From the almanac for July 8th -- Shelley's grave marker is in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome; have you visited?
Percy Bysshe Shelley died at sea off the coast of Italy on this day in 1822, just shy of his 30th birthday. He had been living in Lerici for about four years, and his work was maturing; most of his poems prior to that time had been political in nature, but when he got away from the daily annoyance of British politics, he began to realize that he couldn't reshape the outside world, so he transferred his idealism to his poetry.
He had sailed from his home in Lerici to Livorno to visit his friend Leigh Hunt. On the return, the seas were stormy, and his schooner sank. Shelley had never bothered to learn to swim, and he drowned. The conservative London newspaper The Courier reported, "Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned: now he knows whether there is a God or no." Uncharitable obituaries aside, he was almost immediately re-created as a tragic, otherworldly figure. His widow, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, set the ball in motion when she wrote, "I was never the Eve of any Paradise, but a human creature blessed by an elemental spirit's company & love — an angel who imprisoned in flesh could not adapt himself to his clay shrine & so has flown and left it." His friend Edward John Trelawny was even more melodramatic. He organized Shelley's beach cremation, turning it into a pagan ceremony with wine and frankincense, and later wrote an account of Shelley's death, which he revised and embellished heavily as years went on. He added conspiracy theories and deathbed confessions — an Italian fisherman admitted he had deliberately rammed the boat, or so Trelawny claimed— and sometimes implied Shelley had committed suicide.
Trelawny reportedly retrieved Shelley's heart, which had not burned, from the pyre. He presented it to the widow, who was not at the funeral; women were kept away from cremations for their health. She's said to have kept it the rest of her life, wrapped in a copy of his poem Adonais (1821). As for the rest of his remains, his ashes were interred at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. His monument is inscribed with the words Cor Cordium — "heart of hearts" — and a few lines from Shakespeare's The Tempest: "Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange."
From the last stanza of Adonais:
The breath whose might I have invoked in song
Descends on me; 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 sphered skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;
Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.