Percy Bysshe Shelley

From Philosopedia

Shelley, Percy Bysshe (22 January 1792 - 8 July 1822)

Many are the tales about Shelley. He switched from Eton, where he refused to fag (a Briticism to describe English public school boys who are required to act as servant to an older schoolmate), to Oxford. There in a school essay, Shelley wrote that so long as there is theism there needs logically to be the antithesis. But his anonymous essay, “The Necessity of Atheism,” (1811), earned no A+. On the contrary, Oxford expelled him. His lifetime friend and biographer, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, also was expelled because he denied complicity. Shelley's father, Sir Timothy Shelley, also forbade him his house.

Shelley then went to London, wrote "Queen Mab," and met 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook, marrying her in 1811 and separating after two children had been born. In 1816 he learned that his wife had drowned herself, so he claimed the custody of his children. Lord Chancellor Eldon, however, decided against him, largely because of Shelley’s heretical opinions, which were considered radical in his day but are mild today. Shelley previously had written A Letter to Lord Ellenborough, indignantly attacking the sentence the judge passed on E. I. Eaton for publishing Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason. In 1816 Shelley married Mary, daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. In 1818, fearing their son might also be taken from him, Shelley left England never to return . . . and never to live to the age of thirty-one.

Corliss Lamont described Shelley’s outlook as having “a vague pantheistic belief.” His bisexuality and anti-establishment views shocked Europe more than wife Mary’s Frankenstein. His "Queen Mab" (1813) tells how he wept when his mother took him “to see an atheist burned. . . . The thirsty fire crept round his manly limbs; his resolute eyes were scorched to blindness soon; his death pang rent my heart! The insensate mob uttered a cry of triumph, and I wept. ‘Weep not, child!’ cried my mother, ‘for that man has said, “There is no God!” ’ ” On the contrary, Shelley believed “the being called God bears every mark of a veil woven by philosophical conceit, to hide the ignorance of the philosophers even from themselves.” For Shelley, classical Greece had seen the highest fulfillment of man as a free being; the introduction of Christianity, however, withered man’s spirit and constrained his estimate of himself. For Shelley, “Every reflecting mind must allow that there is no proof of the existence of a Deity.” Queen Mab contains the following:

How ludicrous the priest’s dogmatic roar!

The weight of his exterminating curses,

How light! and his affected charity,

To suit the pressure of the changing times,

What palpable deceit!—but for thy aid,

Religion! but for thee, prolific fiend,

Who peopleth earth with demons, hell with men,

And heaven with slaves!

In 1812 Shelley wrote to Elizabeth Hitchener, “I have lately had some conversation with Southey which has elicited my true opinions of God—he says I ought not to call myself an Atheist, since in reality I believe that the Universe is God.” Remarks Berman: “So for Southey the universe (in Shelley’s thought) is another name for God; whereas for Shelley God is another name for the universe. The distinction is not unimportant.” Berman has written a particularly thorough description of Shelley’s views, finding his philosophical method “is closer to that of Hammon, Turner, and Collins than it is to Scepticus’s. It is epistemological rather than metaphysical. Shelley is more interested in the nature of our knowledge and belief in God than in the nature of God per se.”

Shelley’s little known “A Refutation of Deism” (1814) has been reprinted in J. C. A. Gaskin’s Varieties of Unbelief (1989). In it, the young Shelley not only rejects the existence of God but also rejects Judeo-Christian revelation, citing its immoral character and suspect historicity. His arguments against “deism” also apply to traditional “theism.” Shelley cites as atheists Epicurus, Democritus, Pliny, Lucretius, and Euripides. He also lists Anaxagoras, Pythagoras, and Plato as being theists.

In Child Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto Two (1811), Shelley wrote

Even Gods must yield -

Religions take their turn:

'Twas Jove's - 'tis Mahomet's -

and other Creeds

Will rise with other years, till

Man shall learn

Vainly his incense soars, his

victim bleeds;

Poor child of Doubt and Death,

whose hope is built on reeds.

