Percy Bysshe Shelley and Miss Phillips at Warwick Street Printery, Worthing, 1810, Charles Alfred Morris (1898–1983), Worthing Museum and Art Gallery
Percy Bysshe Shelley and Miss Phillips at Warwick Street Printery, Worthing, 1810, Charles Alfred Morris (1898–1983), Worthing Museum and Art Gallery
POETRY, BIOGRAPHY, AND TOPOGRAPHY THE CASE OF PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY By Karen Alkalay-Gut *** The Montréal Review, January 2025 |
||||||
Photo © Ezra Gut If we agree with the assumption that few people actually read poetry, then what are the criteria which keep certain poets on the tip of every educated tongue? How is it that some poets disappear from public discussion when others seem to be included in the ‘of course I’ve read…’ lexicon? One might suggest that quotability contributes to the popularity of some writers. Yeats, Shakespeare and Whitman always seem to come to mind when a political speechwriter sits down to his task, and Auden and perhaps Shelley’s prose must be quoted in any discussion of the relevance of poetry. But Shelley’s poetry is not always consistent with his reputation and is known to be contain the worst line ever written by a romantic poet, “I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!” in his most well-known poem “Ode to the West Wind.” Shelley certainly left a significant poetic heritage, but it is not by his poetry alone that his fame has continued. Shelley who died a month before his thirtieth birthday, managed to encompass extremely colorful experiences, and the record of his life is memorable, so it may well be the scandalous biography which endears us to today’s audiences. But perhaps the most dramatic element is the mystery surrounding his death and the narrative of his burial, and the maintenance of this popularity was first created through topography. And it is of the topography of the non-Catholic Cemetery at Rome that I will focus in these pages. Let me begin with John Keats. Keats died on February, 23 1821, and was buried in the old part of the non-Catholic cemetery. Despite the coolness of their friendship, as soon as Shelley heard of Keats’ demise, he wrote the pastoral elegy, “Adonais.” In the spirit of pastoral elegies, it is a long and rambling proclamation of great loss, concluding with the traditional elegiac possibility of comfort. Solace can be found in the Non Catholic Cemetery in Rome.
Photo © Ezra Gut
XLIX Go thou to Rome—at once the Paradise, Shelley knew the spot in the Protestant Cemetery because his third child, three year old William, had been buried there two years before.
Photo © Ezra Gut
Shelley himself had not seen the grave, but wrote a poem to William hoping his spirit would transcend the body. Imagining the grave of his son, he wrote of Keats’s resting place that if one could be sheltered in such a beautiful environment there would be no point to avoid death. In fact, burial in a place so beautiful would be preferable to the harshness of life.
How can one fear death when it is so beautifully and eternally mourned in this elegant resting place? Unfortunately, when Shelley’s turn came, the old section had been closed to further burials, and Shelley was to be separated from his son and his fellow poet. Nevertheless, Shelley was allowed the opportunity to be buried there too, and unlike Keats’ corner grave (which became against his will a place for pilgrimage) Shelley’s grave is one that seems to command the entire area. The visitor enters the perfectly manicured grounds of the non-Catholic cemetery of Rome and is directed by a sign to go straight up the main path to the top, through the cypresses originally planted by Edward Trelawny, Shelley’s friend, when Trelawny chose this perfect resting place. The landscape itself directs the visitor to Shelley. From the entrance to the grave is a direct line.
Photo © Ezra Gut
Although there are numerous significant and elaborate graves, the stone sign at the entrance to the cemetery indicates the central attraction: “To Shelley’s Tomb (at the base of the Tower).” It sends the visitor to a niche formed by two ancient buttresses near the imposing pyramid of Cauis Cestius where lie the ashes of the young Romantic poet, under a simple engraved white marble stone. The stone itself seems intended to evoke the most poetic of emotions while hinting of the details of Shelley’s death. In his essay, “The Defense of Poetry,” Shelley had proclaimed “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” and here his grave seems to rule over the entire grounds, connecting to and lending significance to the other graves.
