And, couched on stolen hay in those green harbours
Farmers called gaps, and we schoolboys called arbours,
Would feast till eight.’
With a bottle in one hand,
As if his very soul were at a stand,
Lionel stood — when Melchior brought him steady: —
‘Sit at the helm — fasten this sheet — all ready.’ . . . 112
It was not very good verse, but it caught the flavour of those late spring days very well. The picture of Shelley — Lionel — suspended in sudden remembrance of his days at Eton with a bottle of tea in one hand and the boat rocking perilously underfoot while Williams shouts at him to sit down at the tiller has an authentic flavour.
Shelley wrote to Claire, ‘The Baths, I think do me good, but especially solitude, & not seeing polite human faces, & hearing voices. I go about twice a week to see Emilia . . . . The William’s come sometimes: they have taken Pugnano. W. I like & I have got reconciled to Jane. — Mr Taaffe rides, writes, invites, complains, bows & apologises; he would be a mortal bore if he came often. The Greek Prince comes sometimes, & I reproach my own savage disposition that so agreable accomplished and amiable person is not more agreeable to me.’113 Most of the sociable dining took place under the Williams’s roof at Pugnano, where Mavrocordato appeared in full war dress — much to Mary’s admiration — on 16 May. She wrote briskly to the Gisbornes of the Patriarch and Greek bishops decapitated in Constantinople, which was more than outweighed by the success of Ypsilanti’s army of liberation who ‘cut to pieces the forces sent against them’.114
San Giuliano remained for the most part a retreat from visitors, and when entirely alone, Shelley and Mary seemed to have found a rare peace together. Sometimes Mary could be persuaded to make the trips to Pugnano in the skiff, and she afterwards remembered the slow, rustling journeys through reeds and under the blossoming boughs that hung down into the water, as a magic interlude of serenity. ‘By day, multitudes of ephemera darted to and fro on the surface; at night, the fireflies came out among the shrubs on the banks; the cicale at noon-day kept up their hum; the aziola cooed in the quiet evening.’115 Sometimes, in the early evening, they would sit at the open windows of the house and Shelley would dream out loud of ‘taking a farm situated on the height of one of the near hills, surrounded by chestnut and pine woods, and overlooking a wide extent of country; or settling still farther in the maritime Apennines, at Massa’.116 The sounds from the canal and the trees drifted across to them in the twilight, and they sat in silence listening.
‘Do you not hear the Aziola cry?
Methinks she must be nigh,’
Said Mary, as we sate
In dusk, ere stars were lit, or candles brought;
And I, who thought
This Aziola was some tedious woman,
Asked, ‘Who is Aziola?’ How elate
I felt to know that it was nothing human,
No mockery of myself to fear or hate:
And Mary saw my soul,
And laughed, and said ‘Disquiet yourself not;
’Tis nothing but a little downy owl.’
Sad Aziola! many an eventide
Thy music I had heard
By wood and stream, meadow and mountain-side,
And fields and marshes wide, —
Such as nor voice, nor lute, nor wind, nor bird,
The soul ever stirred;
Unlike and far sweeter than them all.
Sad Aziola! from that moment I
Loved thee and thy sad cry.117
[1] The sinister mace-like stone tower which stands isolated at the north-western gate of Pisa is not now identified as the historical Torre della Fame, which has been located as the squat municipal prison in Piazza dei Cavalieri.
[2] Friedrich Anton Mesmer was born in Austria in 1733 and died in Switzerland in 1815. His magnetic experiments led to his ejection from Vienna by the police, and his later denunciation by an official investigating committee in Paris in 1785. Nevertheless he contributed an original theme to nineteenth-century gothic fiction, and must be regarded as the occult forefather of modern therapeutic hypnotism and psycho-analysis. ‘Lithotomy’ — an eighteenth-century word meaning the art of cutting out stones from the bladder. In Shelley’s time it was still an agonizing and dangerous operation, depending for success entirely on the doctor’s skill with a surgical knife, and for anaesthesia on the patient’s own powers of endurance. Shelley dreaded having to submit to this operation, and there is some evidence that he contemplated suicide as a better alternative.
