Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry
Nothing of him that doth fade but doth suffer a sea change into something rich and strange
The Courier’s obituary didn’t mince words. “Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned,” The Tory newspaper wrote of the great poet’s death, “now he knows whether there is a God or no.”
A short note, perhaps fitting of a short life. Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned one month shy of 30. His sailboat sunk off the shore of Pisa, where he and his wife, the great novelist, had settled some two years prior. The details of his vessel, along with the wreck that ended his life, remain a source of some controversy among scholars 200 years later.
The sailboat was commissioned by Shelley, writer Edward John Trelawny and retired naval officer Edward Ellerkery Williams.
“Williams had brought with him, on leaving England, the section of a boat as a model to build from,” Trelawny would write in his Shelley biography, “designed by a naval officer, and the two friends had so often sat contemplating this toy, believing it to be a marvel of nautical architecture, that nothing would satisfy them but that their craft should be built exactly on the same lines.”
Accounts of the ship’s size vary greatly, primarily between 17 to 30 feet. Questions, too, have emerged around its seaworthiness. Mary would write, reflecting on the death of her husband, “Ours was to be an open boat, on a model taken from one of the royal dockyards. I have since heard that there was a defect in this model, and that it was never seaworthy.”
It was Trelawny who suggested the boat be named “Don Juan,” in tribute to the works of Lord Byron. By the time construction was finished, however, the partnership between its future owners had dissolved, leaving Shelley to purchase it outright for £80. Refusing to step foot in a craft named for the magnum opus of a contemporary, Shelley renamed the boat “Ariel.” On his death, lines from the “Ariel’s Song” passage of Shakespeare’s The Tempest was etched into his headstone, reading,
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
Two things are clear regarding the circumstances around Shelley’s death, however. First, the poet and the two crew members who died alongside him were inexperienced seamen. Second, in spite of speculation around malice or self-sabotage, it was a storm that capsized the ship and its ill-prepared crew.
While perhaps incorrect, speculation around the poet’s intentional demise is not wholly unfounded. The months preceding Percy’s death were, by any measure, fraught. Shortly before her husband’s death, Mary nearly died of a miscarriage, having already lost two of three children shortly after birth. Her depression only deepened, along with the rift between she and Percy.
The latter would soon write to Trelawny, requesting what amounted to a lethal dose of prussic acid. He begun regularly awakening in the middle of the night startled by nightmarish visions. In one, Shelley imagined the house consumed by rising floodwaters. Recounting the morning he awoke from that dream, Mary describes a vision of a doppelgänger – a double believed to foretell the coming of great tragedy.
In Mary’s retelling, Williams’ wife, Jane, also served witness to the ominous encounter,
But Shelley had often seen these figures when ill. but the strangest thing is that Mrs. Williams saw him. Now Jane, though a woman of sensibility, has not much imagination & is not in the slightest degree nervous — neither in dreams or otherwise. She was standing one day, the day before I was taken ill, [June 15] at a window that looked on the Terrace with Trelawny — it was day — she saw as she thought Shelley pass by the window, as he often was then, without a coat or jacket — he passed again — now as he passed both times the same way — and as from the side towards which he went each time there was no way to get back except past the window again (except over a wall twenty feet from the ground) she was struck at seeing him pass twice thus & looked out & seeing him no more she cried — "Good God can Shelley have leapt from the wall?.... Where can he be gone?”
Shelley’s death fittingly left his final major work, “The Triumph of Life,” unfinished. In what would prove the final stanza, the poet writes,
"Then, what is Life?" I said . . . the cripple cast
His eye upon the car which now had rolled
Onward, as if that look must be the last,
And answered .... "Happy those for whom the fold
Of ...
Mary, who edited the unfinished manuscript for publication, championed the poem as one of Percy’s most important. But the ending, it seems, met with the same fate as its author that night.
“When Shelley was on board, he had his papers with him,” she writes, “and much of the ‘Triumph of Life’ was written as he sailed or weltered on that sea which was soon to engulf him.”
Sources:
Death and destiny https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/jan/24/featuresreviews.guardianreview1
The Sinking of the Don Juan Revisited https://www.jstor.org/stable/30210570?read-now=1&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents