9. Being Shelley, by Ann Wroe, pp. 231-254

Part III: Air, 2. The song

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The English poet loved the Italian blue sky, and "depended on it, he said, for life. In 1820 he wanted Keats too, who was dying, to see that sky and live." It reinforced in him a sense of some limitless force: "He had called it Necessity, the Soul of the Universe, all-sufficing Power, the Spirit of Nature." It was also Love, but he was conscious of how that word had been "'too often profaned,' he told Jane [Williams], 'for me to profane it again.'" But he was also conscious of how alien human beings had become from the workings of nature: "The renewal of the world in spring, though it stirred his blood, could neither ease his sadness nor lighten his burdens for long. Love did not work in him that way." But he continued his quest for that ecstatic sense of connection with "the Spirit of Beauty" that he had experienced as a boy.

In his notebooks he often sketched trees, "sometimes rooted firmly in the earth, sometimes dangerously poised at the edges of cliffs whose stones had begun to give. But most often he drew swags and snatches of foliage adrift in the air." He sought out what he called "pavilions," places where the branches of trees joined together over his head, and "green lawns among the trees, soft-carpeted with moss and strewn almost too formally with tiny, brightly coloured flowers." He listened to the song the trees sang as the wind passed through their branches. "The Spirit of Beauty, the constant object of his love and his pursuit, he had compared not to music but to 'memory of music fled': a melody heard as a child but now fading, even as far as silence."

The impact of song on him was often unbearable in its physical intensity. When women played, they played him; when they sang, they stole his own breath from him. He was in love with them, ached with wanting them, whatever his reasonings otherwise. The draft of "To Constantia," written as Claire sang at the piano in 1817, was among the most desperate and illegible he ever produced. The words lost, dissolved, consumed, drunk were tried and deleted again and again, blotted, smudged.

In composition, he often began with the rhythm: "He found the metre, then the rhymes, leaving gaps, as was necessary, when words would not come.... When a rhythm caught him he would try it in the notebook for a line or two, to see if he liked it and how well it would carry words.... With rhythm came harmony -- rhythm's spirit, as Shelley termed it -- and with harmony, meaning and power. Sound itself carried sense."

Music, rather than words, made him a Poet. Indeed metrical language, Shelley thought, worked better even than music to express "the actions and passions of our internal being," and was "susceptible of more various and delicate combinations than colour, form or motion." Poetry had no intermediary, no instrument or canvas or sculptor's marble, but was sheer thought modified only by arrangement "by that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man." 

He made lists of words he liked and disliked. "Among his favourites were 'glimmering,' 'murmuring,' and 'scattering,' words of half-seeing, half-hearing and half-apprehension: his human life."

In June 1820, he and Mary were walking through fields near Leghorn when they heard the songs of the skylarks soaring above them. He had previously translated the Homeric Hymn to Mercury, using words like "unpremeditated," "unconquerable," ""joyous and wild and wanton," "sweet as Love," and the words and phrases came back to him as he wrote his piece in praise of the skylark that he could hear but not see above him: "the bird had vanished in its singing, mounting so high that it became all music, impossible to see." He posited a kinship with the bird, which "was more confident in its song than in its flying. It mounted and fell, mounted and fell, struggling to shake off the murky pull of Earth." He believed his own verse to be "unpremeditated art," that it "had nothing to do with consciousness or will or 'the active powers of the mind.'" in a famous simile he likened "the mind in creation" to "a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness."

Plato had written of the madness of poets, enchanted by nymphs and dryads or possessed by the Muses. Shelley compared writing poetry to taking laudanum.

Poets naturally knew this burst of feeling, crazily coalescing into words. Fools knew it too, and Shelley instinctively sympathised with them: Calderón's Pasquin, with his disquieting tales of blindness and masks; Shakespeare's Feste from Twelfth Night, with his sad song of rain; Edgar's Poor Tom from Lear, shadowed like Shelley by the "foul fiend"; and his own fool, Archy, in his unfinished play Charles the First. Archy-Shelley saw a rainbow once, hanging over London and its shops, "like a bridge of congregated lightnings pierced by the masonry of heaven." But at the end of the rainbow he found the carcass of a dead ass, rotten rags and broken dishes: earth-rubbish, though his eyes were still full of gold and purple light. 

But however spontaneous the inspiration of poetry may be, the agony of composition still remained. His manuscripts are full of false starts and revisions.

7. Being Shelley, by Ann Wroe, pp. 182-210

Part II: Water, 3. Escape from "Many of his Poet-journeys were inward..." through end. Part III: Air, 1. The shadow through "... a radiant light rests on men, and life is sweet."

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Shelley made several journeys attempting to trace the source of streams and lakes, a quest that resembled his inward one:  "At some point thought, like water, disappeared underground, enticing him into the dark." He was fascinated with mazes, drawing them in his notebooks and exploring the maze-like ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, where he wrote Prometheus Unbound. His walks in woods and cities would often end up with him getting lost.

He loved to build boats, both toy ones and real, and in 1822 he designed a sailboat to explore the Bay of Spezia. As a joke, Byron, whose own boat was built in the same yard, had "the name Don Juan painted in large black letters on the mainsail." The attempts to wash the letters out left the sail dingy, and it had to be replaced so the boat could be the pure white Shelley wanted. It was refitted as well, becoming "swifter, slimmer and less stable.... Most remarkable and foolish was a gaff topsail, providing more surface to the wind than unskilled sailors could possibly manage. But that was the point of her."

Shelley was a careless sailor, too preoccupied with his thoughts and the books and notebooks he brought on board with him. "He took exercise in boats, he told Claire, 'to dissipate thought,' or in other words to stop time weighing on him." And he thought of boats as a means to escape from persecutors, such as the Lord Chancellor who had taken away his children by Harriet. He took his children out on boats even when they were small: "the sole memory his son Percy, who was two when [Shelley] died, preserved of him [was of] strong, cradling arms lifting him on board." He imagined his boats as birds: "Among his very last drafts of poetry Shelley drew a page of sleek prows, giving them wings."

In 1823 a Geneva boatman gave his views on Shelley. He remembered him stretched on the bottom of the boat "gazing at Heaven, where he would never enter." Mary had a similar memory of Shelley observing skies and clouds as he drifted on the river at Marlow. He floated in a light cocoon between the water and the air. Often the two were interchangeable. The sea was "Heaven's ever-changing shadow," the sky "the inverse deep," each mirroring the other. The air was eddying and liquid; birds dived in it, as fish in the sea; clouds became sunrise-tinted foam, and waves broke in shiverings of mist and light. Though Shelley could not cope in water, in air he imagined he could move like a swimmer, his "subtle spirit" gliding and turning in an element that could carry him.

He was fascinated by clouds, and particularly by their relationship to the earth: "They clung like thought itself to the tops of the woods, or trailed on the flanks of mountains." He was amazed to find the peaks of the Alps rising above the clouds: "his mountain summits were always 'aery,' 'aëreal,' 'floating' or 'íslanded' in the deep sea of the sky." He was intrigued by Humphry Davy's writings about the atom, which "pictured transparent atoms in tiny revolutions about their own axes and about each other, copying the motions of the universe. They were mostly empty, letting movement in." He echoed this in Prometheus Unbound, and thought of his body as "the model of the moving universe; his substance, which seemed so solid, was as porous and open to influence the wide pulsating air."

He also thought of himself, the Poet, as a chameleon, taking on the colors of his surroundings. "His chameleon nature also sensitised him to the least sign of good or evil in the world. Friends saw that sensitivity in Shelley's own change of colour, from the pallor of his 'languid' days to the furious blushing when he was forced to be sociable or was caught out in lying." The chameleon Shelley was manifested in his personality. Sometimes he took on the manner of "Socrates, his hero, ... careless of clothes and shoes, happy on a diet of bread and vegetables, and, most of all, suddenly losing himself, so wrapped in thought that he took no stock of where he was." He was was undependable:

Summoned to appointments, he did not come. Called to dinner, he was out in the woods or by water, writing. He told Trelawny, rather sharply, that the Muses who lived in the air did not dine. Bird-like, he picked at any food he found -- wild strawberries, "milky" pine-nuts shaken in the grass -- and winged his way back with the birds as evening fell.

He was notoriously difficult to capture in portraits, though many of his friends tried. "All these friends presumed him uncatchable because he was not of the earth." Some of them, "only half joking, presumed Shelley could fly." They compared him to Oberon or Puck from A Midsummer Night's Dream, or to aliens from outer space. "Keats -- who encountered him at Hunt's in Hampstead, but foudn him too overbearing -- once remarked, with slight jealousy, that Shelley probably never sat with his wings furled for six months together."

6. Being Shelley, by Ann Wroe, pp. 147-181

Part II: Water, 2. Reflection from "What he also sought in water or in mirrors ..." through end. 3. Escape through "... leaned down towards an embrace."

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Reflections were also, in Shelley's Platonic idealism, a medium through which ultimate reality could be perceived. "The mind, Plato said, should be treated like an eye, guided gently from obscurity to light." For Shelley, the eye was also the window to the soul. He gazed deeply into Mary's eyes, and sketched images of eyes in his noteooks.

Eyes, he believed, became intricate from "the acquisition of knowledge and the cultivation of sentiment." Dreams, too, could be read there. In their "mazy depth of colour behind colour" he could lose himself with looking, as Narcissus did, at his own idealised image reflected in the mind of another.... In deepest thought, using the inner eye of his mind, he could sometimes begin to observe within himself the bright form of which Shelley, with his lined cheeks and greying hair, was only the mortal shadow.... Hence the hours spent musing by ponds and pools and, in female company, the uncomfortable intensity of his longing, blue-eyed stare. 

It was Southey, whom Shelley visited in 1811, who suggested he read Berkeley, who conceived of reality as "a construct of mind." He didn't go to the solipsistic extreme, but argued, "Mind, as far as we have any experience of its properties, and beyond that experience how vain is argument! cannot create, it can only perceive." He also posited a universal Mind, not a divinity to be worshiped but "a source from which his thoughts drew energy." This concept was reinforced by an Alpine epiphany in the summer of 1816 in which he "sensed a presence in the mountains" when he visited the glacier at Chamounix.

As he picnicked with Mary and Claire at the glacier's edge they could hear it creak and crack; they once saw, not far off, the thunderclap smoke and rubble of an avalanche it caused, bearing down into the valley "all the ruins of the mountains."... Three years later, in Prometheus Unbound, he made this the echo of all men's thoughts suddenly released from the ice.... The great mountain represented the secret law that governed though: solemn, inaccessible, transcendent. Mutability and chance could not come near it. Only mind could ponder it. In its remoteness it marked the last of the visible and natural causes men could see before ... they lost the thread of their understanding and reached, clumsily and blindly for the notion "God." 

Shelley crossed a bridge over the river Arve and saw the torrent below as an image of "his own thoughts, 'now dark -- now glittering,' and ceaselessly bursting and raving among the rocks." He wrote to Peacock of his "realisation that his existence and the mountain's were one in his mind. He had made the whole landscape his idea, his thought, and part of him. Mind became what it contemplated, and what he saw became himself." As Poet, "he could shape, colour, fill with meaning, invest with light and life." The human mind was a mirror of the vast sea of mind. "The notion of 'distinct individual minds, similar to that which is employed in now questioning its own nature,' was a delusion. He was simply an infinitesimal ripple in a Mind infinitely extensive."

In Dante's Convito, God dreamed man and the divine Intelligences made him, according to God's idea. But in Shelley's Queen Mab, man dreamed God. Y los sueños, sueños son. ... Others, standing in awe under the same Swiss sky, had bowed before the God who made the mountain. Shelley had been made aware of, and had tested, his own power. 

This concept of the power of mind informed his politics. "Perceptions, opinions and dispositions could be changed, not least by his own writing and incessant, urgent arguing.... Mind would triumph over matter, and the world could be transformed."

"You talk Utopia," said Byron shortly. Perhaps Shelley did; he knew that men did not dare this, that they did not even know their lack of daring, that "the good want power, but to weep barren tears," and that the revolution in France had failed precisely because its promoters had persisted in seeing the world in terms of oppression and revenge. But he talked Utopia because "some few, like we know who" saw it believed it, and knew it had to be shown forth to other minds. It could be built that way.

Shelley thought of his political writings as stones cast into the lake, the ripple made by the disturbance spreading outward. It was an image suggested by Godwin, who called truth "the pebble in the lake." "The Necessity of Atheism had been one such pebble, in Shelley's view." In November 1817, he wrote his Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte, in which he contrasted the widespread grief over the death of the young princess with the "indifference to the death of Liberty in England." Two years later, in Italy, he began work on A Philosophical View of Reform, but it was left unfinished and unpublished for a century. "Shelley crouched by the water with his mind full of spreading circles of light. But the pond, and England, slept again."

One problem is that Shelley had a short attention span: "His life seemed compounded of eddying ideas that begged to be heeded and followed. Sudden notions drove him to grab friends by the arm and tug them eastwards, westwards, sideways, into bread-shops and pawn-shops in the London streets." Trelawny said, "He overbore all opposition in those less self-willed than he was." In Hogg's view, "Shelley never fled towards, but escaped from whatever it was that moved him."

Increasingly, Shelley resorted to images of "free fall through nothingness, or water, or the illusory solidity of the body and the self." In 1820, he jumped into the Arno from the Ponte della Trinità in Florence, from which Trelawny, who had failed to teach him to swim, rescued him. Despite the horror of Harriet's drowning, he had convinced himself that he would drown calmly. In 1816, he had been sailing with Byron on Lake Geneva when they were caught in a sudden windstorm. Byron, a strong swimmer, "assured him he could save him, as long as he did not struggle. Shelley replied that he had no notion of being saved." And when Trelawny rescued him from the Arno, "Shelley was sorely disappointed that he had not left him there."

He took Jane Williams and her two small children out in a small boat in the Bay of Lerici in the spring of 1822 and fell oddly silent as the little coracle drifted far from shore. "Jane watched him as he sat, head bowed, motionless and wordless. His melancholy was terrifying." Finally he announced his interest in finding out what mysteries lay in the afterlife. Jane told him that she and the children would rather have dinner first, and when they got back to shore she "swore she would never go out in a boat with Shelley again."

He had persuaded himself that drowning "was a state much like sleeping."

He was confident ... that thought did not die. It might even become more influential once the thinker had gone. Books, paintings, sculptures, products of mind, survived, with immortality in them as long as men lived to admire them. ... Yet the question for Shelley was whether minds themselves persisted, and whether his own mind, with all its pulsings of thought, would dissolve as a billow in the ocean or go on. His reasoning self insisted that things beyond the grave could not be known. Men could believe, if they cared to, in eternal life; but in belief of that sort, the sort that priests demanded, the will was passive and the intellect suspended.... Nothing beyond visible phenomena could be subjected to rational analysis. It was a realm of phantoms and faith. The first he had outgrown, the second he rejected as poison. But looking into water -- water running deep and quiet, his own face looking back at him -- he sometimes felt he was on the edge of understanding, and leaned down towards an embrace.

5. Being Shelley, by Ann Wroe, pp. 117-147

Part II: Water, 1. Immersion from "Water could not be counted his friend...." through end. 2. Reflection through "... Drängt immer fremd und fremder stoff sich an."

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He disliked some forms of water, such as "The loathed baptismal fluid." And "The English rain, whenever it fell, turned him aguish, bilious and weak.... In his poems, rain fell bleakly over cities ruled by tyrants: sullen, rotting, poisoned rain." But he fancied himself invulnerable to water, like the Wandering Jew, who could not drown. He saw himself as like the tides, controlled by the moon, and he symbolized Mary as the moon: "In the early summer of 1814, when his passion for Mary had first erupted and he was threatening suicide if he could not have her, it was she -- so he claimed -- who was exerting influence on him, her passive lover. His mind without her, he told her later, was 'dead & cold as the dark midnight river when the moon is down.'" Later, it was Jane Williams whom he compared to the moon. He also likened orgasmic ecstasy to drowning:

Ecstasy, for him, was a condition of dissolution. "To sink and die" was a favourite phrase, commingling death and love as consummation to be longed for. He would expire in the deep like a lover subsiding with the spasms of the sexual act, "the quick dying gasps / Of the life meeting." 

He was fascinated by the undersea world, which was silent and filled with wonders. It "was also the realm of dreams." Shelley slept erratically, sometimes seeming to resent and resist sleep, though it "brought a disconnect between body and mind, and mind and spirit, that ceaselessly interested him." There are three recorded instances of his walking in his sleep. He tried to keep a record of his dreams, and once found himself terrified when he encountered a landscape that he thought he had seen before in a dream. He read with great fascination Calderón's La vida es sueño.

Was sleep a form of death, or a deeper form of waking life? Was life death, at least of the spirit? Was death a form of sleep in which, in Hamlet's words, "what dreams may come ... Must give us pause"? Or was it like the slumber of a baby, which "in the dim newness of its being feels / The impulses of sublunary things"? In Queen Mab Shelley called Death Sleep's brother, and described the quiescent body of Ianthe as though either Sleep or Death had embraced her, leaving her state indeterminate.

He believed in ghosts, or rather that he had seen them, and he regarded "all tyrannised notions of government, religion and God as clouds of phantoms, or bats, or Spenser's swarming flies, continually forming and fluttering around men's heads." In the spring of 1822, he saw what he believed to be the ghost of Allegra, the daughter of Byron and Claire Clairmont, a few weeks after she had died at the age of five. "She appeared to him as a naked child rising from the sea foam in the moonlight." And several times he encountered his Doppelgänger.

Water also provided a reflective surface, and as such "had an almost hypnotic attraction for him." The flower narcissus, named for the Greek who drowned admiring his image in the water, was also the garland for the Poet in Alastor.

Reflection was almost always more beautiful than life. Sunset on the Jura snowfields looked far lovelier to Shelley in the lake that lay below; at noon, "a more heavenly and serener light" than daylight was reflected from the "icy mirrors" of the mountain peaks.... The ripples of the surface current could not change this scene. It became for Shelley an image of timelessness and purity, the reverse of human life.

The quest for purity, for "unchanging perfect forms: Beauty, Justice, Truth, Equality," led him to the Greeks. "For him they were "those divine people who, in their very errors, are the mirrors, as it were, in which all that is delicate and graceful contemplates itself." He studied Greek statuary in this quest "for unity, harmony and simplicity, for light and life."

3. Being Shelley, by Ann Wroe, pp. 57-93

Part I: Earth, 2. Chains from "On the heights of Bisham Wood ... " to end; 3. Masks through "... Sick to death of the name of self / Killing / Self."

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Shelley was fascinated with the then-new science of geology, and filled his notes with drawings of geological formations, images of the antiquity of the Earth. As a student of the classics, "he mourned ... the disappearance of the Athenian democracy. He never saw Greece but observed, in 1818 in Pompeii, the ruins of what he stressed had been a Greek city." The geological record and the ruins of ancient civilizations reminded him that "Everything on the Earth became the Earth" and that "All kings became nothing," sentiments articulated in the sonnet "Ozymandias" which was "written in an hour or so in 1817."

In France in 1814 he came across a village devastated by the war that he denounced as "liberticide" that had been "unleashed against the French to reverse their revolution." As an Englishman he was upset when his own government "joined forces in 1815 with 'the seven bloodhounds' ... -- Austria, Bourbon France, Portugal, Prussia, Russia, Spain and Sweden -- to suppress reform in Europe and to preserve the slave trade." He believed that Earth itself "breathed and lived and cried out at injustice.... In Shelley's view, great traumas -- none greater than the French Revolution, descending to the Terror, then to Napoleon's imperium, then in 1815 to the Bourbon restoration -- had their birth in physical upheaval as much as in the minds of men." He did not see human progress as a steady forward movement: "Earthly existence meant continual frustration. Centuries and generations might pass while the cycles of human progress edged forward, then regressed, as they had done in France."

He was not a child of the French Revolution so much as of its awful aftermath, when the rule of the people had descended to an orgy of reprisals and blood. He was deeply disappointed by this "sanguine eagerness," but not surprised: men suddenly released from the slavery that had made them "brutal and torpid and ferocious" could not immediately be "liberal-minded" and "forbearing." He refused to despair, as so many did; the pessimistic weariness of the revolutionary generation, Wordsworth, Coleridge, South and the rest, angered and disgusted him. Shelley insisted on hope as a matter of principle. Yet it was qualified by the fear that the people, once given power, would take revenge, bringing more horrors.

"Hope" may have kept him going, but he also entertained thoughts of suicide, especially after those of Harriet and Fanny Godwin, Mary's half-sister, who killed herself in October 1816, age twenty-two. Fanny had taken an overdose of laudanum, a drug with which Shelley was familiar since his days at Eton and to which he became addicted. In 1818, he and Mary suffered the loss of their daughter, Clara, at eighteen months, from typhoid fever. William, three and a half, died from worms and malaria the next summer. "Mary was devastated by the deaths of her children. Shelley's far quicker recovery deepened the estrangement between them. Yet the horror, for him, was not death. True horror was to be condemned, like the Wandering Jew, to eternal earthly life, forever dragging that worthless body, never able to rest."

His poems are full of flowers, symbols of "beauty and mortality combined," and his friends took them as emblems of Shelley himself. "Hogg saw him as 'a climber, a creeper, an elegant, beautiful, odoriferous parasitical plan' that needed tying to a from stick, such as himself." Plants and flowers also provided him an image of sexual love: "Trees interlaced, tendrils wound about each other, petals opened to the touch of the sun and their perfume fled away." And for the destructive side of passion as well: "He pictured it in his poems as bitter-sweet nightshade, bright-berried but deadly, or poisonous white bryony garlanding a cave for erotic and tormented dreams." Though he admitted, in Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks, "delicately and offhandedly, to routine masturbation" and drew a detailed picture of his erect penis on a page on which he had made some calculations, he sometimes expressed a disgust with the mechanisms of sex. The madman who is one of his personae in Julian and Maddalo wishes "That, like some maniac monk, I had torn out / The nerves of manhood by their bleeding root / With mine own quivering fingers."

The flowers he singled out as his personal images were pansies and Mimosa pudica. The latter provided a symbol for himself in "The Sensitive Plant." It was "hermaphrodite, with male and female flowers sharing a stem and feathery leaves that folded at a shadow, or a touch. Shelley-like, it grew alone. It was almost constantly aroused, quivering with desire 'from the leaf to the root,' yet could never find love to match the love it felt." As for pansies, he wanted them on his grave, which was to have no tombstone with his name on it -- a name that he allowed to be printed on "only eight of his 14 poetical publications." He said of his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" that "it deserves a better fate than the being linked with so stigmatised & unpopular a name ... as mine." He also "obscured when poems were written" and even his letters were sent out under various names. Sometimes this was to prevent prosecution for blasphemy, but others, such as the ones he wrote to Claire Clairmont, were to avoid arousing Mary's suspicions. Some of them dealt with a baby, Elena Adelaide Shelley, whose mother may have been either Claire or the Shelleys' maid, Elise. He paid for Elena's care for the few months of her life.

He also had nicknames: "Byron called him Shiloh, after the seraph-man a crazed prophetess, Joanna Southcott, believed she would give birth to. Hunt and Peacock called him "the Conchoid," which was a shy, spiky creature that disappeared into its shell. At school he had been "Don Quixote" because of "his tendency ... to catapult himself into fights." And Emilia Viviani, when she heard his name was Percy, thought it was Persi, meaning "lost," which he liked.

Like the Poet in Alastor, he craved solitude, or at least a minimum of company. "Two women and himself, loosening the monopoly of 'the society of one' (no matter what the cost in jealousy and unhappiness) was his ideal all through his life." But he also abhorred selfishness.

Self-interest was the essence of the world he moved in. Shelley traced to it every child crying with hunger, every wasted labourer, the pollution of cities, the filthy opulence of monarchs, war and desolation.... Self-interest made men acquiesce in tyranny, bringing their evils wilfully upon themselves, enthroning both 'the oppression and the oppressor.'" 

On the other hand, self-esteem, gained through self-knowledge, was, along with Love and Hope, one of his three cardinal virtues. Empathy was also a virtue:

Shelley's own Poet's life put him deeply, or so it seemed, in the selves and the miseries of others. He ached with the aged, crippled woman gathering firewood to supplement parish charity; he throbbed with the pride of a freedom fighter, wrapped in his gore-soaked flag, dying on the field in Mexico.

But he also expected the same imaginative sympathy to be extended to himself: "If he extended his human sympathy to others he desperately and urgently wanted it returned, especially by the women with whom he had chosen to live." And he was as susceptible to egotism as anyone.

