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.

4. Being Shelley, by Ann Wroe, pp. 93-117

Part I: Earth, 3. Masks from "In December 1812 Shelley addressed ... " through end. Part II: Water, 1. Immersion through "... no wish to keep his body floating."

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When Mary wrote Frankenstein, Shelley "found brotherhood with the gruesome monster Frankenstein had created, the would-be benefactor of mankind who was reviled and driven away." Although he regarded hatred as "tyrant behaviour," he was capable of proclaiming anathema on his enemies, including "Lord Eldon, the Chancellor who in 1817, citing Shelley's immorality, had removed his children by Harriet and placed them with sober church-going folk." He relished images of horror, and his nightmares included eyes that appeared in place of nipples on women's breasts. Hell "was a city much like London, 'a populous and a smoky city.'"

He grew fond of flaunting his atheism. "His furious, public break with Christianity came at seventeen, when the religious squeamishness of Harriet Grove's parents put an end to his 'engagement' to her.... In January 1811, back at Field Place from Oxford for the holidays, he tried to persuade his father that Christ had never existed, satisfactorily shocking him." But his pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism, which got him expelled from Oxford, was "a slim production politely and reasonably asking for better proofs of God's existence than had been provided so far." Not only was kicked out of the university for it, but his father barred him from returning to Field Place for fear that he would corrupt his sisters.

On a spare leaf of paper, around 1819, he began to sketch out what he meant by atheism. The Greek word atheos meant impious, and was a term of reproach. Yet he himself did not deny "whatever power, and mystery, and might may lie behind the universe." He simply disagreed that this great system of things was arranged by one intellectual being"; to rebuke him for that, or for impiety, was "insolence" and "intolerable." 

But he still signed visitors' books with "P.B. Shelley, Atheist, Democrat, Philanthropist," although he did so in Greek. Byron dubbed him "the Snake," and Shelley liked it so much he adapted it as one of his personae.

"Shelley sought water always. [Edward] Trelawny called it a mania with him, and Hogg attributed all his restlessness to the need to see streams and green banks, or hear waterfalls." Water became for him a symbol of "the mutable and eternal in constant tension." As he said of a waterfall near Spoleto, "The very imagination is bewildered in it." One of his favorite passages in Dante's Paradiso described a stream so pure that water on Earth would seem "turbid" in comparison. "Like Dante, he pursued clear running water as the distillation of wisdom, slaking a thirst that was spiritual as much as physical in the desert of the world."

More than a poet's interest bred Shelley's affinity with water. Scientifically its suppleness delighted him: its molecules spreading out, as old Dr Walker had described it in lectures at Eton, and its parts sliding smoothly over each other as its purity increased. Water marked the first escape from densest matter, slippery and quick and translucent.... "It is a faculty of the human mind," [Thomas] Paine said [in Rights of Man] -- in a phrase Shelley took and repeated and adopted -- "to become what it contemplates, and to act in unison with its object." In the ceaseless braiding and unfurling of mountain torrents Shelley was both the falling force, forever changing yet forever the same, and the bubbles that were battered and broken in the surf, constantly remade.

He liked to plunge his face into cold water several times a day, and at Villa Magni he spent much of his time in the sea, letting "the salt water dry on him, disdaining combs and towels." Once, when a dinner party was being held at the villa, "Shelley came in from a ducking, naked. Sea water trickled down his nose, and there was seaweed in his hair. He smelt of brine." A maid tried to screen him from the guests but "he drew himself up beside a lady's chair" and "launched his own defence, explaining loudly that he had to go to his room to fetch his clothes. Water running down him formed a puddle on the floor; the lady averted her eyes."

The madman who is one of his personae in Julian and Maddalo is also described as a sea-creature and a weeper of "dizzying, scalding tears." Shelly too could be found "wild with weeping," a state that he called "inexplicably pleasing." He "sometimes laughed until he cried. Water as delight, water as tears, tears as 'sweet medicine and relief' all swelled in Shelley's head.

And yet, fatally, "he could not swim." Trelawny tried to teach him, but Shelley sank to the bottom.

Not for the last time, Trelawny fished him out. He spluttered and jerked on the bank, where in the water he had been still, calm, as if asleep. Trelawny thought his spine was curved the wrong way; if he could only unbend it, and turn on his back as he rose to the air, he could swim perfectly well. He failed to bear in mind that Shelley might have no wish to keep his body floating.