Okay, so the title is a little bit of a misnomer, because I’m technically supposed to be doing poetry this entry, but I also had to share with you the greatest part of Percy Shelley’s life, which just so happens to be his death. I’ll make sure to put one of his poems at the end, though. And besides, the whole thing has a theme of poetry to it because he was a poet!
Okay, so Percy Shelley, husband of legendary authoress Mary Shelley, was a Romantic-era poet who ran in the same circles as John Keats and the like and was friends with Lord Byron, who was a whole other level of unhinged and annoying and whom I will have to return to later. (I hate Lord Byron with a burning passion that I am not wholly able to articulate but that he completely deserves.)
Anyway, Percy was a poet and also a First Class Dramatic Bastard, to the point that he PREDICTED HIS OWN DEATH. By drowning.
This man then proceeded to spend most of his free time going out on the water in little boats and absolutely outright refusing to learn how to swim. He was also a fairly inexperienced seaman. Why Mary Shelley married this man I do not know. But the point is, his prediction came true, entirely by his own hand, because he went out on the ocean off the coast of Italy and then disappeared.
A friend of his found a body washed up on the shore later and the only reason they were able to identify him was because of the 1820 volume of John Keats’ poetry he had in his pocket. They then had a funeral where they cremated him, but someone noticed that his heart was not burning due to some weird circumstances so they snatched it out of the fire and gave it to Mary to remember her husband by.
It probably partially calcified due to a combination of tuberculosis and water logging, or it didn’t (my mother thinks this is insane), but the point of the story is that he was an absolute madman and his wife the greatest goth to ever live. The goth details of Mary Shelley’s life will have to wait for another installment of what I think I’m going to make a series.
The thing is, 19th century artists of the scholarly type tended to be absolutely insane and there quite a lot of fascinating stories about them, so much so that I could probably write a book about it. They were all slightly unhinged and all knew each other, which led to some amazing anecdotes, so I think I might start a special series, and I’m going to name it 19th Century Shenanigans.
This will also allow me to finally write that rant about Lord Byron. He knows what he did.
But anyway, I’ll leave you with one of Percy Shelley’s poems, and one of my personal favorites: Ozymandias, a name which I’m pretty sure he pulled out of thin air.
Ozymandias
BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Grace's Place 