He was glad, he told a friend in 1821, that he had not known the details of Keats's death when he composed Adonais for him, or 'the enthusiasm of the imagination would have been overpowered by sentiment.' As it was, the dead poet, pale and beautiful as a 'broken lily,' tears trembling 'on the silken fringe of his faint eyes,' was also Shelley in death, heartbreakingly sentimentalized.

2. Being Shelley, by Ann Wroe, pp. 37-56

Part I: Earth, 2. Chains through "... The which I make & call it melody"

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Shelley's tour of the dungeons of the Castle of Chillon in 1816 reinforced a fascination with prisons as a manifestation of the restrictions placed on liberty. He regarded the schools he had attended as prisons, and had once been imprisoned himself, for debt, in 1817.

In his view slavery pervaded life, even the otiose and disgusting lives of emperors, priests and kings. He drew them on iron thrones, weighed under iron sceptres, heavily dragging their carcasses to east and shackled to the very systems they imposed on others. Under them, the people groaned.... If man was a slave, woman was his "bond-slave." Shelley saw young women downtrodden and dishonoured by convention -- models of his favourite heroine, Antigone, destroyed by her love and pity by the Theban laws -- while young men like himself were forced to visit prostitutes by "monkish" rules of chastity that spread disease and repair. 

Children, in Shelley's view, had it worst, "restrained by parental discipline, church, school, and worse" -- the horror of child labor. It led him in August 1811 to "rescue" Harriet Westbrook from the school she attended in Clapham. She was sixteen and he was nineteen, and he really didn't want to marry her -- "Matrimony revolted him" as another form of bondage. But he did so on August 29, 1811, in Edinburgh. He made his attempts to educate her, teaching her Latin and converting her to vegetarianism. "Yet her mind was in fetters of another kind, bound by propriety, seemliness and fashion as tightly as ribbons on a bonnet, and Shelley could neither change her nor, in the end, save her." Her older sister, Eliza, moved in with them in October, bringing "censoriousness and rectitude, scolding and 'nerves,' while endlessly brushing her long black hair." Shelley, the believer in free love, "was now confined, numb, tranquillised."

Their daughter, Ianthe, was born in 1813, and they renewed their vows in 1814, just in case the marriage in Scotland was judged illegal. But that summer he met Mary Godwin, who was sixteen and "imbued with the feminist free-thinking of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, who had died just after she was born." They had sex "in St Pancras churchyard, by her mother's grave," in June 1814 and a month later fled to Scotland, leaving Harriet, who was four months pregnant. He wrote Harriet preachy letters about how she had failed to follow the path to freedom he had shown her. "In curt postscripts, he asked her to send him 'hanks' and stockings and to lend him money." Harriet committed suicide in December 1816, and "he was forced by custom and the Godwins" to marry Mary on December 30.

Mary had "been a kindred soul" and had perhaps even slept with his friend Hogg with his encouragement, but she "became a fretting and domesticated wife," jealous of Claire Clairmont, her step-half-sister -- christened Jane -- who had joined them when they eloped. The high-strung Claire also got on Mary's nerves. Mary gave birth to William in 1816 and Clara in 1817, but the move to Italy in 1818 proved fatal to the children, both of whom died in the summer of 1819. That November a third child, Percy Florence, was born, but the Shelleys had fallen out of love with each other. "When he could he escaped with Claire, who would love him -- perhaps physically, perhaps not -- but would not, in any case, possess him.

In 1820, he became acquainted with Teresa Emilia Viviani, nineteen, who was boarding in a convent in Pisa while waiting to be married. Shelley saw her as another prisoner and wrote poems to her, but Emilia chose to get married once the contract was arranged and "to live contentedly and soberly with her 'clod of earth.'" Like so many others, however, Emilia asked him for money. "For most of his life Shelley had enough, either in anticipation or reality, to be 'the purse of his friends,' including [Leigh] Hunt, Thomas Love Peacock and Claire." His father-in-law, William Godwin, also "made it clear that it was Shelley's duty to bail him out.... By August 1819 he reckoned he had given Godwin £4,700, and had 'bought bitter knowledge' with it. That begging was to continue, and worsen, for the remaining three years of Shelley's life."

Shelley's father had cut off his allowance for a few months when he eloped with Harriet, so Shelley knew what it was like to need money. But it didn't teach him to handle it wisely. "His private income -- eventually settled as an annuity of £1,000 when, in 1815, his grandfather's death freed up his funds -- removed him fom the sordidness of earning a living." But when he had money he spent it or gave it away, and he borrowed at "such colossal rates of interest that by March 1822, four months before his death, he reckoned his debts might amount to £25,000."

