Gothicized, Glamourized, Mythologized: The Funeral of Percy Bysshe Shelley
On 16 August 1822, two hundred years ago today, the funeral of Percy Bysshe Shelley was held upon “a magnificent extent” of sea-shore on the “blue and windless Mediterranean” near Viareggio, Italy. Looking across the peaceful Ligurian Sea, no longer a raging sea-scape from la tempesta di mare that claimed Shelley’s life just five weeks prior, one could see the “Isles of Elba and Gorgona” in the clear distance. Following the incandescent flame rising ever higher from Shelley’s burning funeral pyre — a truly classical, pagan ceremony complete with offerings of spice, honey, wine, and frankincense — one’s eyes were solemnly led toward a heavenly view framed by “an immense extent of the Italian Alps, which are here particularly picturesque from their volcanic and manifold appearances, and which being composed of white marble, give their summits the resemblance of snow.”
In contrast to the beauty of the Ligurian and the picturesque sublime of the white-marbled Apuan Alps (indeed composed of white Carrara marble, or “Luna marble” as it was called in Ancient Rome), the scene was “marked by an old and withered trunk of fir-tree” and, as if right out of a piece of Gothic fiction, near it “stood a solitary hut covered with reeds.” To continue in this truly romantic portrait, painted purposefully with poetry for posterity, it was indeed a landscape “well calculated for a poet’s grave.”
The quoted narrative above comes from the first published account of Shelley’s funeral and brilliantly appropriate pagan-style cremation (unique and unusual for the time), appearing in Conversations of Lord Byron (1824), by Shelley’s own cousin Thomas Medwin. Incredibly, however, Medwin was not even in attendance. The only friends of Shelley in mourning at the ceremony were Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt, and Edward John Trelawny, the latter being the organizer of the funeral and cremation as well as a full-blown participant, according to his ever-changing accounts. Trelawny not only incensed the funeral pyre with spice and wine, he supposedly plucked Shelley’s inconsumable heart from the “fiery furnace,” badly burning his hand in the process — he added that he did this as Shelley’s brains “seethed, bubbled, and boiled as in a cauldron.” Because Medwin’s account was not first-hand, he based his telling on Trelawny’s early manuscripts. Not only that, but Medwin’s account does not even describe the cremation of Shelley. In actuality, it is a poetic telling of the cremation of Shelley’s good friend Edward Williams the day prior, who drowned with Shelley in the sudden summer squall weeks earlier on 8 July. Williams’s body was found “near a tower on the Tuscan shore, about four miles from his companion.”
According to Leslie A. Marchland, the great Byronist known particularly for his twelve-volume edition of Byron’s Letters and Journals (1973-82), Trelawny’s own version of Shelley’s funeral alters over the years (including the addition of bizarre stories of Shelley’s drowning suggesting pirates and even suicide, among other changes), containing inconsistencies and conflicting details in at least ten different narratives. Trelawny’s earliest manuscripts of Shelley’s funeral are tinctured with the Gothic, often rather graphically, but his later published versions become revised and more glamourized. Marchland calls this glamourization on Trelawny’s part a “desire to prettify the story for his more squeamish Victorian contemporaries.” There was nothing pretty or glamourizing in what Trelawny wrote pertaining to the state of Shelley’s remains after being exhumed for cremation. In fact, Trelawny’s description is downright gruesome, and not at all fit for the mythologized etherealizing of Shelley which would occur later, and still occurs today:
The body was in the worst state of putridity and very offensive: the soldiers employed, were obliged to strengthen their nerves continually by drinking brandy and the officers retired from a sight so horrible. Both the legs were separated at the knees, the thigh bones bared and the flesh hung about in shreds; the hands were off and the arm bones protruded, the skull black & neither features nor face remaining.
