On July 8th, 1822, 177 years ago today, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley set sail across the Gulf of Genoa in his small schooner Ariel to visit his friend Lord Byron in Livorno. He was 30 years of age and he was not a happy man.
Four years previously, hounded by creditors in England and troubled by ill-health and social ignominy, he had moved to Italy with his unconventional family. But even there, as he tells us in Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples, he continued to have problems:
Alas, I have not hope nor health,
Nor peace within, nor calm around.
His misfortune climaxed on the return leg of that fateful visit. Shelley's frail craft was overtaken by a violent summer squall, and floundered before the sails were lowered.
His body was found on the seashore some days later, cremated in situ, and his ashes buried afterwards in Rome. Shelley's poetry was remarkable for its time in the accuracy with which it described meteorological phenomena.
In particular, he knew his clouds. He would not have recognised them by the names we call them now, because that nomenclature did not become well-known until the 1830s, but he was a keen observer of the individual cloud-types.
His graphic description of an advancing warm front in Ode to the West Wind, for example, has become a classic. Typically, the first signs are the wispy cirrus clouds that progressively invade the sky from the west.
They are drawn out in the shape of an elongated comma, and are sometimes called "mares' tails"; others compare them to a curl of hair - and indeed the word cirrus comes from the Latin word for curl. Shelley describes the sky in such a situation as bearing
. . . even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height,
The locks of the approaching storm.
The eponym of another poem, simply called The Cloud, had many guises. At times it takes the form of cirrostratus, the veil of very high, thin cloud that follows the broken cirrus as a depression approaches, and through which a weak and watery sun or moon can frequently be seen:
I bind the sun's throne with a burning zone
And the moon with a girdle of pearl.
But at other times, Shelley's cloud becomes more vicious - as when it assumes the shape of cumulonimbus:
I wield the flail of the lashing hail
And whiten the green plains under,
And then again I dissolve in rain
And laugh as I pass in thunder.