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     Anyone familiar with the poetry and prose of Percy Bysshe Shelley must realise he was far from being “the beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain”, as characterised by Matthew Arnold in the latter’s Essays in Criticism, Series Two.

     The passionate language and surging rhythms of the poems are generated by, and also generate, powerful energy, sweeping reader or listener along on soaring cadences. They are the rhythms of Nature, with which Shelley identified himself. He became ‘The Cloud’, ‘The West Wind’, ‘Prometheus’, even ‘Beatrice Cenci’, with all the intensity of a rebellious, iconoclastic spirit.

     As a quick-tempered, easily-angered child, he gave almost as good as he got to his impatient father, Sir Timothy, Squire of Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, where Shelley was born in 1792. The partly Tudor, partly Georgian country house stands in a spacious, pastoral park, off a country road, near the village of Warnham.

     Shelley was at least as much of a rebel as many of today’s young people and hit out against parental, scholastic and establishment rules. At Eton, he refused to participate in ‘fagging’; and for his odd, anti-social behaviour, he was called ‘Mad Shelley’. At Oxford he wrote a provocative pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism, which he refused to retract. He and his co-author, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, were sent down, much to the mounting fury of Sir Timothy.

     Shelley also had a sort of ‘knight-errant complex’ that got him into difficulties several times during his short life. Soon after leaving Oxford, he set about ‘rescuing’ 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook from a school where she complained of being forced to stay by her tyrannical publican father. The youngsters fled to Scotland and went through the marriage ceremony. So charming and appealing were they that the good burghers of Edinburgh provided a wedding feast, and an inn-keeper gave them a room. Someone always seemed to come forward when Shelley needed help, or money, or both. In return, on the death of his grandfather, when he came into a sizeable fortune, he was the most generous of men, handing out money without question, whether to his demanding second father-in-law, William Godwin, to whose philosophic and republican spell Shelley succumbed; or to radical journalist, Leigh Hunt, whose family Shelley supported for years, leaving, at his death, the burden to a not-so-willing Lord Byron.

     The poet was quick-tempered, quixotic, generous, rebellious and idealistic: a conflicting combination that, blended with genius, resulted in a unique and compelling personality.

     “I go on until I am stopped”, he told his friend, Edward Trelawny, “and I am never stopped”. Among his paradoxical qualities, he had also the noble one of humility, and gave full marks to those he admired, such as Byron, Keats and Leigh Hunt. The story of the Shelley-Byron association is that of one of the greatest friendships in the history of literature.

     Byron dominated, and for him Shelley performed many services, especially those connected with the ill-fated and lovely Allegra, child of Byron’s affair with Claire Claremont, Shelley’s sister-in-law.

     An appealing vignette of Shelley’s affection for this child, who died at five and a half, appears in Shelley’s poem, Julian and Maddalo, an account of his relationship with Byron:

Ere Maddalo arose, I called on him,
And whilst I waited, with his child I played;
A lovelier toy sweet nature never made,
A serious, sub tie, wild, yet gentle being,
Graceful without design and unforseeing,
With eyes — Oh, speak not of her eyes which seem
Twin mirrors of Italian Heaven, yet gleam
With such deep meaning as we never see
But in the human countenance: with me
She was a special favourite, I had nursed
Her fine and feeble limbs when she came first
Into this bleak world; and she seemed to know
On second sight her antient playfellow,
Less changed than she was by six months or so;
For after her first shyness was worn out
We sat there, rolling billiard balls about
When the Count entered . . . . .”        

     This poem, in which Byron is portrayed as Count Maddalo and Shelley as Julian, is one of Shelley’s most human. It reveals the seminal nature of the friendship that interacted so productively: calling Byron’s attention more keenly to aspects of inanimate nature; Shelley’s to human nature.

     The two met in Switzerland, May 1816, after Shelley and Harriet had separated; and he was eloping with Godwin’s beautiful blonde bluestocking daughter, 16-year-old Mary. At the same time, Byron was shaking the matrimonial dust from his feet. The poets provided further gossip for the horrified relish of English visitors to Switzerland, who viewed and pursued the poets’ interesting activities with the fascination and self-righteousness that Byron reviled as ‘Cant’. It is amusing to note that in several Swiss hotel registers, Shelley inscribed, after his name, in Greek, the words “Democrat, Philanthropist and Atheist”.

     At one hotel, the words were scratched out later by Lord Byron’s friend, John Cam Hobhouse; but one of these inscriptions was discovered by Robert Southey, who noted it down, for future use.

     From the sojourn in Switzerland in the spring and summer of 1816, dates some of the best work of both poets: Mont Blanc by Shelley; The Prisoner of Chillon and Manfred by Byron. But it is revealing to turn back and consider Shelley’s work before 1816.

     Among early poems in The Esdaile Notebook, a manuscript collection Shelley gave to Harriet, we find, among love and nature lyrics, a number of revolutionary poems, burning with his hatred of tyranny and false authority, and the desire to overthrow, or change, existing institutions. Falsehood and Vice begins:

“Whilst Monarchs laughed upon their thrones
To hear a famished nation’s groans,
And hugged the wealth wrung from the woe . . . . .”

     Another bears an immensely long title that begins: To the Emperors of Russia and Austria who eyed the Battle of Austerlitz . . . . .

“Coward Chiefs! who, while the fight
Rages in the plain below,
Hide the shame of your affright
On yon distant mountain’s brow,
Does one human feeling creep
Thro’ your hearts’ remorseless sleep . . . . .”

Together with Blake, Byron and others, Shelley hated cities:

On Leaving London for Wales

“Thou miserable city! where the gloam
Of penury mingles with the tyrant’s pride . . . . .
May floods and vales and mountains me divide
From all the taints thy wretched walls contain . . . . .”