Italian quarantine laws and regulations at the time required that Shelley and Williams were to be cremated first before being allowed to be transported elsewhere — eventually, in 1823, Shelley’s ashes would be interred in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, while much later in 1884 Williams’s ashes would be buried alongside Jane Williams in Kensal Green Cemetery in London. But before this could be done, Shelley and Williams were crudely buried in temporary graves and covered with quicklime, decomposing slowly and horrifically over a period of five weeks. As the bodies were exhumed for cremation, Trelawny’s description of soldiers fortifying their resolve with copious amounts of brandy should have been quite enough to paint the horror of the scene, but Trelawny goes further and describes missing limbs, protruding bones, and shredded flesh — Shelley’s “mangled corpse” would miraculously become whole again in a later version, which I will write out near the end of this essay.
Trelawny would also record the reaction of Lord Byron upon seeing his good friend’s mutilated remains of “shapeless flesh.” Although Byron attended Shelley’s funeral, written accounts suggest he could not handle the disturbing spectacle and instead went swimming toward his yacht the Bolivar, anchored in the distance — Byron himself writes just two weeks after the funeral that all of his skin had “peeled off from swimming three hours in a hot Sun at Via Reggio.” This is Trelawny’s 1822 account:
Lord B who had been standing over the livid mass of shapeless flesh — exclaimed in disgust — “what are we to resemble that — it may be the carcass of a sheep for all I can distinguish” — and pointing to the handkerchief — said — “see an old rag retains its form longer — what a degrading reflection.”
However, some thirty-six years later in Trelawny’s first published account, Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (1858), there appears a rather altered narrative. Was it pure invention on Trelawny’s part? Perhaps. He does, at least, point out that the handkerchief indeed belonged to Edward (Ellerker) Williams by writing out the initials:
“Is that a human body?” exclaimed Byron; “why it’s more like a carcass of a sheep, or any other animal, than a man; this is a satire on our pride and folly.” I pointed to the letters E.E.W. on the black silk handkerchief. Byron looking on, muttered, “The entrails of a worm hold together longer than the potter’s clay, of which man is made”
The 1858 Recollections, as well as later narratives, are certainly written with a Victorian audience in mind, to glamourize and “etherealize” Shelley and his romantic, otherworldly funeral, but they are not without a touch of decay and Gothic sentiment. In Recollections, Trelawny recalls how Byron had asked to “preserve [Shelley’s] skull for him,” but, in one of many moments of self-aggrandizement throughout the narratives, Trelawny remembers how Byron once used a skull unearthed at Newstead Abbey as a drinking vessel and was thus determined that Shelley’s remains “should not be so profaned.” As a brief Gothic aside with regard to this skull-cup remembrance, according to Medwin in his Conversations of Lord Byron (1824), Byron did indeed have a skull fashioned into a drinking cup:
There had been found by the gardener, in digging, a skull that had probably belonged to some jolly monk or friar of the Abbey, about the time it was dis-monasteried. Observing it to be of giant size, and in a perfect state of preservation, a strange fancy seized me of having it set and mounted as a drinking cup. I accordingly sent it to town, and it returned with a very high polish and of a mottled colour like tortoise-shell.
According to Medwin’s account, Byron continues with some rather wild tales, perhaps simply to amuse, such as claiming to have established a “new order” of twelve, all in ceremonial “black gowns,” passing around the highly polished skull, now filled with claret, drinking in ritualistic revelry “in imitation of the Goths of old.” Apparently, Byron even remembers “scribbling some lines about it,” which, without having to read between the lines, could be from his poem “Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed From a Skull” (1808):
Better to hold the sparkling grape,
Than nurse the earth-worm’s slimy brood;
And circle in the goblet’s shape
The drink of Gods, than reptiles’ food.
