Shelleys Tragedy

Few villages have had a sadder son than Warnham had in Shelley, one of the incredible figures in our literature.

Shelley's grandfather, Sir Bysshe Shelley, who died in 1815, was a wealthy and penurious baronet. The poet's father Timothy, through whom the poet became heir to the baronetcy, was common-place, crabbed, and incapable of understanding a son who was quite unlike his ancestors. Indeed the poet had from early boyhood, onward through early manhood, the misfortune to fail in meeting anyone who understood his spirit and aims.

His schoolfellows did not understand him and gave him a rough time because he would not care for their games and resented the tyranny of their customs. It was the same at Oxford. Shelley found himself in instinctive rebellion against the thought and the usages of the place, and he was more than a passive resister. He began a challenging attack against some of its most fundamental beliefs in religion and politics.

Cradled in a revolutionary age, he had one of the freest and most independent minds in the world and, with scarcely any experience of life to supplement his thinking, he set up to be a director of opinion. He wished, among other things, to abolish the idea of God as it existed in current theology, and addressed a statement of his views to the Heads of the Colleges.

This he did when he was a youth of 18. It seemed to be nobody's business to influence sympathetically this brilliant, widely read, seemingly impertinent but really simple and callow youth. What they did was to bundle him out of the University.

When Oxford expelled Shelley he had less than a dozen years to live, and he lived most of them in a state of visionary exaltation, marred by a want of commonsense in ordinary life. As a thinker and a poet he was constantly expanding and gaining power, but he was miserably harassed by his feckless surrenders to sentimental impulses.

He was possessed by aims which seemed to him most noble, and he made a sad botch of his own day-by-day life. Before he was 19 he made an unsuitable marriage, and did it because he was sorry for a young girl. Before he was 22 he ran away with Mary Godwin who was not yet 17, and when she was 19 he married her, his first wife having drowned herself in the Serpentine.

Mary Godwin made him an intellectual and most devoted wife, but the marriage subjected Shelley to incessant appeals for money by her father William Godwin, an adept in playing the part of the importunate beggar. Shelley himself depended on his own family for support and was kept short of money until his grandfather died and he became heir to the family estates.

All this worry, unhappiness, and tragedy arose from a youthful belief in an unbridled freedom. The last four years of Shelley's life were passed in Italy, the second part of it in frequent association with another poet exile, Byron. During these four years he wrote the poems that have given him immortal fame, and have left the world wondering what he would have written if he had lived.

His death was tragic. He was drowned off the Italian coast in his thirtieth year. He had sailed from Leghorn for Spezzia in a boat with a friend, Williams, and a young Italian sailor. The boat foundered in a sudden squall and all its occupants perished.

The poet's body was cast ashore ten days later, and was cremated by his friends, Trelawney, Byron, and Leigh Hunt, Trelawney afterwards interring the ashes in the Protestant cemetery at Rome. The heart, snatched from the flames, was preserved by Shelley's wife, and many years after was buried in the tomb of their son Sir Percy Shelley in St Peter's churchyard, Bournemouth.

In person Shelley was one of the most attractive of men. No one who knew him denied his charm. Byron said of him that he was the most gentle, the most amiable, and least worldly-minded man he had ever met. It was Shelley's misfortune that he began writing and living an independent life under impressions gained from books long before he had any knowledge of men either individually or in the mass.

His early writings, which were copious, are mostly imitative and almost negligible, but his development into an originality all his own was rapid, and he reached a stage when his writing had a proportion of pure poetry of ethereal quality unsurpassed.

Though his lyrics make an epoch in English literature he was never much read in his lifetime, but his fame has grown ever since until nothing he wrote after 1818 can be neglected. He and John Keats are the two English poets whose genius never reached consummation but suggested illimitable expansion.

 

See Also 'Shelley Letter's' & 'Edward Trelawny'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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