His wanderings were expensive, too. "To tie him to any particular landscape, as Wordsworth was tethered to his lakes and fells, was hopeless.... [H]e moved incessantly." In 1811, when he left Oxford, he went to London, York, Edinburgh, Keswick and Dublin. Then to Wales, Devon, Wales again, Ireland again, London again, Berkeshire, London again, Bishopsgate and Marlow. He and Mary and Claire wandered in France and Germany in the summer of 1814; "in July 1816 he was with Mary, Claire and Byron in Switzerland; in March 1818 he left England for definitive exile in Italy. Yet there too he moved constantly, from Milan to Pisa, to Leghorn, to Bagni de Lucca, to Venice, to Rome (by 1819), to Naples, to Pisa, to Villa Magni at San Terenzo, near Lerici." Some of these moves seem to have been inspired by paranoia: "Many wanderings were blamed on government spies, creditors, his father's agents (his father, he was sure, ever seeking a pretext to imprison him), and men of vague but broad menace against him, some real, some imaginary."

And some of the restlessness came from a fear of being imprisoned by ties to a place.

If he were to settle anywhere he would sink into time, and the hours would close round him. Too dull and comfortable to struggle, he would not escape.... Time inhabited his poems as a figure wrapped in shroud-like wings, driving a chariot slowly forward. Shelley could neither push the chariot faster (though he sometimes longed to whip it till the wheels burned), nor get out of its way. Time weighed him down and tormented him. He longed to be suspended, unthinking and therefore unaware of the slow hours passing, in some spell of inspiration, or in the unknowable state that followed death.... If Shelley were to say, with Faust, to the passing moment, Verweile doch, du bist [so] schön! "Remain thou, thou art so beautiful!", he was consigning himself to death in life, as surely as if he were to live for ever within the same four walls. 

1. Being Shelley, by Ann Wroe, pp. ix-34

Introduction; Prelude: The Voyage Out; Part I: Earth, 1. Substance

_____

Ann Wroe says her book is "an experiment, ... an attempt to write the life of a poet from the inside out: that is, from the perspective of the creative spirit struggling to discover its true nature." She wants to "reconstruct the world of a poet into which earthly life keeps intruding," because she regrets that, in the twentieth century, so much attention was directed at Shelley's politics that "his spiritual force seems to have been largely forgotten." The narrative of the book is not chronological but instead tracks "the poet's quest for truth through the steadily rarefying elements of earth, water, air and fire." And if the book shifts the focus away from the life to the ideas, so be it. Shelley believed, "No revolution in the moral and social order could take place until he, and all men and women, knew themselves for what they were and could unlock the true power they possessed."

Wroe's "Prelude: the voyage out" is an impressionist series of vignettes in which the poet launches his words onto the sea in paper boats on which the ink begins to "blur and run." Each is "a shell of woven paper" moving "intrepidly and madly on the sea." "To the casual eye he was on shore, a tall, stooped young man with tangled hair and yet more boats in his pockets.... Yet in reality he was out on the huge sea adventuring, one of them." Inevitably the boats sink, foreshadowing the poet's own death: "His body would go on falling through the blue deep, softly, like paper. He had once told a small boy, watching with him, that this would be his favourite of all deaths."

Charles MacFarlane remembered his first encounter with Shelley in the Royal Bourbon Museum in Naples in February 1819. The stranger, who joined him in admiring a statue, had a "soft and strangely touching" voice and "was a gentleman of twenty-five or twenty-six, thin, with a delicate and negligent, even wild, appearance." Their conversation left MacFarlane with "fragments of deep thought, like leaves from a private notebook."

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born at Field Place, Horsham, Sussex, in 1792. His father was Timothy Shelley, a landowner who would become a baronet in 1815. Bysshe, as his family called him, was the oldest child, and would be joined by four sisters and, 14 years later, a brother. He attended Syon House Academy and Eton, but was expelled from Oxford after one term, in 1811, for writing, along with Thomas Jefferson Hogg, "a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism." In August he eloped with 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook, and after that marriage failed in 1814 with Mary Godwin, the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary's step-half-sister, Jane Clairmont, who would later be called Claire, went with them France and Germany and set up house with them after they returned to England. His father cut off ties with him, and in 1817, the Lord Chancellor "deprived him, on the double grounds of immorality and atheism, of the two infant children of his first marriage. He left England for Italy in March 1818.

Shelley told many stories about his childhood, but Hogg observed, "He was altogether incapable of rendering an account of any transaction whatsoever, according to the strict and precise truth, and the bare naked realities of actual life." Sometimes he thought of himself as a farmer, which is what he entered as his occupation on the register when he married Harriet. He was interested in agricultural chemistry and his poetic imagery often reflects his rural background. He inspected things so closely that people thought he was near-sighted, but "Shelley himself sometimes complained not of dim vision but the reverse."

One of his most treasured possessions, from boyhood onwards, was a solar microscope in a heavy mahogany box that projected, on a sheet or a wall, giant images of the animalculae that wriggled in vinegar, or the overlapping plates of a fly's wing, or the mites entombed in cheese.... He believed with Erasmus Darwin, whose books on science and Nature he also devoured as a schoolboy, that the minute worlds he saw suffered and felt as he did.... From his earliest years of scientific enquiry Shelley pictured Nature as one concurring whole, with an iron chain of Necessity binding the smallest to the mightiest.

