Art thou pale for weariness Of climbing heaven, and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless Among the stars that have a different birth,— And ever-changing, like a joyless eye That finds no object worth its constancy?
(First page of the oldest surviving poem by iconic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley - “Cat In Distress”. He apparently wrote this when he was about 10. Sometime between 1809 and 1811, his sister Elizabeth transcribed it onto this piece of paper and created the little watercolor cat image. When Elizabeth died, the poem was passed to her sister Hellen.)
when arthur conan doyle said “of all ghosts, the ghosts of our old loves are the worst” and when harry styles said “we’re just two ghosts standing in the place of you and me” and when mother mother said “i’m just a ghost out of his grave / and i can’t make love in my grave” and when lord huron said “yes i know that love is like ghosts / oh, few have seen it but everybody talks” and when sylvia plath said “how can i go, meeting and exorcising my own ghosts here! i’ve made some new ones now” and when mumford & sons said “but the ghosts we knew will flicker from view / we’ll live a long life” and wh
It was on this day in British history, 8 July 1822, that English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned off the coast of Italy. Shelley died after his boat, the Don Juan, sank while he sailed with two of his friends. Shelley’s body was washed ashore and later, in keeping with quarantine regulations, was cremated on the beach near Viareggio. Shelley’s ashes were interred in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome, near an ancient pyramid in the city walls. His grave bears the Latin inscription, Cor Cordium (“Heart of Hearts”), and, in reference to his death at sea, a few lines of “Ariel’s Song” from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.“
An 1889 painting by Louis Édouard Fournier, The Funeral of Shelley (also known as The Cremation of Shelley), contains inaccuracies. In pre-Victorian times it was English custom that women would not attend funerals for health reasons. Mary Shelley did not attend but was featured in the painting, kneeling at the left-hand side. Leigh Hunt stayed in the carriage during the ceremony but is also pictured. Also, Trelawny, in his account of the recovery of Shelley’s body, records that "the face and hands, and parts of the body not protected by the dress, were fleshless,” and by the time that the party returned to the beach for the cremation, the body was even further decomposed. In his graphic account of the cremation, he writes of Byron being unable to face the scene, and withdrawing to the beach.
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandiaswas first published in the 11 January 1818 edition of The Examiner - 200 years ago today.
Ozymandias is the Greek name for Ramses II, who ruled Egypt from 1279 to 1213 BC. He was a military conqueror and a great builder, but Shelley’s sonnet describes how the achievements of even the mightiest tyrants are obliterated by time.
Ironically, the imagery in Shelley’s poem is very much still part of the cultural conversation, two centuries after first publication. For one recent example, it seemed like Blade Runner 2049 had images deliberately designed to evoke Shelley’s ideas.
This manuscript draft of the sonnet is kept in the Bodleian Libraries’ collection with the shelfmark MS. Shelley e. 4
You can read more about Ozymandias, and the other work of Shelley, on our Shelley’s Ghost website, originally built to support our 2010-11 exhibition.
This amateur historian has a soft spot for Shelley, who writes fantastic poems and whose life was chock full of the sort of absurd happenings that make this amateur historian laugh aloud.
Her personal favorite has to be when Percy Shelley wrote The Necessity of Atheism. It is difficult to understand what, if anything, was going through Shelley’s head when he decided to send this treatise to a bunch of bishops and the heads of all the Oxford colleges.
He apparently expected for his theories to be accepted and widely publicized if he was right, or some kindly ecclesiastical or academic official would draw him aside and give him empirical evidence for the existence of God if he was wrong.
