Shelley: The Pursuit (139 page)

35. Faust and Mephistopheles ascend the Brocken on Valpurgisnacht. Engraving by Friedrich August Moritz Retzsch, 1820

36. Casa Magni, Lerici from a photograph taken in the 1880s

37. Manuscript sketch of the
Don Juan
and the
Bolivar
, by Edward Williams

38. Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1819 by Aemilia Curran. This portrait was finished retrospectively in 1822 or 1823

39. Bust of Shelley by Marianne Leigh-Hunt.
Reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College.

27. The Colony: 1821

The peaceful solitude of summer 1821 at San Giuliano was never long without interruption. Once, Shelley had a bad attack of his nephritic spasms, and returned to Pisa to consult Vaccà; but the illness passed. Then Claire wrote from Florence, after days of ‘bad spirits’ and nights of unhappy dreams. She was obsessed with the idea that Allegra would catch some fatal disease in the unhealthy atmosphere of a nunnery, and she felt the moment for decisive action could be put off no longer. Shelley was as ever deeply sympathetic, and it was Shelley’s sympathy and perhaps a personal visit of reassurance to Florence that Claire most wanted.

But Claire’s sudden outburst was particularly awkward. Taking up Byron’s postscript about the solo run to Ravenna, Shelley had recently written back, extending his own and Mary’s invitation to the Bagni, where all would be discreet and solitary, and Claire would
not
be in evidence. Apart from his personal desire to extend the friendship with Byron, he had at the back of his mind the possibility of softening Byron’s attitude to Allegra, simply by the process of confirming their old friendship of the Venice days of 1818. Byron had been easy enough then. Shelley wanted Byron to understand the new independence of Claire’s life in Florence. ‘I hope that she will be cured of the exaggerated ideas from which such conduct arises in the society with which she has now become conversant. Our solitary mode of life, and my abstract manner of thinking, were very unfit for her; and have probably been the sources of all her errors. It is well, therefore, that I should intercede for her forgiveness.’
¹
But now this promising new line of diplomacy was in danger of being put in jeopardy by Claire’s eternal anxiety for a decisive confrontation.

Shelley wrote to her about the idea of setting up a school under Mrs Mason’s protection, suggesting that this was an altogether more constructive and plausible project than an immediate attempt to force the issue with Byron. If she showed independence and calm, she might yet recover Allegra on her own terms. He sensed
that she could be cajoled out of her sudden mood perhaps more effectively than she could be argued out. ‘You say that I may not have a conversation with you because you may depart in a hurry Heaven knows where — Except it be to the other world, (& I know the coachman of that road will not let the passengers wait a minute) I know of no mortal business that requires such post haste.’
²
This letter did the trick, and for the time being Claire went back to her German studies. Now that she was living apart from Shelley, the subject of Allegra was one which Claire could and did use as a method of bringing pressure to bear on him, of demanding his attention and ultimately of demanding his personal presence. It was to that extent a weapon that she could also use against Mary. This is not to say that Claire’s real concern for her child had diminished, but rather that it had gained a new motive and dimension. Byron had always feared that unless he possessed Allegra and was completely responsible for her, Claire would contrive to use the child as a lever into his affections. Now ironically it was Shelley who was vulnerable to such a measure. From this moment on, he was drawn into a position of self-contradiction with regard to Allegra’s presence at the convent of Bagnacavallo: writing to Byron that his conduct was honourable and justified, while writing to Claire that Byron’s conduct was ruthless and cruel. But for the moment the end of May brought a temporary peace in that quarter.

On the last day of May, Shelley took off with Williams, this time for a two days’ expedition to Brentina. The quiet, broken only by the dinners at Pugnano, and the twice-weekly expeditions into Pisa, encouraged Mary to return to her novel
Valperga.
It promised to develop at considerable length, and by the end of June she found she was at the seventy-first manuscript page of her third volume.
³
Spasmodic visits from Taaffe, who brought absurd offerings of guinea pigs and bad verses, and Prince Mavrocordato, his mind increasingly on the distant shores of Morea, continued. But a ship was already waiting for the prince in Livorno harbour, and he took his departure before the end of the month. ‘He is a great loss to Mary,’ Shelley told Claire, ‘and
therefore
to me — but not otherwise.’
⁴