[3] But not, as Shelley makes out in his Advertisement, from the Vita Nuova. The actual sources are the first canzone of the Convivio; for the free love passage, Purgatorio, Canto XV, where Dante questions Virgil on the nature of divine love; and for the vision of Emilia as an ‘incarnation of the Sun’ — the central image of the whole poem — Purgatorio Canto XXVIII. The full moral and social implications of Shelley’s mature philosophy of free love filtered gradually down through two generations of Victorian readers, and began to emerge clearly in such texts as John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869), and Edward Carpenter’s Love’s Coming-of-Age (1896).
[4] The comet image, like most of Shelley’s best, had been long germinating. It is the same comet — no doubt a pure anticipated cognition — that Shelley first saw in 1811 at Edinburgh; first described in the ‘dark-red night’ of the revolutionary poem ‘Zeinab and Kathema’ also of 1811. It flashes through Prometheus in the lovely line of Act III, scene 3, ‘And long blue meteors cleansing the dull night’. The MS Notebook, Bod. MS Shelley Adds. e. 9, which contains the draft of the comet passage (p. 196 rev.) also has a dramatic ink drawing of a comet drawn diagonally across the whole of p. 317.
[5] Which may be rendered, in the Hogg manner, as
From our grey worlds of commonplace
Your skills attract bright forms of grace
Horace, Ars Poetica, 1. 243
[6] Horace Smith made permanent arrangements for Shelley’s quarterly payment of £220 to be remitted regularly to the Poste Restante Pisa under personal supervision, while Sir Timothy agreed to pay the £30 quarter due to Hume straight from his own account. This in effect put Sir Timothy in the position of direct financial trustee for Charles and Ianthe, and it was later to bring out his grandfatherly tendencies, especially towards Charles.
Illustrations: Section III
27. The Albergo Tre Donzelle where the Shelleys stayed when they first came to Pisa
28. The view of the Arno from Shelley’s apartments at Pisa in 1821; the white façade of the Palazzo Lanfranchi is diagonally across the river with its private landing steps
29. Sleeping Hermaphrodite, Roma
30. A page of Shelley’s manuscript of stanzas 47–8 of ‘The Witch of Atlas’
31. Detail of a sketch of Shelley made by Edward Williams in November 1821
32. Jane Williams, by George Clint
33. Shelley’s sketches on inside cover of Italian notebook 1821–22
34 left Mary in 1841, nineteen years after Shelley’s death
35. Faust and Mephistopheles ascend the Brocken on Valpurgisnacht. Engraving by Friedrich August Moritz Retzsch, 1820
36. Casa Magni, Lerici from a photograph taken in the 1880s
37. Manuscript sketch of the Don Juan and the Bolivar, by Edward Williams
38. Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1819 by Aemilia Curran. This portrait was finished retrospectively in 1822 or 1823
39. Bust of Shelley by Marianne Leigh-Hunt. Reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College.
27. The Colony: 1821
The peaceful solitude of summer 1821 at San Giuliano was never long without interruption. Once, Shelley had a bad attack of his nephritic spasms, and returned to Pisa to consult Vaccà; but the illness passed. Then Claire wrote from Florence, after days of ‘bad spirits’ and nights of unhappy dreams. She was obsessed with the idea that Allegra would catch some fatal disease in the unhealt
hy atmosphere of a nunnery, and she felt the moment for decisive action could be put off no longer. Shelley was as ever deeply sympathetic, and it was Shelley’s sympathy and perhaps a personal visit of reassurance to Florence that Claire most wanted.
But Claire’s sudden outburst was particularly awkward. Taking up Byron’s postscript about the solo run to Ravenna, Shelley had recently written back, extending his own and Mary’s invitation to the Bagni, where all would be discreet and solitary, and Claire would not be in evidence. Apart from his personal desire to extend the friendship with Byron, he had at the back of his mind the possibility of softening Byron’s attitude to Allegra, simply by the process of confirming their old friendship of the Venice days of 1818. Byron had been easy enough then. Shelley wanted Byron to understand the new independence of Claire’s life in Florence. ‘I hope that she will be cured of the exaggerated ideas from which such conduct arises in the society with which she has now become conversant. Our solitary mode of life, and my abstract manner of thinking, were very unfit for her; and have probably been the sources of all her errors. It is well, therefore, that I should intercede for her forgiveness.’1 But now this promising new line of diplomacy was in danger of being put in jeopardy by Claire’s eternal anxiety for a decisive confrontation.