Photo © Ezra Gut
Not only are the gravestones of his son, William, and his colleague John Keats, in the neighborhood (although minutes away), but adjacent to Shelley’s grave is the grave of poet Gregory Corso, designed to match that of Shelley, reflecting Shelley’s influence. Despite its obvious importance in the cemetery, Shelley’s grave itself seems unassuming: a simple white marble slab with a poetic quotation, a brief statement, and the name. The quotation at the bottom of his grave, closest to the path where it can be most easily read, is from Shakespeare’s “Tempest.” In Shakespeare’s play, the sprite Ariel comforts the frightened Ferdinand with the account that although his father, Prospero, has been drowned, his death is a transformation rather than an end. But Ariel was lying; Prospero was not drowned, but would soon return to rule the island. Shelley, however, did in fact drown. Shelley had been working on the poem “The Triumph of Life,” a piece that employed the concept and form of terza rima of Dante. Weeks before his death he had written a description of his guide in his Dantesque poetic journey, Rousseau, returning from the dead here with a decayed face. “and the holes it vainly sought to hide/Were or had been eyes,” reminiscent of Ariel’s description of the death of Prospero, part of which is quoted on Shelley’s grave:
The allusion in Shelley’s epitaph to Shakespeare, then, is perfect and appropriate on many levels. To drown is to be transformed, to become something eternal. ‘Ariel’ was also the original and preferred name for the boat in which Shelley drowned. This quotation of Ariel on the grave immediately puts Shelley’s drowning into a mythological perspective, transforming his rather foolish death into an entrance into the world of magic and eternity. One would have thought from the death notices in England announcing Shelley’s drowning that his poetic existence was also at an end. Some of the literary papers acknowledged Shelley’s ‘promise’ but most of the reports of his death were negative. The Courier was only one of many newspapers that mocked his atheism and proclaimed, "Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned: now he knows whether there is a God or no." Indeed, there seems to be something too meaningful in what was certainly an accident of faulty sailing. Some of the facts about his death seemed to suit a poem rather than a biography, as if Shelley had plotted a dramatic end. First, there was the scaled-down schooner, the Don Juan, named by Byron after Byron’s first major poem that was inspired and encouraged by Shelley, despite Shelley’s preference for naming the boat ‘Ariel.’ The boat had been just been remodeled to make it appear even more like a swift schooner, with artificial additions, and these romanticizations made it, in the words of biographer Richard Holmes, “dangerously unseaworthy.” 1 It was wonderful for sailing out with his wife Mary before her pregnancy, miscarriage, and consequent depression. It was idyllic for jaunts with his friend Williams as Williams’ wife Jane played guitar and sang over the water. It was a beautiful setting for reading poetry and philosophy. But it wasn’t a practical boat for survival, especially in a storm. Shelley was returning from an exciting visit to Livorno where he had met with Leigh Hunt and Byron about their planned revolutionary journal, The Liberal, when his boat hit a flash storm. The local vessels had returned to Livorno for safety but Shelley’s boat did not, and when the captain of a local boat sailed beside them offering to take them on board, he heard Shelley shout “No.” The sailors then advised Shelley to lower their sails, but the top-heavy Don Juan sank into the Gulf of Spezia with full sails. In Shelley’s pocket was a copy of the poems of the recently deceased Keats. It was as if he had been reading the book when the storm came up, and he put it away quickly to free his hands to manage the sails. This too seems too symbolic a detail even for a poet. Poetry and the poetic seemed to absorb Shelley far more than survival. There were other factors that could indicate foolhardiness or even suicide. In response to the numerous pressures he had been experiencing recently in particular, he had hinted at the idea of drowning to the others in his group. Jane Williams was particularly alarmed by Shelley’s proclaiming the delights of drowning while he was taking her children out of the boat after a jaunt. Another time he dreamed of the sea flooding his home and