Williams and Shelley spent the next afternoon fishing off the rocks; they caught nothing and found the stone was volcanic and viciously sharp, twisted into grotesque lacework and tracery. In the evening, Claire walked into the room where they were all talking about Byron and Bagnacavallo. She asked them if Allegra was dead; Shelley stood up and said yes.8 He told Byron afterwards that what he really feared was that she would go mad.
For the first week of May, all their time was taken up in coping with Claire. Shelley wrote to Byron asking for a miniature and a lock of the child’s hair, which duly appeared by the return boat. A murderous note from Claire slipped past Shelley’s observation — or so he said — and also reached Byron at Livorno; but to this second letter there would be no answer.9 Claire’s only coherent request was that she should be allowed to see Allegra’s coffin before it was shipped from Livorno to England. When Byron offered to give her complete charge of Allegra’s funeral and burial, Shelley wrote back: ‘She now seems bewildered; & whether she designs to avail herself further of your permission to regulate the funeral, I know not. In fact, I am so exhausted with the scenes through which I have passed, that I do not dare to ask.’10
The only relief was the extraordinary beauty of their situation in the bay of Lerici. Even in his first letter to Byron, Shelley could not avoid mentioning it: ‘Nature is here as vivid and joyous as we are dismal, and we have built, as Faust says, “our little world in the great world of all”.’
The Casa Magni had been built originally as a boat-house, and it was right on the seashore. Its ground floor consisted of an open stone portico with seven arches roughly whitewashed, and a stone-flagged floor running back into the building. The edge of the flagging had a low wall which formed a little jetty, with a fringe of small rocks up against it. The sea frequently splashed to the very foot of the portico. The flag-stones were always carpeted with the blown sand, and the ground floor could only be used for storing rope and tackle and oars. Above the portico was the first-floor terrace, which ran the whole length of the building and looked out westwards clear over the bay. Inside was a single large main room, reached by a staircase from the back. Off this central chamber, which the Shelleys and the Williamses shared as their dining hall, were three smaller rooms. The ones to the left and right, facing over the terrace and the sea, were Mary’s and Shelley’s respectively, while the Williamses were given the third room, immediately next to Shelley’s, on the north side of the building. The servants and the children slept in the back of the house.
From the terrace, the bay was spread out before them. To their right, 200 yards up the sand, was the tiny hamlet of San Terenzo, with a little cupola church, and its ruined castle on a spur of rock jutting out into the sea. Beyond it, clear in the mornings but hazy by midday, was the peninsula of Portovenere, and the blue hump of the island of Palmaria. To their left, half-obscured by one of the little rocky coves of the bay, was Lerici. It stood across about a mile of glittering water, with its harbour and moored boats and quayside strung with nets. The village houses struggled up the steep hill and were lost in the woods, while the castle of Lerici, answering more grandly that of San Terenzo, jutted sharply against the skyline. The whole bay was very wild, and communications were by boat or along the beach. Behind the Casa Magni, the rocks and trees rose up steeply cutting off all access by road, in a jungle of dark foliage. Except for the sea, the situation was strangely like Tan-yr-allt.
At night, especially when the moon shone on the water, it almost seemed as if their house was ocean-going. For the first few days all of them found it difficult to sleep with the sound of the heavy swell booming on the rocks and along the beach. ‘We all feel as if we were on board ship — and the roaring of the sea brings this idea even into our beds.’11 Williams noted: ‘I think if there are no tides in the Mediterranean that there are strong currents on which the moon both at the full and change have a very powerful effect. The swell this evening is evidently caused by her influence, for it is quite calm at sea.’12
The death of Allegra did not affect only Claire. On the eighth day at the Casa Magni, Shelley took Williams out on to the terrace to gaze at the moonlight flooding the little bay. ‘. . . While walking with Shelley on the terrace and observing the effect of moonshine on the waters, he complained of being unusually nervous, and stopping short he grasped me violently by the arm and stared steadfastly on the white surf that broke upon the beach under our feet.
Observing him sensibly affected I demanded of him if he were in pain — but he only answered, saying “There it is again! — there!’” Williams shook Shelley and asked him what he had seen: apparently it was a naked child which kept rising out of the sea, with its hands clasped. Williams’s later comment is interesting, and suggests that Shelley wanted Williams to see the ghost as much as himself. ‘Our conversation which had been at first rather melancholy led to this, and my confirming his sensations by confessing that I had felt the same, gave a greater activity to his ever wandering and lively imagination.’13 It was ‘a sort of natural magic’.
But gradually the crisis passed, and Claire then recovered with a rapidity that surprised everyone. Mary even thought that she was ‘more tranquil than when prophesying her disaster’. She stayed on for several days at the Casa Magni, and Shelley told Byron on the 16th that she was much better, ‘after the first shock she has sustained her loss with more fortitude than I had dared to hope’. A cheering influence was Byron’s bearded Venetian servant Tita, who came to stay in the back quarters of the Casa Magni after his release from prison in Pisa where he had been held as a suspect in the dragoon affair. He announced that he had given a banquet — with hired plate and chandeliers — to his fellow-inmates on the night of his release. He stayed on amiably helping out until a new passport arrived, and then he rejoined his master at Livorno.
