Only death. ‘I always go on until I am stopped,’ he once wrote, ‘and I am never stopped.’ Youth! It was not wasted on young Percy Bysshe Shelley. He lived his short life in an ecstasy of being and creating –
one and the same thing to Shelley. He was born on 4 August 1792 to Sir Timothy Shelley, MP for Horsham, Sussex, Whig aristocrat and a deeply religious man. He had high hopes for his brilliant and beautiful boy. Like many of his class he saw his son’s future as a chronicle of a life foretold. Shelley, however, intended to write his own. Sir Timothy had bred an immortal – never a comfortable position for a father. His son believed poetry to be ‘a fountain flowing with the waters of wisdom and delight’, ‘a sword of lightning, forever unsheathed’. He pursued the extreme not only in poetry and prose but also in his most emphatically unordinary life. If his father was abashed, so are we. The incandescence of his nature, his febrile sensitivity, the sometimes reckless intensity of his political and philosophical idealism, his fantastical dreams, his sublime intelligence – sharp as a blade – all astonish us and sometimes hint at the edge of madness. He began as he meant to go on.
In the nursery he was the thrilling brother of adoring sisters, whose chilblains he would eventually promise to cure by means of electrification. The family cat was perhaps a less willing victim. At Syon
House, his preparatory school, where he was mercilessly bullied, he ‘surprised’ his school friends when, with gunpowder, he blew off the lid of his desk. At Eton, where he was again bullied, ‘Mad’ Shelley’s
rages were themselves electrifying (though he gained respect as a published novelist with the violent, passionate Zastrozzi – fee £40). At Oxford he horrified everyone by writing ‘The Necessity of Atheism’,
its provocative conclusion: ‘Every reflecting mind must allow that there is no proof of the existence of a Deity. QED.’ He could perhaps have put it more subtly. He was sent down – atheism was dangerous,
treacherous, blasphemous and therefore possibly criminal. Sir Timothy, horrified and himself fearful of legal proceedings, sent his communications to his son through legal channels. A furious Shelley disinherited himself by surrendering his claim on the family estate, Field Place, for an annuity of £2000, thus wounding himself and his father.
He found consolation with the Westbrook family, well-off coffee merchants. The daughters of the house, Eliza and Harriet, were enchanting and, after consideration of each, he ran away with Harriet, aged sixteen. They married and had two children, Ianthe and Eliza. Shelley seemed initially happy with Harriet: ‘Love seems inclined to stay in the prison.’ Alas, it would escape. For Shelley fell madly in love with another, the phrase, in this case, forensically accurate. Mary Godwin was the brilliant, beautiful daughter of philosopher William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, who had died shortly after her daughter’s birth. Distraught by the possibility their love might be thwarted Shelley held out laudanum to the ashen-faced Mary. ‘They wish to separate us, my beloved; but Death shall unite us.’ Happily for us Mary resisted the laudanum and thus left us her strange masterpiece Frankenstein. She did not, however, resist Shelley. What sixteen-year-old could? She left home, as had Harriet. She didn’t leave alone; fathers Beware! In case the couple might get lonely Shelley took her fifteen-year-old half-sister, Jane, with them. She, finding the name less than alluring, changed it to Claire – allurement being the raison d’être of Claire Clairmont. (She would practise it ruthlessly on Lord Byron, succeed briefly and be equally ruthlessly rejected. She would also become pregnant from her ten minutes of ‘happy passion’ with Lord Byron.) William Godwin was, understandably, initially enraged. It is one thing to believe in free love, another matter altogether to have it practised on one’s daughter. He soothed himself eventually. Aristocratic connections have a charm all their own. Free love came, as it always does, at a high price. Shelley was no lust-filled predator. He loathed grossness of any kind. However, his high romanticism about sexual love made him more dangerous and indeed more cruel than Byron – with whom you at least knew what you were getting. Consumed by his obsession with Mary, Shelley endeavoured to persuade Harriet, whom he did not wish to divorce (though their marriage was, as he cruelly explained to her, not one of passion), of the philosophical and moral rightness of his true passion for Mary. He failed, and in 1816 Harriet drowned herself. The heartbroken Westbrook family applied for custody of the children, as did Shelley. They both lost, and the children were fostered. The tragedy cast a long shadow. Few were well disposed to a declared atheist whose young wife and mother of his children had committed suicide, her heart broken by cruel infidelity. The reviews in 1818 of his long poem The Revolt of Islam, inspired by the French Revolution, were savage. Previously titled ‘Laon and Cythna’, it had been suppressed due to its perceived theme of incest. Though he declared in the preface, ‘I have written fearlessly . . . I believe that Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton wrote with an utter disregard of anonymous censure’, he was aware that his future in England, like his past, was bleak. In a sense he allowed himself to be hounded out of England, although not before writing one of the greatest lyrics in the language, ‘Ozymandias’, king of kings: ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ The five years remaining to him were years of exile in Italy and of unbearable tragedy. His daughter with Mary, Clara, died in 1818 aged one; the following year his son William, aged three, died. He wrote on in virtual literary obscurity, with much of his work being published posthumously. In his last years he bequeathed us ‘Julian and Maddalo’, a precursor to Browning’s dramatic monologues; the great metaphysical poem, ‘The Cloud’ (‘I change, but I cannot die’); The Mask of Anarchy (‘I met Murder on the way – / He had a mask like Castlereagh’); odes ‘To the West Wind’ (‘tameless, and swift, and proud’), ‘To a Skylark’ (‘Our sweetest songs are those that / tell of saddest thought’); ‘Adonais’, his passionate defence of Keats; and ‘Epipsychidion’; the plays The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound (a sacred text to Yeats); and ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in which poets are declared to be ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’.
He was in the midst of writing The Triumph of Life when his own ended. He drowned on 8 July 1822, aged twenty-nine, in a storm in the Bay of Lerici, having refused an offer of assistance from another boat. He’d designed his own, the Don Juan in honour of Byron. It had a built-in fault. When his body was recovered (a copy of Keats’s ‘Hyperion’ in his pocket) he was cremated on the sands. His heart wouldn’t burn. And that’s the essence of Shelley. His heart was indestructible. Cor Cordium, heart of hearts, reads his gravestone. Probably literature’s most truthful epitaph.