his family. The sea and death seem joined in his visions. Life in general was not going as beautifully as Shelley had planned. Not only did his wife Mary hate their house on the sea, and was physically weak, undernourished and depressed, but Shelley could feel no empathy to her situation. Instead he interpreted her lassitude as an imperviousness to his moods, and began to think he had made a mistake in thinking she was the perfect soul mate of his dreams. And Mary’s niece, Allegra, had just died of a fever. Allegra was the illegitimate daughter of Byron and Mary’s sister, Claire Clairmont, and had lived with Shelley, Mary, and Claire from infancy until she was sent by Byron to a convent to be raised. There she contracted typhus and died at the age of five. The helplessness and guilt must have affected her: A short while before his own death Shelley saw a vision of the beloved Allegra rising naked from the waves in the sea. And then there was Jane. Shelley had been writing and poems to her, and the fact that Jane and her husband lived in the same house with Percy and Mary must have made the situation interesting, perhaps too complex even for the poet who advocated free love. “To Jane” captures the mood of idyllic splendor on the boat:
But there are also hints of his sense of impending end:
Jane was flattered, but faithful to her husband. It might have seemed like a perfect time for Shelley to disappear and be born again in the waves. Shelley had successfully survived perilous incidents on the Rhine (with Mary) in 1814, on Lake Geneva (with Byron) in 1816, and on the Pisan Canal (with Williams) in 1821. Years before he had nearly drowned off Lake Geneva and was saved by Byron. His only concern then, he wrote to his friend, was that he would endanger Byron. Perhaps his concern should have been that he learn to swim. Especially in the sea in which he was unfamiliar. A sailor lacking this basic skill must not expect to live long. However, Shelley’s entire concept of time was concerned with the intensity rather than the duration of life, so caution was not a factor in his considerations. Swimming perhaps seemed too banal to which to devote his elevated energies. The body of Shelley washed ashore ten days after the storm of July 8, on the beach between Massa and Viareggio. He was identified by his clothes and the book of Keats’ poems in his pocket. His friend, Edward Williams and crew member Charles Vivian washed up as well. Because of Italian quarantine laws, the bodies could not be transported to Rome for burial, according to the wishes of family and friends, without being cremated. Edward Trelawny, a recent friend of Shelley, helped out the helpless Mary and the indifferent Byron, and arranged for the temporary burial on the spot. He also organized and carried out a suitable funeral for Shelley, cremating the body on August 15, in a special oven he had designed, and chanted a number of myth-like rituals while anointing the corpse with herbs and wine. Trelawny began with Williams. In addition to the representative from the Health Office, soldiers, and some curious local residents, there were three significant witnesses: Byron, Hunt, and Trelawny. The day after it was Shelley’s turn, and the audience may have been smaller for the second performance, but the soldiers and the health officer were in attendance to make sure the quarantine laws were followed. It was hot, and slow, and despite the anointed oils and herbs, stinking of burning flesh. In the last year of Trelawny’s life, he recalled: “When I threw the incense, wine and oil on the pile, I uttered incantations, saying: ‘I restore to nature through fire the elements of which this man was composed, earth, air, and water; everything is changed, but not annihilated; he is now a portion of that which he worshipped.'"2 The speech obviously recalls the epitaph he later placed on the tomb. Byron, overcome with heat and grief or boredom, went for a swim while Hunt remained in the carriage. Only Trelawny remained, overseeing the event, and observing that Shelley’s heart, too pure to burn, became visible, he “plucked” it from the fire, making sure he was not observed by the health officer. The ashes were transported to Rome and for months after were in storage in the Non-Catholic Cemetery, because Mary wanted him to be buried with their son, which was near the fresh grave of John Keats, immortalized by Shelley in his elegy. But that part of the cemetery had just been closed to further burials and when Trelawny