Shelley’s boat had long been expected from Genoa, and on 12 May, a strange sail was spotted rounding the point of Portovenere. It was threatening, stormy weather, and the boat made fast for Lerici harbour, cranked hard over in the wind with a crew of three crouching in the spray over her deck. Shelley and Williams watched her with admiration from the terrace: it was the Don Juan. She struck them instantly with her swift temperamental elegance: she was twenty-four feet long, but very slim, with twin mainmasts and schooner rigging with topsails and a selection of jibs. They hurried along the beach to take delivery of the boat, and took her out at once into the bay. There was no other craft that could match her speed. Shelley wrote to Captain Roberts: ‘She is a most beautiful boat, & so far surpasses both mine and Williams’ expectations that it was with some difficulty that we could persuade ourselves that you had not sent us the Bolivar by mistake.’14
On the 15th they gave her a first full run, in clear fresh weather, with both Mary and Jane aboard. They sailed her to Portovenere, and found in Williams’s words that ‘she fetches whatever she looked at’. They turned again past the point in open sea, and beat back to Lerici, the boat sailing ‘like a witch’. The late storms had covered the sea with huge, purple Portuguese men-o’-war that drifted beneath the surface like opalescent apparitions.15
They now had their ‘perfect plaything for the summer’. They retained one of the 18-year-old English boys who came with the boat from Genoa to act as their crew, which made launching and handling the massive canvas easier. Apart from insufficient reefing, their only problem was how to remove the huge black lettering Don Juan which had been painted on the forward mainsail. Mary said it looked like a coal barge, and Shelley said acidly to Trelawny that he ‘supposed the name to have been given her during the equivocation of sex which her godfather suffered in the Harem’.16 It was suspected that Byron had arranged this desecration through Trelawny, and Shelley was indignant out of all proportion to the crime. Hours were spent trying to remove the paint at Lerici with ‘turpentine, spirits of wine, and buccata’.17 It would not come off, but Shelley absolutely refused to sail under the title of Byron’s greatest work, and finally
had the section of the sail cut out altogether, and a new patch put in by a local sailmaker, disguised by a line of reefs. Shelley had fallen in love with the craft, and he arranged with Williams that he would pay for it exclusively. ‘She serves me at once for a study and a carriage,’ he wrote rapturously, and for him at least life at Casa Magni was slowly transformed into a waking dream.
To Horace Smith at Versailles, he wrote: ‘As to me, like Anacreon’s swallow, I have left my Nile, and having taken up my summer quarters here, in a lonely house close by the sea side, surrounded by the soft & sublime scenery of the Gulph of Spezia — I do not write — I have lived too long near Lord Byron & the sun has extinguished the glow worm . . . .’18 A day or two later he posted Smith another letter with an even more mystic contents, which Smith described in his reply: ‘blank, with the exception of your handwriting in the address, which, with the postmark identified it to be from you, though you had forgotten the Promethean part of informing it with a soul. Imagining that some most mysterious secret was to be conveyed to me by the aid of sympathetic ink, I tried it against the sun, and in the fire, and in the dark, and with lemon juice . . . .’19
Claire left on 21 May to collect her things from the Bojtis at Florence and stay a few days at the Casa Silva, after Shelley had made her promise to return in a fortnight. The household began to settle down, and Shelley and Williams spent the rest of the month on the water. The Don Juan was anchored in the bay directly in front of the Casa Magni — except when the winds were too high, when she was taken into Lerici harbour for shelter. Williams spent many hours on the beach making a small rowing boat out of canvas and beech planks to act as a tender, and Shelley sat for whole mornings with his back against the Don Juan’s mainmast, reading Faust and Calderón, writing on loose scraps of paper, and lulled by the gentle swell of the Mediterranean. He became tanned and fit, and slowly his mind began to turn towards a new visionary poem. In preparation, he turned one of the servants’ rooms at the back of the Casa Magni into a study for writing in the evenings away from the communal part of the house.20 But when the moon was out, many nights found him on the water, with Williams, or with Jane, or by himself alone.
Mary, after looking forward so long to this escape to the seaside, was now very unhappy. She was three months pregnant, and frequently ill and upset, and the remoteness of their situation, the wild beauty of the bay and the ceaseless lapping of the sea under her windows filled her with a sense of helpless remoteness. Shelley wrote to Claire at the end of May that Mary suffered ‘terribly from languor and hysterical affections’.21 Although sometimes she sailed, sitting between Shelley’s legs at the helm, most of her day was spent in the shade of the terrace, feeling sick and abandoned. The squabbling servants at the rear of the house worried her, and she did not like the intimate company of the Williamses. Moreover, in the first week in June, the mild sunny weather hardened into a glazing heatwave which continued day after day with ‘excessive and oppressive’ heat, and lurid electrical arches — as Williams called them — forming in the haze above the entrance to the bay. It was like being in an enchanted prison. Occasionally the weather would break, with a violent electrical storm, and running waves. At these times Shelley and Williams would be busy beating the Don Juan into the safety of Lerici harbour. The next day the heat would return.
