But Shelley, Edward Williams and Charlie Vian, their boat-boy, set off from Livorno in their 18ft yacht, the Don Juan. On July 8th, 1822, the weather was stormy. He also found time to write a love-note to Jane, wife of his friend Edward Williams which read: ‘How soon those hours past, and how slowly they return to pass so soon again, and perhaps for ever, in which we have lived together so intimately and so happily.’ Shelley had prevented Mary from haemorrhaging to death by placing her in a bath of icy water. Shelley moved to Italy for the rest of his short life. Shelley than eloped with Mary Godwin, daughter of William Godwin who taught the anarchic philosophy that rational creatures could live in harmony without laws and institutions. He married 16 year old Harriet Westbrook, a stormy marriage which lasted five years before Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine. He was educated at Eton and University College, Oxford, from where he was sent down for circulating a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism. Shelley was a Romantic Genius who spent most of his short life wasting his immense talent. The lone and level sands stretch far away. Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: Which yet survive, stamped on those lifeless things, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,Īnd wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

The statue of Rameses II, also known as Ozymandias, in the British Museum which inspired Shelley to write his poem Ozymandias 1817

Percy shelley sonnets