by Jim Bernhard
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
“Mad Shelley” was the nickname given to Percy Bysshe Shelley by his college mates at Oxford, owing to his absentminded behavior, violent temper, interest in alchemy, espousal of free love, and vocal promotion of atheism. It was a pamphlet entitled “The Necessity of Atheism” that resulted in his expulsion from Oxford only a year after arriving there.
Born on August 4, 1792, in Warnham, Sussex, England, the son of a member of Parliament, Percy was sent to Eton College and then to University College, Oxford. After being expelled, he was estranged from his family and eloped to Scotland with sixteen-year-old Harriet Westbrook, who bore him three children before committing suicide when he abandoned her five years into their marriage. Shelley then married Mary Godwin, later the author of Frankenstein, with whom he had three more children.
Percy and Mary moved permanently to Italy, where they befriended Lord Byron, and where Shelley wrote most of his poetical works. He is known for his hundreds of lyrical poems, including “Ode to the West Wind” (“If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”), “To a Skylark” (“Hail to thee, blithe Spirit”), “The Cloud” (“I bring fresh showers for thirsting flowers”), “Ozymandias,” and “Epipsychidion”; longer poems such as “Julian and Maddalo,” “The Revolt of Islam,” “Letter to Maria Gisborne,” and “The Triumph of Life”; and verse dramas, The Cenci, Prometheus Unbound, and Hellas.
“Adonais,” Shelley’s elegy on the death of John Keats, expresses Shelley’s belief, despite his professed atheism, in a kind of pantheistic monism, in which human life, like all creation, springs from and returns to the eternal oneness of the universe:
Dust to the dust! But the pure spirit shall flow
Back to the burning fountain whence it came,
A portion of the Eternal, which must glow
Through time and change, unquenchably the same,
Whilst thy cold embers choke the sordid hearth of shame.
. . .
The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.—Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Shelley died in 1822, a month before he would have turned thirty, when his boat went down in a storm off the coast of Italy. He and his friend Edward Williams had been visiting Byron in Pisa and were returning from the port of Livorno to Lerici, where Mary Shelley and Edward’s wife, Jane (with whom Shelley was having an affair), were waiting for them. They set out in a small sailboat Shelley had bought from Byron, accompanied by an Italian sailor-boy, about six o’clock in the evening of July 8 to travel a distance of about twenty miles. The boat, which Byron had named “Don Juan,” but Shelley preferred to call “Ariel,” made it as far as Via Reggio when a sudden, violent storm arose. When it had cleared, the “Ariel” had vanished. The bodies of the three occupants were found ten days later, washed up several miles from the point of the storm.
Initially, Shelley’s friends assumed that the boat had gone down in the strong winds, but the boat’s structural damage suggested it might have been rammed by another vessel. A tale later emerged that an Italian seaman had made a deathbed confession—that he had been on the crew of a fishing vessel that collided intentionally with Shelley’s boat in order to steal a large sum of money mistakenly believed to be on board, in the possession of Lord Byron. This was the story believed by Shelley’s friend Edward Trelawny, who found the bodies, identifying Shelley by a copy of Keats’s poems in his pocket. He first buried Shelley in the sand, where the body remained for a month, and then on August 15 cremated him on the beach in the ancient Greek fashion. He snatched Shelley’s heart from the fire and sent it to Mary. The remainder of his ashes were interred in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.
The English public was largely unmoved by Shelley’s death. One newspaper reported: “Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned; now he knows whether there is a God or not.”
JOHN KEATS
It was a cruel twist of irony that John Keats—a poet licensed to practice medicine—succumbed to an incurable disease in the prime of his youth. Keats, the eldest son of a stable keeper, was born in Finsbury, London, on October 31, 1795. Both parents died early; his father when Keats was eight, and his mother when he was fifteen. The Keats children were raised by a guardian named Richard Abbey, who was a tea merchant. John was sent to Mr. Clarke’s School in Enfield and then apprenticed to a surgeon—while translating Virgil’s Aeneid in his spare time. He interned in Guy’s and St. Thomas’s Hospitals and received an apothecary’s license, enabling him to practice as a physician and surgeon.
Poetry was his true gift, however, and he became friends with Shelley, Wordsworth, and Leigh Hunt while pursuing his writing. His first volume of verse was followed by a wealth of lyrical poems that earned him a place, as he predicted, “among the English poets.” His most notable works include “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”), “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (“Silent, upon a peak in Darien”), “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (“And no birds sing”), “The Eve of St. Agnes,” “Lamia,” and such longer works as “Hyperion,” “Otho the Great,” and “Endymion” (“A thing of beauty is a joy forever”).
On a seaside holiday to Hastings in 1817, Keats struck up an acquaintance with an alluring twenty-two-year-old woman named Isabella Jones, who may or may not have had a husband lurking in the background, and with whom Keats may or may not have had a torrid love affair. This connection, whatever its nature, ended abruptly in the following year, when Keats met Fanny Brawne, an eighteen-year-old girl who lived next door to him in London. He became infatuated with her in a consuming, but unconsummated, passion.