Returning again to the more Gothicized accounts of Trelawny, if not self-aggrandized, in another early manuscript he writes yet another macabre scene of horror, describing the use of “hooks” to drag the “mangled corpses” into “shallow holes” as to avoid contamination from the badly decomposed, fish-eaten bodies — the mutilated remains were in such a profound state of corruption that they were not to be touched. Death had stripped them not only of flesh, but had left them as unrecognizable relics of decay and contagion. Nothing in Trelawny’s description here paints a glamorous image, or an angelic one, except, perhaps, for the saving angel of his own self-importance, rescuing their disregarded bodies from “the severity of Quarantine Laws & bigotry of religion”:
their Familys & friends intreated me to undertake this painful task, and to rescue their remains from the humbling & degrading manner which the severity of Quarantine Laws & bigotry of religion (Catholicism) had consigned ‘to the little house with the narrow gate’ — their mangled corpses — which had been dragged on shore by hooks and tumbled into shallow holes — barely covered with loose sand and but for a massy old root of a tree — placed over all the next sea would have reclaimed their bodys — An officer cautioned me to have the graves guarded or the dogs here half wild would devour them at night!
Leigh Hunt, on the other hand, would glamourize Shelley’s funeral, adding to the myth of Shelley the spirit, Shelley the angel, etherealized in imagery of his “seraphic countenance” looking out from the “inconceivable beauty” of the ceremony to gaze one last time upon his friends who “had done their duty.” One cannot help but see a touch of Trelawny in these last words. Ironically, just as Medwin had done in his fantasized first-hand account of 1824, although Hunt was indeed at Shelley’s funeral, he too based his narrative on Trelawny’s early manuscripts — without resorting to gruesome detail of mortal decay.
Hunt’s account, the second published narrative of Shelley’s funeral, first appeared in Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries (1828), just four years after Medwin’s. Unlike Medwin, and even unlike Trelawny in his revised 1858 narrative, Hunt does not use the picturesque scenery of Williams’s cremation for Shelley’s. Instead, he writes that the location of Williams’s body was “well adapted for a man of his imaginative cast of mind,” and how he had “wished his remains to rest undisturbed.” Williams was not to remain undisturbed, and neither was Shelley, and Hunt’s afterthought of “but it was willed otherwise” suggests an air of regret, perhaps even guilt, for the burning of their bodies was seen by some as “a horrible and unfeeling thing,” which he writes about shortly after. But not before setting the scene: “Before us was the sea, with islands; behind us the Apennines; beside us, a large tract of thick wood, stunted and twisted into fantastic shapes by the sea-breeze. The heat was intense, the sand being so scorched as to render standing on it painful.”
Hunt’s very next paragraph begins with a single sentence about “Trelawny proceed[ing] to describe the disinterment and burning of Mr. Williams’s remains.” Instead of describing Trelawny’s account of “mangled corpses” being dragged by hooks, Hunt writes nothing else on the subject and proceeds directly with an attempt to dispel unfair accusations and, in my opinion, his own feelings of guilt with regard to this spectacle of cremation. He writes that the “friends of the deceased” (himself included, of course) were “accused of wishing to make a sensation” and of doing “a horrible and unfeeling thing, &c.” The unjust criticism Hunt writes about pertains to the burning of their bodies which, as I have previously mentioned, was unique and unusual at the time — it was certainly seen as some sort of sensationalized pagan ritual, and not in a good way. In truth, the family and friends of both Shelley and Williams wanted “their remains interred in regular places of burial; and that for this purpose they could be removed in no other manner” except by being cremated first. Hunt continues on the grounds of justification that both Shelley and Williams would have approved of such a fate:
Such being the case, it is admitted that the mourners did not refuse themselves the little comfort of supposing, that lovers of books and antiquity, like Mr. Shelley and his friend, would not have been sorry to foresee this part of their fate. Among the materials for burning, as many of the gracefuller and more classical articles as could be procured — frankincense, wine, &c. were not forgotten.
