Bysshe Shelley was an excitable, brilliant young man—inventive and
imaginative and susceptible to tales of the supernatural. Throughout his life,
boyhood to manhood, there are stories about him getting so excited about a
late-night sound or suggestion or scene or story that he—in modern terminology—freaked
out.
Let’s look at just one of them. Not long before he died, he and
Mary and little Percy and some friends were living in a seaside house, Casa
Magni, in Lerici, Italy. (The house still stands (see below)—though a seawall now keeps it
dry.) Edward Williams (one of their friends) recorded the following incident in
his journal on Monday, May 6, 1822:
After tea while
walking with Shelley on the terrace and observing the effect of moonshine on
the waters, he complained of being unusually nervous, and stopping short he
grasped me violently by the arm and stared steadfastly on the white surf that
broke upon the beach under our feet. Observing him sensibly affected I demanded
of him if he was in pain—but he only answered, saying “There it is again!—there!”—He
recovered after some time and declared that he saw, as plainly as then he saw
me a naked child rise from the sea, clap its hands as if in joy and smiling at
him. This was a trance that it required some reasoning and philosophy entirely
to awaken him from ….[1]
Almost exactly two months later (July 8) Williams would drown in
the boating accident that also took the lives of Charles Vivian (a young deck
hand) and Bysshe Shelley himself.
Bysshe’s excitability and impulsiveness manifested itself in a
variety of ways. As a boy (as we’ve seen) he liked to scare his siblings with
frightening tales; he performed electrical experiments that literally shocked
some observers; more than once in his later life he decided he was going to
adopt someone else’s child. And, of course, there were those sixteen-year-old
girls he ran away with.
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| Casa Magni (then) |
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| Casa Magni, April 23, 1999 |
[1] Frederick L. Jones, ed. Maria Gisborne & Edward E. Williams,
Shelley’s Friends: Their Journals and Letters (Norman: U of Oklahoma P,
1951), 147.
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