Shelley wrote to her about the idea of setting up a school under Mrs Mason’s protection, suggesting that this was an altogether more constructive and plausible project than an immediate attempt to force the issue with Byron. If she showed independence and calm, she might yet recover Allegra on her own terms. He sensed that she could be cajoled out of her sudden mood perhaps more effectively than she could be argued out. ‘You say that I may not have a conversation with you because you may depart in a hurry Heaven knows where — Except it be to the other world, (& I know the coachman of that road will not let the passengers wait a minute) I know of no mortal business that requires such post haste.’2 This letter did the trick, and for the time being Claire went back to her German studies. Now that she was living apart from Shelley, the subject of Allegra was one which Claire could and did use as a method of bringing pressure to bear on him, of demanding his attention and ultimately of demanding his personal presence. It was to that extent a weapon that she could also use against Mary. This is not to say that Claire’s real concern for her child had diminished, but rather that it had gained a new motive and dimension. Byron had always feared that unless he possessed Allegra and was completely responsible for her, Claire would contrive to use the child as a lever into his affections. Now ironically it was Shelley who was vulnerable to such a measure. From this moment on, he was drawn into a position of self-contradiction with regard to Allegra’s presence at the convent of Bagnacavallo: writing to Byron that his conduct was honourable and justified, while writing to Claire that Byron’s conduct was ruthless and cruel. But for the moment the end of May brought a temporary peace in that quarter.
On the last day of May, Shelley took off with Williams, this time for a two days’ expedition to Brentina. The quiet, broken only by the dinners at Pugnano, and the twice-weekly expeditions into Pisa, encouraged Mary to return to her novel Valperga. It promised to develop at considerable length, and by the end of June she found she was at the seventy-first manuscript page of her third volume.3 Spasmodic visits from Taaffe, who brought absurd offerings of guinea pigs and bad verses, and Prince Mavrocordato, his mind increasingly on the distant shores of Morea, continued. But a ship was already waiting for the prince in Livorno harbour, and he took his departure before the end of the month. ‘He is a great loss to Mary,’ Shelley told Claire, ‘and therefore to me — but not otherwise.’4
The quiet was also working on Shelley’s mind. He was frequently taking the boat out alone, and Mary’s journal shows that during the first fortnight of June, his destination was as often as not Pisa. Frequently he got back late, and on the 4th he arrived at midnight, just as a thunderstorm was about to break.5 On the following evening a note flew off to the Gisbornes: ‘I have been engaged these last days in composing a poem on the death of Keats, which will shortly be finished; and I anticipate the pleasure of reading it to you, as some of the very few persons who will be interested in it and understand it. — It is a highly wrought piece of art, perhaps better in point of composition than anything I have written.’ Three days later, on 8 June, the poem had reached the length of some forty Spenserian stanzas, and he announced it formally to Ollier. ‘It is a lament on the death of poor Keats, with some interposed stabs on the assassins of his peace and of his fame; and will be preceded by a criticism of “Hyperion” . . . .’6 On the same day he told Claire what he had been working on, and explained that in writing poetry he found the only real form of mental relief which lifted him above ‘the stormy mist of sensations’. The poem would be ‘worthy both of him and me’. It seems strange that in the external peace of San Giuliano, Shelley was in fact dwelling within storms.
Once writing, Shelley worked hard, as was his custom. The poem, fifty-five stanzas in all, was rapidly completed by the 11th, and by the 16th he had both finished his critical preface, and arranged to have a small edition especially printed in Pisa using the fine Didot typeface, so that he could correct it himself before sending it to Ollier in London. It was the first time he had tried this new method of publication. The title was taken from the Greek legend of the death of Adonis, the beloved of Aphrodite. For the purpose of the Spenserian metre, Shelley had anglicized the name and extended it by a syllable to become ‘Adonais’.