Shelley and Williams, both “lovers of books and antiquity,” would have undoubtedly found the classical funeral pyre a most brilliant send off into the undiscovered universe — Shelley, most especially, would have appreciated such incendiary heathenry, sending his “energy forever to the stars.” Even Keats’s last volume of poems, found on Shelley’s body and used in identifying his unrecognizable remains, was thrown into the fire. According to the poet Robert Browning, when speaking with Hunt and inquiring if Keats’s book still existed, Hunt replied, “No, I threw it into the burning pile; Shelley said he would return it with his own hands into mine, and so he shall return it.” The ancient pagan rite and burning of the “gracefuller and more classical articles” should have expected to draw much derision and hostility, and Hunt certainly understood this. After all, Shelley’s radical ideas and writings were well known, especially with regard to his atheistic sentiments on institutional religion and God, and when news of his death reached England, the conservative newspaper The Courier wrote, “Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned; now he knows whether there is a God or no”. Hunt, still in the mind of poetic justification, continues to give a wonderfully glamourized account of the funerals, etherealizing Shelley as an angelic spirit, “seraphic” and heavenly among the sublime beauty of the scene:
On both days, the extraordinary beauty of the flame arising from the funeral pile was noticed. The weather was beautifully fine. The Mediterranean, now soft and lucid, kissed the shore as if to make peace with it. The yellow sand and blue sky intensely contrasted with one another: marble mountains touched the air with coolness, and the flame of the fire bore away towards heaven in vigorous amplitude, waving and quivering with a brightness of inconceivable beauty. It seemed as though it contained the glassy essence of vitality. You might have expected a seraphic countenance to look out of it, turning once more, before it departed, to thank the friends that had done their duty.
However, the apotheosis of glamourized, romanticized narratives of Shelley’s funeral belongs to none other than the incorrigible myth-maker himself, Edward Trelawny. Historian William St. Clair called Trelawny “the incurable romancer,” a self-created Byronic corsair to impress the Shelley circle of literati with tales of adventure and fantasy. Although he only knew Shelley for six months, Trelawny self-styled himself as an “intimate friend” and was considered the foremost expert on Shelley throughout the rest of his long life. When Trelawny died at the age of 88, outliving Shelley by almost sixty years, he had arranged for his ashes to be buried next to Shelley’s in Rome (the very plot he had purchased in 1822) with an inscription on his tombstone from Shelley’s poem “Epitaph”:
These are two friends whose lives were undivided:
So let their memory be, now they have glided
Under the grave: let not their bones be parted,
For their two hearts in life were single-hearted.
Ever the romanticist and revisionist, Trelawny’s 1858 account of Shelley’s funeral from Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron is the crowning achievement of what one may call “mythologized Shelley,” the epitome of Shelleyan glamourie in death, the divine summit in Shelley’s etherealized divinity whose once “mangled corpse” now miraculously becomes whole, complete, angelic and idealized, placed “entire into the furnace,” taking to the “singular appearance the salt and frankincense gave to the flame” and ascending into a glamourized transcendence as a poetic spirit of the sublime. And although there are moments of “Gothic sensationalism,” there is nothing quite as disturbing as the gruesome, macabre descriptions from his early 1822 manuscripts — though one can certainly argue that his bit about how Shelley’s “brains literally seethed, bubbled, and boiled as in a cauldron” was more than just a trifle Gothic. And yet, even if I do have trouble discerning fact from fiction in literally anything Trelawny has written, I cannot help but admire his 1858 account of Shelley’s funeral, and find it an appropriate scene of the Italian picturesque and fitting conclusion to the life and death of the brilliantly original, peerless Percy Bysshe Shelley:
The lonely and grand scenery that surrounded us so exactly harmonised with Shelley’s genius, that I could imagine his spirit soaring over us. The sea, with the islands of Gorgona, Capraja, and Elba, was before us; old battlemented watch-towers stretched along the coast, backed by the marble-crested Apennines glistening in the sun, picturesque from their diversified outlines, and not a human dwelling was in sight.