The quiet was also working on Shelley’s mind. He was frequently taking the boat out alone, and Mary’s journal shows that during the first fortnight of June, his destination was as often as not Pisa. Frequently he got back late, and on the 4th he arrived at midnight, just as a thunderstorm was about to break.
⁵
On the following evening a note flew off to the Gisbornes: ‘I have been engaged these last days in composing a poem on the death of Keats, which will shortly be finished; and I anticipate the pleasure of reading it to you, as some of the very few persons who will be interested in it and understand it. — It is a highly wrought
piece of art
, perhaps better in point of composition than anything I have written.’ Three days later, on 8 June, the poem had reached the length of some forty Spenserian stanzas, and he announced it formally to Ollier. ‘It is a lament on the
death of poor Keats, with some interposed stabs on the assassins of his peace and of his fame; and will be preceded by a criticism of “Hyperion” . . . .’
⁶
On the same day he told Claire what he had been working on, and explained that in writing poetry he found the only real form of mental
relief
which lifted him above ‘the stormy mist of sensations’. The poem would be ‘worthy both of him and me’. It seems strange that in the external peace of San Giuliano, Shelley was in fact dwelling within storms.

Once writing, Shelley worked hard, as was his custom. The poem, fifty-five stanzas in all, was rapidly completed by the 11th, and by the 16th he had both finished his critical preface, and arranged to have a small edition especially printed in Pisa using the fine Didot typeface, so that he could correct it himself before sending it to Ollier in London. It was the first time he had tried this new method of publication. The title was taken from the Greek legend of the death of Adonis, the beloved of Aphrodite. For the purpose of the Spenserian metre, Shelley had anglicized the name and extended it by a syllable to become ‘Adonais’.

From the outset, Shelley intended the poem as both an elegy and a polemic. He wrote to John Gisborne and to Claire on the day he took the manuscript into the press at Pisa, ‘I have dipped my pen in consuming fire to chastise his destroyers; otherwise the tone of the poem is solemn and exalted.’ As with most of his sustained writing during these years, the work was deeply literary in its conception and sources. The presence of the Greek of Bion, an erotic poet of the first century BC, whose celebrated ‘Elegy on the Death of Adonis’ Shelley had translated during the previous winter, was very strong. Shelley’s translation opened:

I mourn Adonis dead — loveliest Adonis —

Dead, dead Adonis — and the Loves lament. . . .

See, his belovèd dogs are gathering round —

The Oread nymphs are weeping — Aphrodite

With hair unbound is wandering through the woods

’Wildered, ungirt, unsandalled. . . .
⁷

This provided in essence the dramatic scenario for
Adonais
: the dead poet greeted by a solemn visitation of his peers. There was also the Greek of Moschus, whose reciprocal ‘Elegy on the Death of Bion’ Shelley had also translated in part, so showing himself conscious of an ‘Adonis’ tradition of elegies already established in the Greek:

Ye Dorian woods and waves, lament aloud, —

Augment your tide, O streams, with fruitless tears,

For the beloved Bion is no more.
⁸

The very phrasing of this translation at once reveals yet a third level of literary predecessors to
Adonais
— the
Lycidas
of Milton. This was a reference that Horace Smith for one immediately recognized on reading the poem in London in August.
⁹
It was primarily this awareness of writing out of a high, classical literary tradition that Shelley meant by his phrase, ‘a highly wrought
piece of art
’.

The poem was also intended as a public gesture. Besides its bitter attack on reviewers — both in the preface, and in the text of the poem — and its praise for ‘Hyperion’, the original drafts show that Shelley intended a whole queue of contemporary poets to pay their respects, including Byron, Tom Moore and Walter Scott. Most of these were finally rejected,
¹⁰
but clear references remained to Byron, the ‘Pilgrim of Eternity’ in stanza 30; to Leigh Hunt, ‘gentlest of the wise’ in stanza 35; and in a notorious passage to Shelley himself between stanzas 31 and 34, ‘a pardlike spirit beautiful and swift’ with a mark ‘like Cain’s or Christ’s’ branded on the flesh of his forehead.