Sailing into the sunset - Frank McNally on Shelley’s last voyage

The epitaph on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s grave in Rome is poetic and hopeful, in a vaguely philosophical sort of way: “Nothing of him that doth fade,/But that doth suffer a sea change/Into something rich and strange.”

Yet in its reference to a sea change, and its origins in his favourite play, The Tempest, it also carries ironic echoes of the way he met his untimely death aged 29, 200 years ago.

On the last afternoon of their lives, July 8th, 1822, Shelley and a friend Edward Williams set sail from the Italian port of Livorno in an open boat, the Don Juan, bound for nearby Lerici where they were staying.

As recorded by another friend E.J. Trelawny, who was to have accompanied them in a separate vessel but had failed to get port clearance, conditions were a dead calm.

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But the skies soon darkened, turning the sea the colour of “lead”, and shortly after 6.30pm, conversations of sailors in the harbour “were suddenly silenced by the crashing voice of a thunder squall that burst right over our heads”.

When the storm abated, after 20 minutes, Trelawny peered out to sea for a signs of Shelley’s boat, in vain. As night fell, the crews of other vessels returning to port were questioned but none of them had seen it either.

And so it continued for three days of “horrid suspense”, until Trelawny rode to Pisa to confide his fears to another poet, Lord Byron: “When I told him, his lip quivered and his voice faltered . . . ”

Shelley was no stranger to sailing in bad weather. Even his life-changing visit to Ireland in 1812 had been book-ended by rough voyages.

On leaving England in early February of that year, it took 30 hours before he landed this side, blown so far up the coast that he still required a “laborious coach journey southwards” to reach Dublin.

Two months later, after he been first energised by the city, then shocked by the sheer poverty of the Liberties, and finally disillusioned by the treachery of former republicans who had “traded in their green coats for government sinecures”, the poet revolutionary sailed home again in a “heavy headwind”.

It took him another 36 hours of “extremely rough sailing” then, with no food, to reach Holyhead.

But in Italy in 1822, Shelley had finally pushed his luck too far. On the shore at Viareggio a few days after the storm, Trelawny found items he recognised as belonging to the poet.

Seven or eight days later, two badly decomposed bodies washed up, and although all exposed flesh had been eaten away, he knew immediately which was which:

“The tall slight figure, the jacket, the volume of Sophocles in one pocket, and Keats’s poems in the other, doubled back, as if the reader, in the act of reading, had thrust it away, were all too familiar to me to leave a doubt in my mind that this mutilated corpse was any other than Shelley’s.”

The bodies were temporarily buried at the spot. Then, after securing the necessary permissions, Trelawny arranged separate cremations, Shelley’s attended (at first anyway) by Byron and another writer Leigh Hunt.

The scene was later painted, with poetic licence, by Louis Édouard Fournier, who added suitably sombre weather. In fact, it was a hot mid-August day, which only increased the fierce intensity of the fire to which Shelley’s remains were committed.

Trelawny did not spare readers some grisly details of the cremation process. But it soon proved too much for Byron, who could “not face this scene” and went off to swim instead.

Such sensitivity was not always guaranteed in that party, however. Trelawny also records that Byron asked him to preserve the skull from the fire, “but remembering that he had formerly used one as a drinking-cup, I was determined Shelley’s should not be so profaned.”

The parts preserved, surprisingly, included the poet’s heart. It remained mysteriously intact amid the flames, according to Trelawny, until he was moved to retrieve it: “In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace, my hand was severely burnt; and had anyone seen me do the act, I should have been put in quarantine.”

Thus it was that the remains of Shelley inverted the final journey of Daniel O’Connell (with whose Catholic Committee he had been an uneasy ally in Dublin).

O’Connell famously directed: “My body to Ireland, my heart to Rome, my soul to God.” The atheist Shelley would have been less concerned about his soul’s destination. But his cremated remains went to Rome’s “Protestant Cemetery”, while his heart was later buried in England.