Following the logic of Hume, he rejected the notion of "a designer and a cause," setting forth his ideas in The Necessity of Atheism. For him, "Unending mutability was the nature of existence.... Chance atoms came together: Shelley lived. He would die when by some stroke they dispersed again."

For all his ties to the land, "Earth was not his element, either in its substance or its society." He simply didn't like getting dirty: "At Eton he roared with pain when leather footballs, caked and soaked from the field, were kicked deliberately and hard against the boy who would not play games.... 'Filth' was almost the strongest word in his lexicon, a spasm of horror." But for all his finickiness, he was a fighter:

Contemporaries remembered ... a prankster and a brawler, a tall, slovenly looking boy (though also like 'a girl in Boy's clothes') who flailed around with his fists and was fearsomely violent when thwarted. Yet in his mind he was the quiet, trembling youth at the edge of the playing field.

At some point, he seems to have had an epiphany of sorts, a "sudden awakening, on one particular morning, to the shadow of the Spirit of Beauty in the world.... Several of his poems described the moment of conversion, but enclosed it in details too vague to pinpoint where or when it had occurred." In any case, it seems to have confirmed him in his radicalism.

His relationship with his parents was one manifestation of this radicalism. "He nursed no strong feelings for his mother, whom he thought mildly ineffectual and 'narrow-minded.' Towards his father he came to feel nothing but loathing and defiance." His father was shocked by everything he did, but especially when in April 1811, he decided "to give up the entail on his grandfather's estate, exchanging a secure landed inheritance for £200 yearly in cash." Even the annuity was cut off in August, when he eloped with Harriet Westbrook. For Shelley, his father symbolized tyranny. Shelley believed that his father, whom he referred to as "Old Buck" "had never loved him, but only the continuation of a name, property and status he represented, like a house or a field."

But though the break with his father left him destitute, Shelley never gave up his taste for luxury. At Oxford he "wore extraordinary clothes," and after he was expelled he boasted that he could live on £50 a year. But by 1817 he was in debt to the most fashionable upholsterers in Bath for £1,192 1s. 10d. He skipped out on the debt when he left for Italy. "For most of his life he kept horses and a carriage," but by 1819 he had decided that

It was the duty of the rich man to give and the right of the poor man to demand. On that principle, Shelley gave away his shoes (arriving at a neighbour's barefoot), his money, and Mary's clothes, continuing to hand out spontaneous charity until the last weeks of his life. On the same principle he took other men's books, and raided [Leigh] Hunt's wardrobe for waistcoats and handkerchiefs he might need himself. To take as well as give -- though sometimes blushing "not a little," Hunt said, in doing it -- was proper redistributive justice. 

But he also looked down on the poor: "most men, he was convinced, lived in a state of 'squalid ignorance, & moral imbecility' from which he foresaw no improvement." And he felt a contempt for the physical: "The link between political oppression, moral evil and physical degradation was all too obvious to him. The common folk of Dublin were 'one mass of animated filth,' the Austrian-occupied Italians 'stupid & shrivelled slaves.'" He thought that human corruption was the result not of "original sin" but of education, of "the 'wrong impressions' stamped on the young by nurses and parents and, if they grew older, by the barbarity of schools and systems of government."

Shelley himself was "tall, vigorous and strong-limbed.... In his notebooks he drew himself naked and muscle-bound, often with weapons in his hands." But the Poet thought of himself as frail and sickly, as susceptible to "'the contagion of the world's slow stain,' so easily fatal to poets, the sort of languors and vapours and excessive sensibilities that made young men throw themselves into chairs with their handkerchiefs pressed to their faces." He suffered from what may have been kidney stones and his hair had premature gray touches, "a syphilitic symptom that filled him with foreboding."


For a while he seemed to live on bread and milk and tea, but with occasional indulgences in gluttony. "From at least the age of nineteen, he was a practising vegetarian" and when he wanted to evoke a sense of horror "he described the eating of flesh, usually human, dwelling on its warm fibrous feel between his teeth and the rust or salt 'bitterness' of blood." He drank mostly water -- alcohol overstimulated him. "Yet his resolution wavered. He was found demolishing bacon ('Bring more bacon!') and feasting on veal chops, well peppered. Cold meat was discovered on his luncheon plate in Italy.... In general, however, the diet and the scruples were observed." Byron worried that if the Shelleys were to raise his daughter Allegra, "she would 'perish of Starvation, and green fruit.'"


He was thought to be mad by a lot of people, including sometimes himself. "This madness was always of the same kind: seeing what others could not see, yearning for what others could not fathom, not belonging." In Julian and Maddalo, "He was both the serious, idealistic Julian ... and a Maniac in a madhouse."

Each Shelley-character held a memory -- disturbed, but not eclipsed, even by stark grief -- of a blissful, momentary, controlling presence both within and beyond himself. This was what had made him mad.... Under its influence, Shelley had made his boyhood vow -- stumblingly, but devotedly -- to Truth, Beauty, Liberty and Love.... He did not know to whom, or what, he made this promise. For years he could not even try to name what it was that had so moved him. But his search for it became his history, and his life.