The Death of Shelley

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Grave of Percy Bysshe Shelley

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On July 8th 1822, less than a month short of his thirtieth birthday, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in the Gulf of Spezia when his boat sank in a violent summer storm. 

His body was washed ashore ten days later and, in compliance with the quarantine rules of the time, was cremated on the beach at Viareggio (Tuscany), with Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt and Edward Trelawny in attendance. Shelley's ashes were sent to Rome for burial in the city's cemetery for non-Catholics, where his son William (1816-19) was interred. 

'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.' So wrote Shelley in the preface to his poem Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats (July, 1821). Keats had died a few months earlier and was buried there. 

​Shelley's gravestone bears the words COR CORDIUM (Heart of Hearts) and three lines from Ariel's song in Shakespeare's The Tempest (II, 2): 'Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange'.
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• Related Post: Grave of John Keats. 

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