‘its sculptor well those passions read/ Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things’
- ozymandias, percy bysshe shelley
This is the monument to Percy Shelley, the English poet who drowned in Italy, aged twenty-nine. A leading light in the Romantic Movement, Shelley was a radical in his poetry as well as in his political and social views, Shelley did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but recognition came later and he is now widely regarded as one of the most influential poets of the past 200 years.
Already a published novelist as a schoolboy at Eton, he went on to publish novels, essays, and poetry before he was twenty. He went to University College, Oxford, briefly before being expelled for his radical political views and atheism. Soon after, he eloped with a sixteen-year-old girl, marrying Harriet in Edinburgh, even while he was in the midst of an intense platonic relationship with another woman whom he described as the "sister of my soul" and "my second self", she became his confidante and intellectual companion as he developed his views on politics, religion, ethics and personal relationships. The three of them lived in a communal home, sharing property. He was a vegetarian and an advocate of Free Love, and had numerous extra-marital affairs and illegitimate children, many of whom died in infancy.
He abandoned his first wife, Harriet, whose pregnant body was found in the Serpentine lake in London in 1816. Their two children were raised apart from the Shelley family.
Mary Shelley was his second long-suffering wife. They collaborated on three novels; even her work Frankenstein was said to have had a lot of input from Percey.
Author of Prometheus Unbound, a "lyrical drama" not intended to be performed but rather read, Shelley used it to express his high moral views on man's irrepressible rebellion against the tyranny of the gods.
Shelley's life was beset by ill-health, financial stress and constant movement. He ended up in Italy, first in Florence then Pisa. He died in a boating accident off the coast of Italy. His badly decomposed body washed up on a beach days later. The body was cremated on the shore and the ashes were interred in the Protestant cemetery in Rome, apart from his heart which was apparently rescued from the flames. Eventually, it was buried, but accounts differ as to where.
The memorial was carved after his death, paid for by his daughter-in-law. Originally designed for the Protestant Cemetary, it proved too big for the plot. It ended up in University College, where I took the inimitable @shelleysprometheus for a pilgrimage.