dramas and sailing and listening to the most enchanting music”, after a life spent almost entirely on the move, has now found that beautiful moment and wishes to remain.
There is much to write about Percy Bysshe Shelley, and I could spend my own eternity writing about his life and writings, but I have a strange suspicion that Shelley would find it appropriate to end this brief introduction here, as sudden as the summer storm, while musing upon the “swift and beautiful” boat that would cause his death, his happiness in the present moment, and the Faustian eternity in Hell. After all, in the same Chamonix hotel register in which he declared himself “lover of humanity, democrat, and atheist”, under the column heading labeled “Destination”, Shelley writes “L’Enfer”. Hell.
Clay Franklin Johnson is the author of A Ride Through Faerie & Other Poems (2021), an illustrated collection of poetry published by Gothic Keats Press in honor of John Keats on the bicentennial year of his death in 1821. His writing has been published widely, nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Rhysling Award, and received Honorable Mention in The Best Horror of the Year. His collection's eponymous poem, “A Ride Through Faerie”, was recently presented at “Ill Met by Moonlight”, a university conference in England organized by Open Graves, Open Minds that discussed the darker side of faeries in literature. You can find out more by visiting his website at https://www.clayfjohnson.com/ and by following him on Twitter @ClayFJohnson.
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