Shelley accidentally drowned off Leghorn while returning in a small yacht from an 1822 visit to his friend, the bisexual Lord Byron. Sharing his fate were his friend Williams and a sailor lad, all of whom had unsuccessfully faced a squall which submerged them. When Shelley’s body washed ashore near Viareggio, its face was so disfigured that his body had to be identified by the copies of Aeschylus and John Keats’s poems doubled back in his jacket. “The face and hands, and parts of the body not protected by the dress, were fleshless,” wrote the poet’s friend Edward Trelawny. Because of Italian law and a plague at that time, the body had to be cremated on the spot. Trelawny and poets Byron and Leigh Hunt, called by Tom Weil, “perhaps the most literate team of undertakers in history,” performed the ritual. An iron mattock was used to crack Shelley’s skull, which Byron had requested be saved for him. Trelawny said “more wine was poured over Shelley’s dead body than he had consumed during his life,” after which Trelawny tossed salt and frankincense onto the flames and poured wine and oil over the cadaver, leading to dancing flames as Shelley cooked. Hunt recalled the “inconceivable beauty” of the flickering flame-sheet. Presently, continued Trelawny, “the corpse fell open and the heart was laid bare. The frontal bone of the skull, where it had been struck with the mattock, fell off; and, as the back of the head rested on the red-hot bottom bars of the furnace, the brains literally seethed, bubbled, and boiled as in a cauldron, for a very long time. . . but what surprised us all was that the heart remained entire. In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace, my hand was severely burnt.”

- Shelley's Cremation

Arthur Norman, in a 1955 article in The Journal of the History of Medicine, suggested that Shelley may have suffered from “a progressively calcifying heart . . . which indeed would have resisted cremation as readily as a skull, a jaw, or fragments of bone.” Later, Trelawny—who said Shelley was an atheist to the last—presented Shelley’s heart (some say it was his liver) to the poet’s wife, Mary, for burial in Bournemouth, England. In 1889, sixty-seven years after his death, the heart (or liver) was buried with the body of his son, Sir Percy Florence Shelley. However, Trelawny did not give the skull to Byron, for, “. . . remembering that he had formerly used one as a drinking cup, I was determined Shelley’s should be so profaned.”

Shelley’s ashes, contained in an oak casket, were delivered to the British consul in Rome who, because the Vatican had closed the old section of the Protestant Cemetery, stored the remains in his wine cellar. At Mary’s request, they tried to rebury their son William, who had been buried in the same cemetery three years before, with his father. However, beneath the child’s stone they found, instead, the skeleton of a grown man. So Shelley was buried alone for a time, then moved by Trelawny to a better plot near the rear wall. Byron, despite having a clubfoot and who once swam the Bosporus, swam to the site where Shelley had died, symbolically leaving a flower. Instead of the marble statue of a nude Shelley spread supine, just washed ashore from the fatal shipwreck, which is found in the first quadrangle at Oxford’s University College (where Shelley was “sent down” in 1811 for his freshman tract in favor of atheism), a simple marker decorates the poet’s grave. A white slab embedded in the ground, it contains only his name, the words cor cordium (heart of hearts), the dates of his birth and death in Latin, and Trelawny’s lines from The Tempest:

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Cor Cordium

Natus iv. Aug MDCCXCII

Obit. vii. Jul. MDCCCXXII

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Today both Trelawny and Keats now lie nearby. Trelawny once wrote,

• The principal fault I have to find is that the Shelleyan writers, being Christians themselves, seem to think that a man of genius cannot be an Atheist, and so they strain their own faculties to disprove what Shelley asserted from the very earliest stage of his career to the last day of his life. He ignored all religions as superstitions. . . . A clergyman wrote in the visitors’ book at the Mer de Glace, Chamourni, something to the following effect: ‘No one can view this sublime scene and deny the existence of God.’ Under which Shelley, using a Greek phrase, wrote, “P. B. Shelley, Atheist,” thereby proclaiming his opinion to all the world. And he never regretted having done so.

(Where might his heart have been buried? See entry for Mary Shelley.)

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