As I thought of the delight Shelley felt in such scenes of loneliness and grandeur whilst living, I felt we were no better than a herd of wolves or a pack of wild dogs in tearing out his battered and naked body from the pure yellow sand that lay so lightly over it, to drag him back to the light of day; but the dead have no voice, nor had I power to check the sacrilege — the work went on silently in the deep and unresisting sand; not a word was spoken, for the Italians have a touch of sentiment, and their feelings are easily excited into sympathy.
Byron was silent and thoughtful. We were startled and drawn together by a dull hollow sound that followed the blow of a mattock; the iron had struck a skull, and the body was soon uncovered. Lime had been strewn on it; this, or decomposition, had the effect of staining it of a dark and ghastly indigo colour. Byron asked me to preserve the skull for him; but remembering that he had formerly used one as a drinking-cup, I was determined Shelley’s should not be so profaned. The limbs did not separate from the trunk, as in the case of Williams’s body, so that the corpse was removed entire into the furnace. I had taken the precaution of having more and larger pieces of timber, in consequence of my experience of the day before of the difficulty of consuming a corpse in the open air with our apparatus.
After the fire was well kindled we repeated the ceremony of the previous day; and more wine was poured over Shelley’s dead body than he had consumed during his life. This with the oil and salt made the yellow flames glisten and quiver. The heat from the sun and fire was so intense that the atmosphere was tremulous and wavy. 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.
Byron could not face this scene, he withdrew to the beach and swam off to the Bolivar. Leigh Hunt remained in the carriage. The fire was so fierce as to produce a white heat on the iron, and to reduce its contents to grey ashes. The only portions that were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull; but what surprised us all was that the heart remained entire. In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace, my hand was severely burnt; and had any one seen me do the act I should have been put into quarantine.
Shelley’s unquenchable heart may not have taken to the flame and thus “remained entire,” but the rest of his mortal remains certainly did, and once they were reduced to smoldering ash, “dust to the dust,” his now “pure spirit shall flow / Back to the burning fountain whence it came” — a sort of Orphic transcendence of spiritual rebirth, the unquenchable spirit that Shelley calls “a portion of the Eternal,” the Absolute One interpreted in Neoplatonism that all created things, especially the immortal human soul, return to. It is the returning to this “burning fountain,” or perhaps the Demiurge (creator of the universe) of Platonic philosophy, that is so Orphean in nature, for the immortal human soul, before its “earthly descent” into a living being, first existed as a “pure spirit” among “the Eternal,” and, during its earthly animation, desires to be reborn again back into the transcendental existence from “whence it came.” Shelley identifies Plato’s Demiurge as a poet under the influence of divine inspiration, or “divine madness,” entering an otherworldly realm of poetic imagination and creation. In Shelley’s own translation, he writes that “the authors of those great poems which we admire, do not attain to excellence through the rules of any art, but they utter their beautiful melodies of verse in a state of inspiration, and, as it were, possessed by a spirit not their own. Thus the composers of lyrical poetry create those admired songs of theirs in a state of divine insanity, like the Corybantes, who lose all control over their reason in the enthusiasm of the scared dance… For a poet is indeed a thing ethereally light, winged, and sacred, nor can he compose anything worth calling poetry until he becomes inspired, and, as it were, mad, or whilst any reason remains in him.” Shelley again writes of this otherworldly realm of poetic creation in his A Defence of Poetry (1840), writing that poetry “acts in a divine and unapprehended manner, beyond and above consciousness,” and that “poetry defeats the curse which binds us… it equally creates for us a being within our being… It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is chaos… It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds.” Shelley continues to quote the “bold and true word of Tasso”, Non Merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta (none merits the name of creator, except God and the Poet).
In my last essay, “On the 200th Anniversary of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Death,” I began with an epigraph from the very last stanza of Adonais (1821), Shelley’s brilliant elegy on the death of John Keats. Perhaps it is fitting, then, to end this essay, the final journey of Shelley’s Orphean transcendence back to the world of spirits and “Eternal” that exists “beyond and above consciousness,” with the penultimate stanza from the very same poem:
That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,
That Beauty in which all things work and move,
That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.
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