Expats, Exiles, and the Tragic Death of Percy Bysshe Shelley
On this day one hundred and ninety-nine years ago, Shelley was cremated on a desolate Italian beach in front of a single witness.
There is a boneyard in Rome, a place the locals call the “English cemetery,” where the ashes of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley are buried. His actual cremation had taken place almost two hundred years before, on the lonely beaches of Liguria not far from where his boat, the Ariel, capsized during a violent storm. Waves as tall as buildings had pounded down on the Ariel, snapped its masts, and drowned the three men onboard: Shelley himself, not yet thirty years old, his friend Edward Williams, whose wife Shelley coveted, and an eighteen-year-old cabin boy named Charles Vivian.
None was an experienced seaman, and it was rumored that at one point, an Italian fisherman had drawn up beside the Ariel and shouted through a speaking tube, “If you will not come onboard, for God’s sake, reef your sails, or you are lost.” But when Williams moved to lower the topmast sails, according to legend, Shelley seized him by the arm in anger and forbade it.
I can easily imagine Shelley doing such a thing. He must have thrilled to the power of the storm, and was just young enough, reckless enough, and selfish enough to want to see if he could outrun it. With three-and-a-half tons of pig iron in the hull to prevent the ship from capsizing, he likely felt invincible.
But the Ariel was not seaworthy. A friend named Edward Trelawny, an inveterate liar who had greatly exaggerated his expertise on such matters, had helped design the ill-fated ship. Returning from a week-long visit to fellow expatriates Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron, Shelley had been in high spirits, almost giddy. What was a storm to a young man who had already conquered so many obstacles?
On July 8, 1822, Shelley’s badly decomposed body washed ashore on the beach, a mile or more north of Viareggio. Trelawny knew it was him because of the book of John Keats’ poems tucked into the pocket of Shelley’s favorite nankeen trousers. His young widow, Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, had begged her husband not to go. She’d had premonitions of disaster, and now found herself sadly justified in those sentiments.
Despite having known Shelley a scant six months, Trelawny took point on his cremation and burial. Even back then, Italian bureaucracy was a nightmare. The local authorities wrangled with him for weeks before allowing a funeral pyre to be built upon the shoes of the Ligurian Sea. With his usual flair for theatrics, Trelawny told Mary that he’d salvaged Shelley’s heart, an unlikely event given the intense heat of the conflagration, which he then gave to her.
Overcome by the odor, Leigh Hunt remained in the carriage. Overcome by … well, whatever has the power to overcome a brilliant narcissist, Lord Byron scurried away, back to his home in Livorno. The last one to stand guard over Shelley’s cremation was Trelawny, the man whose need for approval caused him to build the un-seaworthy vessel that killed his friend. He stood on that beach amid the stench of burning flesh and the showering sparks, the sea winds lifting his long hair, until the final ember died. Then he packed up Shelley’s ashes and dispatched them to the English cemetery in Rome.
Originally, the idea had been to bury Shelley next to his young son, William, who had also been interred there. But Trelawny couldn’t help himself. His need for redemption, his lust to be fame-adjacent, was too much. Instead of reuniting father and son, Trelawny commissioned a ledger to be laid flat on the ground, well away from William’s modest little grave. Next to it, Trelawny made a ledger for himself. under which, at the venerable age of eighty-eight, he was finally committed. On it was written: “These are two friends whose lives were undivided … for their two hearts in life were single hearted.”
If, in reading these words, you sense a surprising amount of judgment from me, you would not be wrong. I empathize with Mary Shelley, and am horrified by the number of women whose lives, including hers, were ruined by their association with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron. I love their work, but cast a gimlet eye upon the havoc they wreaked with their selfish disregard for the feelings of others. Shelley’s first wife, whom he left destitute and with children, eventually drowned herself. Byron’s neglect of his daughter, Allegra, led to her death at age five.
Had he been a more responsible and circumspect man, Shelley would certainly not have been so fascinating, but when reading his poetry, I often have to remind myself not to mistake the talent for the man.
The Shelleys, the Williamses, the Hunts, and Lord Byron were all exiles from their native England. They were the original expats. The elopement of Mary and Shelley was a scandal of epic proportion, forcing them to find refuge on foreign shores. Edward Williams and his inamorata, Jane, faced censure for the same reason: they weren’t married, and they were cohabitating. My boyfriend John and I are unmarried and cohabitating. These days, no one even gives it a second thought.
Anyone who bemoans the lack of progress made on women’s rights might well consider the plight of women from two-hundred years ago. A female who deviated from society’s norms was hunted for sport. She was shamed, driven into exile, and her children made to carry the stigma of their bastardy. This is not to say that true equity has been achieved in 2021. Far from it. Just that progress is always two steps forward, one step back. If you take a bird’s eye view of racial and women’s equality, you will see that its history is one of advances and setbacks, yes, but the wheels of justice do eventually lurch forward.
None of that came soon enough to save Mary. At age twenty-five, she returned to England eight years after she left it, broken in spirit, but determined to burnish her husband’s legacy. Through mostly Mary’s efforts, Shelley’s status as one of the greatest of the Romantic poets was firmly established.
Remembering the vagabond Romantics forces me to consider the expats of today. Not the desperate immigrants whose broken homelands drive them to risk their lives by sailing to Italy on crowded boats. I’m talking about people, like me, who have the privilege of choice. Why do we come to Italy? What do we hope to find here? In what way does Italy ultimately change us?
In Mary Shelley’s case, she remained haunted her entire life by Shelley’s death and their eight years together in Italy. Before her husband’s body had washed ashore, Mary kept a tense, terrifying vigil for any sign of him. How cruel and ironic the laughter of local villagers must have sounded to her ears. They were throwing a raucous, drunken celebration during that period. “They pass the whole night in dancing on the sands close to our door,” she wrote, “running into the sea, and then back again, and screaming all the time in one perpetual air.” And yet years later, accompanied by her only surviving child, Mary visited Italy once again, drawn there, proving, I suspect, that once Italy gets into your blood, it never leaves.
I can only speak for myself when I say that expats are different. The sensation of being nowhere and everywhere at once is itself addictive, ergo the wanderlust. After seven years away from my native country, home is no longer elsewhere; it is here, in the messy, complicated, boundless abyss of myself.
Do you have a favorite poet? If so, I’d love to hear about it in the comments section below.
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Favorite Poet: Wislawa Szymborska
Second Fave: Czeslaw Milosz
This despite the fact that I can't spell either of their names (had to look both up & then copy and paste.)
I struggle to respect any person who does not respect the sea. The kind of pathological ego that imagines itself capable of dominating even the littlest ocean by sheer force of will alone simply beggars the imagination.