Poet memorialized by the college that expelled him
"He is made one with Nature: there is heard/His voice in all her music from the moan/Of thunder to the song of night's sweet bird" reads a portion of the elegy entitled "Adonais," which Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in the weeks following his receipt of the news that his fellow poet, John Keats, had died of tuberculosis in Rome at the age of 25. Two poets in the Romantic tradition, Shelley and Keats shared a reverence for nature, a penchant for philosophical idealism and a belief in the transforming power of the imagination.
Shelley was moved by the untimely death of Keats in 1821 to write one of his best poems. Ironically enough, he himself was to die prematurely, drowned when his boat capsized in a storm off the coast of the Italian Riviera, less than one year later. When his body washed up on the shore near Viareggio, a book of poems by Keats was found in one of his pockets.
Both poets were buried in the Non-Catholic Cemetery, popularly known as the Protestant Cemetery, in Rome in rather modestly identified gravesites. In the case of Shelley, however, his heart was snatched from the funeral pyre by his friend, Edward John Trelawny, and given to the poet's second wife Mary, the author of "Frankenstein." Mary Shelley presumably kept it in an envelope on her desk. Eventually the heart was interred with the remains of their son, Sir Percy Florence Shelley, in Bournemouth, England, where the latter died in 1889.
The story does not, however, end with the disposition of Shelley's ashes in Rome and his heart in Bournemouth. Indeed, the most famous memorial to the poet can be found in Oxford, England, in one of the 30 colleges that make up the University of Oxford. Donated to University College by Shelley's daughter-in-law, Lady Jane Shelley, the memorial was originally commissioned for the gravesite in Rome, but its size precluded its use in that space. Instead, ironically enough, the elaborate sculpture was given by the family to the college that expelled the poet many years before on account of his publication of a pamphlet in defense of those individuals who might hold atheistic beliefs. This was not the only position held by Shelley that was considered radical for the time; he also believed in free love (he ran off with Mary while still married to his first wife Harriet) and opposed the monarchy, even though he himself was a member of the landed aristocracy.
University College accepted Lady Shelley's gift in 1893, and a special domed chamber was designed by architect Basil Champneys to showcase the piece. Although the entrance is blocked by a wrought-iron gate, normally locked, I had an opportunity, on a recent visit to Oxford, to gain access to the inner sanctum. Anticipating my stay in the city to make a presentation at the annual conference of the International Emily Dickinson Society at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University, I wrote ahead to the porter at University College, requesting special permission to photograph the sculpture for my classes - I teach Shelley's "Defense of Poetry" every fall in my introductory course in literary criticism.
On the appointed date, Bob Maskell, head pPorter at University College - all the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge have porters who are the first point of contact for visitors and residents; they have a host of duties, including matters related to security and safety - met me at the entrance to the Front Quad and gave me a key to the domed room. I proceeded along the passageway to the right until coming to the northwest corner and the ornamental gate. A turn of the key, and I was inside the space crowned by a dome embellished with stars. The umber-colored walls feature another quote from "Adonais," penned by Shelley to honor Keats but now used in reference to Shelley's own fate: "He has outsoar'd the shadow of our night;/Envy and calumny and hate and pain/All that unrest which we miscall delight,/Can touch him not and torture not again."
Taking center stage is the memorial itself, a prime example of sentimentality in stone. Carved by Edward Onslow Ford, the life-size, white marble sculpture of the naked, drowned poet is supported on a bronze plinth resting on the shoulders of two winged lions and the muse of poetry. It is as if the poet's lifeless form had washed up on shore in Italy and been transported to an academic cloister in the heart of England. He lies on his side on a patch of sand - his eyes closed, his mouth half open, his long hair replicating the effect of cascading water.
The sculpture is the embodiment of youthful loss and wasted possibility. It solidifies Shelley's place among other English Romantic poets - John Keats and Lord Byron - whose early deaths cut short their creative promise. By the time of his death at the age of 29, Percy Bysshe Shelley had already penned, in addition to "Adonais" and "A Defense of Poetry," a score of important lyrical works, including "Ozymandias," "The Cloud" and "Ode to the West Wind." What other works have been lost to posterity due his venturing out in his custom-built boat upon a treacherous sea?
A Carolina Trustee Professor, Dr. Mack holds the G.L. Toole Chair at the University of South Carolina-Aiken.