At about the same time Keats began suffering from the effects of pulmonary tuberculosis, which had claimed his brother Tom’s life. Keats, already weakened with a sore throat and stomach trouble from dosing himself with mercury—a dangerous and controversial treatment for various ailments, including syphillis and gonorrhea—may have acquired tuberculosis from nursing his ailing brother. From then until the end of his life, Keats suffered from worsening sore throats, gastric upset, coughs, loss of hair, and frequent hemorrhages. In February of 1820, he experienced two severe lung hemorrhages and, at his doctor’s suggestion, moved from the damp English climate to Italy, accompanied by his friend, the painter Joseph Severn. In the same year he published “Ode to a Nightingale,” in which he wrote:
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Keats was more explicit about his wish for—and fear of—death in a letter to his friend Charles Armitage Brown:
I wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these pains, and then I wish death away, for death would destroy even those pains, which are better than nothing. Land and sea, weakness and decline, are great separators, but Death is the great Divorcer forever. . . . Is there another life? Shall I awake and find this all a dream? There must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.
Keats and Severn settled in the Piazza di Spagna, Rome, where Keats was attended by English expatriate Dr. James Clarke. At eleven o’clock on the night of February 23, 1821, in his room overlooking a Bernini fountain, Keats called to Severn, “Lift me up, for I am dying. I shall die easy. Don’t be frightened. Thank God it has come.” A few moments later he was gone, at the age of twenty-five. He was buried four days later in Rome’s Protestant cemetery.
Shelley gives
this account of Keats’s passing in the introduction of his elegy “Adonais”:
The savage criticism of his Endymion, which appeared in the Quarterly Review, produced the most violent effect on his susceptible mind; the agitation thus originated ended in the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs; a rapid consumption ensued, and the succeeding acknowledgements from more candid critics of the true greatness of his powers were ineffectual to heal the wound thus wantonly inflicted.
Byron commented that Keats was “snuffed out by an article.”
Shelley described Keats’s burial place as:
. . . the romantic and lonely cemetery of the Protestants in that city [Rome], under the pyramid which is the tomb of Cestius, and the massy walls and towers, now mouldering and desolate, which formed the circuit of ancient Rome. The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.
Keats had asked Severn to inscribe on his tomb a line paraphrased from Philaster by Beaumont and Fletcher: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Severn embellished it considerably:
This Grave
contains all that was Mortal
of a Young English Poet
Who
on his Death Bed
in the Bitterness of his Heart
at the Malicious Power of his Enemies
Desired
these Words to be engraved upon his Tomb Stone
Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water.
MARY SHELLEY
Mary Shelley wrote the work for which she is famous on a dare when she was only nineteen. It was conceived in a “can-you-top-this?” challenge around a campfire with her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley; Lord Byron; and John Polidori, By-ron’s physician, each of whom vowed to write a Gothic horror story. Byron and Percy never finished theirs. Polidori wrote The Vampyre, which later inspired Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Mary wanted her story to be one “which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awake thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart.” The result was a novel, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. It remains one of the most enduring pieces of fiction ever written, and its monster, as portrayed on the screen by Boris Karloff, is indelibly etched in the memories of terrified filmgoers.
Mary, born on August 30, 1797, in Somerstown, London, was the daughter of two free-thinking, iconoclastic, atheist political philosophers: William Godwin, and his feminist wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, who died when infant Mary was only eleven days old. Raised by her father, she became infatuated with one of his disciples, the young poet Shelley, who was already married. The two fled to Europe to escape society’s censure of their adulterous affair. She married Shelley after his first wife committed suicide.
After Shelley drowned in Italy, Mary returned to London, where she spent the rest of her life raising her son, also named Percy, and continuing to write novels, essays, biographies, and travel journals. Her writings include Rambles in Germany and Italy and the novels Valperga, Perkin Warbeck, The Last Man, Lodore, and Falkner.
The daughter of two atheists and the wife of another, Mary Shelley was very likely one herself, although her views on religion and death are not really known. The Last Man is an apocalyptic novel about a plague that kills every human being except the protagonist Verney, who is an autobiographical stand-in for Mary herself. He faces his solitary life on earth alternating acceptance of death with fear of it:
And now I do not fear death. I should be well pleased to close my eyes, never more to open them again. And yet I fear it; even as I fear all things; for in any state of being linked by the chain of memory with this, happiness would not return—even in Paradise, I must feel that your love was less enduring than the mortal beatings of my fragile heart, every pulse of which knells audibly,
The funeral note
Of love, deep buried, without resurrection.
No—no—me miserable; for love extinct there is no resurrection!
In another place, Verney says, “Death will perpetually cross my path, and I will meet him as a benefactor.”