arrived he selected a more suitable place to the image he was creating of Shelley, overlooking the new section of the cemetery. The position and elevation – the top and center of the new cemetery – seemed perfect to him and he arranged place for two niches in the wall, with room for two gravestones. He ordered a white marble stone with the quotation from Shakespeare. The other epitaph on the stone was Hunt’s idea: “Cor Cordium,” the “heart of hearts.” It is a beautiful epitaph, but, of course, Shelley’s heart, as Trelawny knew, was not physically there. Nor, apparently, were all his ashes. When Shelley’s daughter-in-law died, ashes which she had identified as belonging to Shelley were found in her copy of “Adonais.” 3 The heart too traveled to England, and was found in Mary Shelley’s writing desk after her death. It may be that the heart was buried with Shelley's son, Sir Percy Florence Shelley. In any case it is agreed that the heart is now in the vault in the churchyard of St Peter's Church, Bournemouth. Although the story may not be totally accurate. Some scholars suggest that it wasn’t his heart at all that Trelawney plucked from the ashes, but his liver. Keats was laid to rest very near what might be the grave of William Shelley, but Shelley himself is not so near. The nobility of the site chosen by Trelawny was at the cost of proximity, and the walk from one to the other takes a few minutes. Mary Shelley only visited this cemetery for the grave of her son and that of her husband in 1843. Trelawny took care of it all. Trelawny had met Shelley a few months before his death, and had not been a close friend of the group of poets, nor was he considered a part of the inner circle. He was an adventurer and a novelist, but his fame came through his relations with Shelley and later with Byron, and he planned his own eternal rest – and his enduring fame - in Shelley’s shade. The grave next to the one Trelawny purchased for Shelley is his own resting place.
Photo © Ezra Gut
This is the epitaph Shelley may have written himself, since his wife published them in his posthumous poems4 but it is just as likely that it was written by Trelawny himself, in an attempt to bring him closer to the poet. Whoever is the author, the impression that Trelawny appeared to have created, as dramatic as his cremation of Shelley, was that he was Shelley’s lifelong companion, rather than the administrator of his funeral. It was part of the legend that Trelawny, the last of the crowd around the Romantics, created in his lifetime and reinforced in the last year of his own life. Writing to the cemetery director in the last year of his life, Trelawny gave specific instructions:
Trelawny was not just being cautious. Mistakes could be made. When William Shelley’s grave was dug up in January of 1823 in order to bury the father together with the son, it was discovered that an adult had been buried in that spot. And in the time between Shelley’s burial and Trelawny’s letter, workers at the cemetery had wondered whose spot was being saved. Had Trelawny not so politely reminded the cemetery of his existence, paid them well, and instructed his housekeeper to bring his ashes from England through Germany (where cremation was legal), the gravesite he saved for himself would have been forgotten in the sixty years that came between his death and his friend’s in 13 August 1881. Moreover, had not Trelawny been so dedicated in his last days it is not certain the grave of Shelley itself (whether the rumor is right or wrong) would have remained. But after Trelawny’s great care, the legend was inviolable. Even the attempt by Shelley’s daughter-in-law to replace the stone with a dramatic sculpture of the drowned poet was prevented in 1891 by the fact of Trelawny’s creation of the tradition. The romantic sculpture, perhaps more appropriate to the poetry and legend of the tragic poet, is placed instead in the college from which Shelley was expelled, University College of Oxford:
Photo © Ezra Gut
The tragedy of the lonely death expressed in the sculpture tells an entirely different story of the poet. Trelawny’s imaginative grave in the exotic environment, originally described by Shelley himself and with its references to the renewal emphasized in Shelley’s own poetry, places Shelley in the spiritual tradition of English poetry and a promised renewal of the tradition. Whatever Trelawny’s motivation, his endeavors followed the legend.
***
|
|
||
The Montréal Review © All rights reserved. ISSN 1920-2911