Later, in Peter Bell, The Third, he was to write:

“Hell is a city much like London!”

     We can compare Byron’s stanzas on the waste and futility of war, in Canto Three of Childe Harold, and in Don Juan, Cantos VII and VIII. In the last stanza of To Liberty, Shelley writes:

“The pyramids shall fall . . . . .
And Monarchs! so shall ye!
Thrones shall rust in the hall
Of forgotten royalty, . . . . .”

A few years later, Byron wrote,

“The King-times are finishing”

and

              ‘God save the king!’
and kings!
For if he don’t I doubt if men will longer -”

     Poets often have the gift of prophecy!

     In the many poems written before 1815, Shelley displays fanatical revolutionary tendencies. He and Harriet even went to Ireland with the intention of converting the Irish to Atheism, among other things!

     Shelley was a thorn in the flesh of the establishment; although he never managed to get himself jailed, as did Leigh Hunt. On honeymoon with Harriet, at Lynmouth, Shelley was closely watched by Home Office officials, as he was seen launching into the Bristol Channel bottles containing suspicious documents, during that dangerous and insecure summer of 1812, when England was at war with the U.S. and had also to deal with Napoleon:

SONNET (on launching some bottles filled with
knowledge into the Bristol Channel)

Vessels of Heavenly medicine! may the breeze,
Auspicious, waft your dark green forms to shore;
Safe may ye stern the wide surrounding roar
Of the wild whirlwinds and the raging seas . . . . .

     Shelley was a vegetarian and anti-alcoholic; and among his prose writings is an essay on A Vindication of Natural Diet:

I believe that abstinence from animal food and spirituous liquors would in a great measure capacitate us for taking the benefits and rejecting the evils of our system, etc. The structure of the human frame is that of one fitted to a pure vegetable diet, in every essential particular. Young children evidently prefer pastry, oranges, apples and other fruit to the flesh of animals; until by the gradual depravation of the digestive organs, the free use of vegetables has for a time produced serious inconveniences; for a time, I say, since there never was an instance wherein a change from spirituous liquors and animal food, to vegetable and pure water, has failed ultimately to invigorate the body, by rendering its juices bland and constaneous, and to restore to the mind that cheerfulness and elasticity which not one in fifty possess on the present system. The advantage of a reform in diet is obviously greater than of any other.

     He appends an impressive list of persons who reached remarkable longevity by keeping to vegetables and pure water: Old Parr, who lived to age 152, Mary Patten, to 136, St. Anthony, to 105, etc. etc.

     Shelley was a wandering, restless soul, impracticable to a high degree, leaving poor young Mary to cope with such ‘trivial’ details as selling a house, moving, travelling with young and ailing children. His intensity was sometimes unbearable to himself as well as shocking to his friends, whom he could terrify with his shrill voice and laugh, and his sybilline gaze.

     There is the famous story of Shelley rushing shrieking from the room after Byron had recited some lines from Coleridge’s poem about a witch, Christabel. Shelley had had some hallucinatory surrealistic vision. Said Byron afterwards, “I can’t tell what seized him, for he don’t want courage”.

     Courage he had in plenty, enthusiasm and profound idealism; and though he left behind a smoking trail of scandal, it was not powerful enough to exclude him from Poets’ Corner, which did not admit Byron until 1969.

     Shelley’s letters, while not as eloquent or immediate as those of Byron, reveal ardour and acute observation in splendid passages of description:

To Thomas Love Peacock, from Naples, December 1818

The English burying-place is a green slope near the walls, under the pyramidal tomb of Cestius, and is, I think, the most beautiful and solemn cemetery I ever beheld. To see the sun shining on its bright grass, fresh, when we first visited it, with the autumnal dews, and hear the whispering of the wind among the leaves of the trees which have overgrown the tomb of Cestius, and the soil which is stirring in the sun-warm earth, and to mark the tombs, mostly of women and young people who were buried there, one might, if one were to die, desire the sleep they seem to sleep’s.

     Inspired and influenced by the changing moods and aspects of water, Shelley met a Greek tragedy death while sailing in his frail yacht, “The Don Juan”, when he and his family were spending the summer of 1822 at the Casa Magni at S. Terenzo on the Bay of Lerici. Death came in a storm that July day, and the boat was never seen again. But the bodies of the poet and his sailing companion, Captain Edward Williams, were cast up on the desolate shore, near Viareggio, where they were later cremated with poetic, pagan rites, by Byron, Trelawny and Leigh Hunt; while Mary and Jane endured their anguish at home.

     Shelley’s ashes were interred in the English Cemetery, near the walls of Rome. His heart that refused to burn was snatched from the flames by Trelawny.

     Shelley’s noblest poems celebrate the regeneration of the world by Platonic Love: Prometheus Unbound; faith in immortality of the spirit: Adonais; longing for the ideal soul-mate,: Epipsychidion. There are many exquisite, melancholy lyrics, such as “Immutability”; “O, World, O, Life, O, Time”; Ozymandias”; “The Painted Veil”, etc. He adored the poetry and art of Greece, and wrote a verse-drama, Hellas, that celebrated that country’s struggle for freedom that began in 1821.

     The final chorus of Hellas ends with this stirring invocation:

O cease! must hate and death return?
Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn
Of bitter prophecy.
The world is weary of the past,
O, might it die or rest at last!

     According to Jane Williams, with whom he was half in love, Shelley had a ‘death-wish’. Perhaps this compulsion urged him to go out on his beloved, unpredictable sea, heedless of storm warnings, perhaps uncertain of his poetic vocation and unaware that his ringing declamation:

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”

would gather power since that day he found or sought death at sea, one hundred and fifty years ago, on the 8th of July 1822.