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Unit 14: Ode to the West Wind by PB Shelley

“On one occasion I had to fetch or take to Byron some copy for the paper which my father, himself and Notes
Shelley, jointly conducted. I found him seated on a lounge feasting himself from a drum of figs. He
asked me if I would like a fig. Now, in that, Leno, consists the difference, Shelley would have handed
me the drum and allowed me to help myself.”

Death

On 8 July 1822, less than a month before his 30th birthday, Shelley drowned in a sudden storm
while sailing back from Leghorn (Livorno) to Lerici in his schooner, Don Juan. Shelley claimed
to have met his Doppelgänger, foreboding his own death. He was returning from having set
up The Liberal with the newly arrived Leigh Hunt. The name “Don Juan”, a compliment to
Byron, was chosen by Edward John Trelawny, a member of the Shelley-Byron Pisan circle.
However, according to Mary Shelley’s testimony, Shelley changed it to “Ariel”. This annoyed
Byron, who forced the painting of the words “Don Juan” on the mainsail. This offended the
Shelleys, who felt that the boat was made to look much like a coal barge. The vessel, an open
boat, was custom-built in Genoa for Shelley. It did not capsize but sank; Mary Shelley declared
in her “Note on Poems of 1822” (1839) that the design had a defect and that the boat was never
seaworthy. In fact the Don Juan was seaworthy; the sinking was due to a severe storm and
poor seamanship of the three men on board.

There were those who believed his death was not accidental. Some said that Shelley was
depressed in those days and that he wanted to die; others say that he did not know how to
navigate; others believed that some pirates mistook the boat for Byron’s and attacked him, and
others have even more fantastical stories. There is a mass of evidence, though scattered and
contradictory, that Shelley may have been murdered for political reasons. Previously, at Plas
Tan-Yr-Allt, the Regency house he rented at Tremadog, near Porthmadog, north-west Wales,
from 1812 to 1813, he had allegedly been surprised and apparently attacked during the night
by a man who may have been, according to some later writers, an intelligence agent. Shelley,
who was in financial difficulties, left forthwith leaving rent unpaid and without contributing
to the fund to support the house owner, William Madocks; this may provide another, more
plausible explanation for this story.

Two other Englishmen were with Shelley on the boat. One was a retired Navy officer, Edward
Ellerker Williams; the other was a boatboy, Charles Vivien. The boat was found ten miles
(16 km) offshore, and it was suggested that one side of the boat had been rammed and staved
in by a much stronger vessel. However, the liferaft was unused and still attached to the boat.
The bodies were found completely clothed, including boots.
In his “Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron”, Trelawny noted that the shirt in
which Williams’s body was clad was “partly drawn over the head, as if the wearer had been
in the act of taking it off [...] and [he was missing] one boot, indicating also that he had
attempted to strip.” Trelawny also relates a supposed deathbed confession by an Italian fisherman
who claimed to have rammed Shelley’s boat in order to rob him, a plan confounded by the
rapid sinking of the vessel. Shelley’s body washed ashore and later, in keeping with quarantine
regulations, was cremated on the beach near Viareggio. The day after the news of his death
reached England, the Tory newspaper The Courier gloated: “Shelley, the writer of some infidel
poetry, has been drowned, now he knows whether there is God or no.” A reclining statue of
Shelley’s body, depicting him washed up onto the shore, created by sculptor Edward Onslow
Ford at the behest of Shelley’s daughter-in-law, Jane, Lady Shelley, is the centerpiece of the
Shelley Memorial at University College, Oxford. 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

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