It was during this period, at the end of May and the beginning of June, before the arrival of Byron’s boat the Bolivar on the 13th, that Shelley began composing his last major poem ‘The Triumph of Life’. He wrote it partly on the boat, and partly in his study at night. It is not, like his other poems, in a notebook, but written on a series of loose foolscap sheets, some much folded from being thrust into his pocket.22 One of them is the back of a bill from the sailmaker at Sarzana who came to cut out the Don Juan lettering; another is on the back of the beginning of one of Shelley’s own letters to Captain Roberts mentioning Hunt’s expected arrival at Genoa in mid-June. A third sheet is covered by sketches for the new topsail rig which Shelley and Williams wanted fitted to the boat to increase the canvas even further. The writing is in ink, unusually large for Shelley, and bleached by sun. There are many corrections in a neater, firmer hand, which appear to have been made in his study. But the motley collection of Italian foolscap suggests that Shelley did not even want to think of himself as writing another serious work: he was just trying out a few ideas.
Yet the poem, rough and unfinished as it is, is the fourth of his Italian masterpieces. In one sense the poem is like nothing he had previously written. It has a hardness of style and a lack of personal emotion which is unique among his writing: it is aloof and almost disparaging, and falls on the reader’s imagination with a cold, clear light like moonlight. Yet the subject draws everywhere on previous work, reassembling it and transforming it.
The dominant image of the poem is the ‘triumph’ — the Roman ritual of the triumphal chariot drive in procession through the streets. It is the image that he found carved on the Arches of Titus and Constantine in the Roman Forum, and first used brilliantly in the apocalyptic second act of Prometheus Unbound. The Roman triumph was always an essentially cruel and violent image in Shelley’s mind, and here in his last poem, the ‘triumph of life’ is used to mean the conquest which Life achieves over all human beings — especially the conquests made by physical ageing, intellectual failure, guilt and remorse, and lack of spiritual self-knowledge.
The poem is a vision, and in the directness of its presentation, and its use of the carnival processions of masked, historical and demoniac figures, Shelley has adapted the method used in The Mask of Anarchy, and in the nightmare sections of Peter Bell the Third. One can also trace his experience of the spring carnivals at Pisa, which Tom Medwin noticed appalled Shelley by their undertones of malevolent hilarity and sickness and evil.
Finally, the structure of the poem owes something to the loose improvisatory flow of Epipsychidion, and its images of radiant female idealisms are clearly drawn from here. Yet ‘The Triumph’ has none of the softness or flatulence of that poem, either in verse form or theme. The verse is the English terza rima which Shelley had used in the ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and his adaptions of Dante. Its movement, though brilliantly varied and flexible — sometimes for speech, sometimes for narrative — always retains an Olympian dignity, ‘stately and fast’. Moreover the ideal images of the poem are never allowed to dazzle, but are continually overwhelmed by darker, demoniac ones, which return to the winter of 1821 at Pisa, and the ‘intermediary world’ of Plato’s kaka-daimons, and through them to the earliest image sources of Shelley’s adolescent poetry.
The dominant presence behind this austerity of form and theme is undoubtedly Dante, and especially the Dante of the Inferno. Shelley uses Dante’s metre, Dante’s bold panorama of real historical characters, and something of Dante’s gloomy underworld of spiritual torment. ‘The Triumph’ has a personal narrator, and a guide — like Dante and Virgil. Shelley’s guide is Rousseau and the passage in which Shelley meets him — or rather discovers him — has that macabre matter-of-factness which is essentially Dantean:
… what I thought was an old root which grew
To strange distortion out of the hill side
Was indeed one of that deluded crew,
And that the grass which methought hung so wide
And white, was but his thin discoloured hair,
And that the holes it vainly sought to hide
Were or had been his eyes. — ‘If thou canst forbear
To join the dance, which I had well forborne,’
Said the grim Feature, of my thought aware,
‘I will now tell that which to this deep scorn
Led me & my companions, and relate
The progress of the Pageant since the morn . . . .’23
Yet for all these literary presences and shadows, the poem transcends Shelley’s previous work, moving above it in that climbing spiral which first became obvious in the Pisa poems, so that the same material is
now rediscovered and re-created from an entirely new and matured position. And everywhere it is filled with the atmosphere of Lerici, the heat, the dust, the broad sea, the foaming wake streaming away from the boat, the cold moonlight glittering on the water.
Shelley first wrote a thirty-line introductory passage which has something of the quality of one of his trial prose prefaces, which tells the reader little except that Shelley had stayed awake all night, ‘wakeful as the stars that gem The cone of night’, and had now lain down in the morning sun with his back against a chestnut tree — presumably the ship’s mast. The poem then begins abruptly, with much of the rapid cadence and speaking immediacy with which The Mask of Anarchy opens. The difference is that the line length is extended into the cool, measured modulations of the terza rima; for it is a much older poet who speaks:
As in that trance of wonderous thought I lay
This was the tenour of my waking dream.
Methought I sate beside a public way
Thick strewn with summer dust, & a great stream
Of people there was hurrying to & fro
Numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam,
All hastening onward, yet none seemed to know
Shelley: The Pursuit Page 106