Mary wrote in her diary: “At the age of twenty-six I am in the condition of an aged person—all my old friends are gone . . . & my heart fails when I think by how few ties I hold to the world.”
By her early forties, Mary was suffering frequent headaches and partial paralysis, probably early symptoms of the brain tumor that ultimately killed her. She died on February 1, 1851, at the age of fifty-three, at her home on Chester Square in London, where she lived with her son and his wife.
Mary had asked to be buried with her parents in St. Pancras churchyard, but her son regarded that as a dreary site and opted instead to exhume her parents and inter them all at St. Peter’s in Bournemouth. A year after Mary’s death, her son opened her desk and found a parcel containing some ashes and the heart of her husband, who had died in Greece in 1822.
The Victorian Era
JOHN HENRY NEWMAN
Calvinist Evangelical, then Anglican priest, and finally Roman Catholic cardinal, John Henry Newman was born in London February 21, 1801, with a silver spoon clamped firmly in his mouth. His father was a London banker, and his mother was descended from a distinguished family of French Huguenots. At age seven, John Henry was sent to Great Ealing School, and at fifteen he became an Evangelical Christian. He graduated without honors from Trinity College in Oxford. Despite his poor academic showing, he became a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford’s intellectual center. Shortly thereafter, he abandoned Evangelicalism and was ordained a priest in the Church of England in 1825.
Newman was active in the Oxford Movement, a group of high-church Anglicans who advocated more Catholic doctrines and rituals. This led to Newman’s conversion to Roman Catholicism and his ordination as a Catholic priest in 1845. He settled in Edgbaston, an upscale Birmingham neighborhood, where he established the Oratory of St. Philip Neri, a church in which J. R. R. Tolkien was later a parishioner. In 1879, Newman was made a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII.
Newman’s writings include The Idea of a University, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, The Dream of Gerontius, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, and the hymn “Lead, Kindly Light.”
In The Dream of Gerontius, inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, Newman paints a vivid picture of the afterlife. The narrator is an elderly man, facing imminent death:
JESU, MARIA—I am near to death,
And Thou art calling me; I know it now.
Not by the token of this faltering breath,
This chill at heart, this dampness on my brow,—
(Jesu, have mercy! Mary, pray for me!)
’Tis this new feeling, never felt before,
(Be with me, Lord, in my extremity!)
That I am going, that I am no more.
’Tis this strange innermost abandonment,
(Lover of souls! great God! I look to Thee,)
This emptying out of each constituent
And natural force, by which I come to be.
Pray for me, O my friends; a visitant
Is knocking his dire summons at my door,
The like of whom, to scare me and to daunt,
Has never, never come to me before;
’Tis death,—O loving friends, your prayers!—’tis he!
After death, Gerontius’s soul is pained by the sight of God, and he begs to spend time in Purgatory until he is properly prepared to be in the divine presence. The poem ends with an angel’s assurance that Gerontius will soon be purified and worthy to meet God:
Softly and gently, dearly-ransomed soul,
In my most loving arms I now enfold thee,
And, o’er the penal waters, as they roll,
I poise thee, and I lower thee, and hold thee.
And carefully I dip thee in the lake,
And thou, without a sob or a resistance,
Dost through the fl
ood thy rapid passage take,
Sinking deep, deeper, into the dim distance.
Angels, to whom the willing task is given,
Shall tend, and nurse, and lull thee, as thou liest;
And Masses on the earth, and prayers in heaven,
Shall aid thee at the Throne of the Most Highest.
Farewell, but not forever! brother dear,
Be brave and patient on thy bed of sorrow;
Swiftly shall pass thy night of trial here,
And I will come and wake thee on the morrow.
Newman’s death from pneumonia at the age of eighty-nine was chronicled in the Times of London on Tuesday, August 12, 1890:
We have to record, with feelings of the most sincere regret, the death of His Eminence Cardinal Newman. He died last evening at the Oratory, Edgbaston, in his 90th year, after less than three days’ illness. . . . On Saturday night the Cardinal had an attack of shivering, followed by a sharp rise of temperature, and the symptoms indicative of pneumonia rapidly supervened and became acute. . . . During the day Cardinal Newman, though rapidly becoming worse, was able to speak to those about him, and in the afternoon, at his request, the Rev. W. Neville recited with him the Breviary. Yesterday morning he fell into an unconscious condition. . . . The rite of extreme unction was performed by the Rev. Austin Mills. Owing to the patient’s comatose condition the Viaticum was not administered. . . . Bishop Illsley visited the Cardinal early in the afternoon and made the “commendation of his soul” in the presence of the Oratory Fathers. There was an appointment on the part of the doctors to meet for consultation at 8 o’clock last evening. At that time it was seen that life was fast ebbing away, and both medical men remained until 12 minutes to 9, when Cardinal Newman breathed his last. He died in the presence of the Fathers of the Congregation, and there is every reason to believe that his death was painless.
