The Death of Shelley
‘It’s better to burn out, than to fade away’, as Neil Young once observed in Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black). Part of the legend of the Romantic Poets comes from several of them dying young, including Byron, Shelley, and their contemporary, John Keats (1795-1821). Shelley died at the age of 29, less than a month before his 30th birthday, sailing his boat in the Gulf of Spezia, Italy. His boat was named the Don Juan after Byron’s famous poem of the same name, and in it Shelley was returning from founding a politically radical journal called The Liberal.
The boat, an open vessel, had been custom-made for Shelley in the famous shipbuilding port of Genoa. Unfortunately, whilst crossing from Livorno to Lerici, the Don Juan met with a sudden and violent storm, which caused it to sink, due to a design fault according to Mary Shelley. Others have blamed the poor navigational skills of Shelley and his companions, a retired naval officer and a boat boy, who also perished. Still others have suggested that Shelley deliberately drowned himself out of depression, though he had just founded a journal of which his works would form a large part.
It took some time for Shelley’s body to wash ashore, and when it did it was hideously disfigured and bloated. Owing to quarantine regulations, he was cremated on the beach where he washed up. Many in England however were not sad to hear of his passing: ‘Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned; now he knows whether there is God or no’, smirked The Courier. But while that particular publication has been forgotten, Shelley’s legacy lives on, and a memorial to him was erected in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey, the highest accolade for a British writer.