From the outset, Shelley intended the poem as both an elegy and a polemic. He wrote to John Gisborne and to Claire on the day he took the manuscript into the press at Pisa, ‘I have dipped my pen in consuming fire to chastise his destroyers; otherwise the tone of the poem is solemn and exalted.’ As with most of his sustained writing during these years, the work was deeply literary in its conception and sources. The presence of the Greek of Bion, an erotic poet of the first century BC, whose celebrated ‘Elegy on the Death of Adonis’ Shelley had translated during the previous winter, was very strong. Shelley’s translation opened:
I mourn Adonis dead — loveliest Adonis —
Dead, dead Adonis — and the Loves lament. . . .
See, his belovèd dogs are gathering round —
The Oread nymphs are weeping — Aphrodite
With hair unbound is wandering through the woods
’Wildered, ungirt, unsandalled. . . .7
This provided in essence the dramatic scenario for Adonais: the dead poet greeted by a solemn visitation of his peers. There was also the Greek of Moschus, whose reciprocal ‘Elegy on the Death of Bion’ Shelley had also translated in part, so showing himself conscious of an ‘Adonis’ tradition of elegies already established in the Greek:
Ye Dorian woods and waves, lament aloud, —
Augment your tide, O streams, with fruitless tears,
For the beloved Bion is no more.8
The very phrasing of this translation at once reveals yet a third level of literary predecessors to Adonais — the Lycidas of Milton. This was a reference that Horace Smith for one immediately recognized on reading the poem in London in August.9 It was primarily this awareness of writing out of a high, classical literary tradition that Shelley meant by his phrase, ‘a highly wrought piece of art’.
The poem was also intended as a public gesture. Besides its bitter attack on reviewers — both in the preface, and in the text of the poem — and its praise for ‘Hyperion’, the original drafts show that Shelley intended a whole queue of contemporary poets to pay their respects, including Byron, Tom Moore and Walter Scott. Most of these were finally rejected,10 but clear references remained to Byron, the ‘Pilgrim of Eternity’ in stanza 30; to Leigh Hunt, ‘gentlest of the wise’ in stanza 35; and in a notorious passage to Shelley himself between stanzas 31 and 34, ‘a pardlike spirit beautiful and swift’ with a mark ‘like Cain’s or Christ’s’ branded on the flesh of his forehead.
The attempt to combine overw
helming personal feelings with the high, marmoreal style of a public monument did not succeed. At best, Shelley produced the rhetoric of a funeral oration — complete with Judaic-Christian echoes of the Burial Service from the Book of Common Prayer — rather than the poetry of a funeral elegy. Alone among Shelley’s poems, it has a mannerism and pomposity of style that strike one as curiously reminiscent of the Baroque.
When he sent a copy of the little Pisan edition to Byron in July, his covering note showed that despite his claims to have written his best piece of composition, he was only too aware of the central weakness of the work, a weakness of conception: ‘I need not be told that I have been carried too far by the enthusiasm of the moment; by my piety, and my indignation, in panegyric. But if I have erred, I console myself by reflecting that it is in defence of the weak — not in conjunction with the powerful. And perhaps I have erred from the narrow view of considering Keats rather as he surpassed me in particular, than as he was inferior to others: so subtle is the principle of self?’11
That ‘principle of self’ is the problem of the poem in a nutshell; and it is also why the imported Platonism of the last five stanzas has the same straining, thinness of tone associated with a far less mature and more blatant work, the ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’. The poem seeks to celebrate the indestructible life of the creative spirit, in art and in nature; yet its personal drive and its most intense images tend always towards consummation and death.
Nevertheless, there are isolated passages of immense strength and genuine poignancy scattered throughout Adonais. There are moments where Shelley seems to have found that balance of high formality and intense emotion which he so admired in ‘Hyperion’ and in which he was conscious — perhaps too conscious — of competing with ‘Lycidas’.
Shelley: The Pursuit Page 97