Travel Blog 3: TRAGEDY AND LOSS ON THE TUSCAN COAST

It’s January in Viareggio, and an expansive Tuscan beach that teems with visitors in summer is empty. It’s barely warm enough to stand, but the dome of gray cloud, its colour matched perfectly by the soft lapping waves, makes today somehow ideal for this pilgrimage.

Perhaps it is because the mood so closely matches Louis Édouard Fournier’s moving, albeit romanticized, depiction of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s cremation in August of 1822, on the spot where I now stand.

Shelley had been lost at sea ten days earlier when his small sailboat capsized in a storm. When his body finally washed ashore, it was identified by a book of poetry written by his friend John Keats that he had in his possession. He was twenty-nine.

His tragic death is both ironic and disturbingly prophetic, given the words in the final stanza of his epic poem Adonais, an elegy for the recently deceased Keats:

… my spirit’s bark is driven

Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng

Whose sails were never to the tempest given.

The massy earth and spherèd skies are riven!

I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar!

Fournier’s painting accurately depicts Shelley’s friends and fellow writers Leigh Hunt and Edward John Trelawny standing by the funeral pyre. Trelawny recorded the event in some detail, stating that “the ashes fell through the cracks and the heart remained entire.” No other family or friends were present, including Shelley’s close friend Lord Byron, who—although in Tuscany—was reportedly too overwhelmed to witness the cremation.

Neither was Shelley’s wife, Mary.

Ill, distraught, and expecting their third child, she remained at home, though her profound grief is poignantly conveyed in her letters. “I am cut off by all that bound me to the world,” she wrote.

It is true that Percy Shelley’s heart, presumed to have been calcified by a prior illness, did not burn. Trelawny brought it to Mary, who kept it until her death, after which it was passed on to their son. The heart was ultimately laid to rest with Mary at St Peter’s Church in Bournemouth, England.

Not far up the road from this spot on the beach stands a monument to Shelley. His bust looks out onto the waters that ended his life. His stare is resolute and unbothered. An expression that portrays defiance in the face of a life cut tragically short, reflecting a legacy, and a heart, that refuse to yield to time or tide.