A POET’S GRAVE

New Zealand Tablet, 22 July 1915, Page 51

A POET’S GRAVE

(For the *'N.Z. Tablet, by the Rev. J. Kelly," Ph.D.) | If you take the train to San Paolo it will bring you through old Rome, between the Forum and the Capitol, by the Tiber under the Aventine, and on into a queer corner, within the walls, but cut off from the city by the Aventine and the river. It is called Testaccio, from a little hill which was the dust-heap where the old Romans shot their rubbish. Beyond Testaccio are the stone-yards where the truncated pyramids of lava, with which Roman streets and roads are paved, are cut into shape. Through the heaps of stone a path leads to the gate of a little cemetery, called in Rome, II Cimitero Inglese. This God's acre is a place worth visiting, though rarely does one meet there the übiquitous tourist. The high walls of Rome run around it on the south and west,- and right beside it is the curious pyramid of white marble known as the Tomb of Cains Cestius. Samuel Rogers loved to visit this solemn retreat and to muse there, as Addison used amid the storied monuments of Westminster Abbey. Shelley, writing from Rome in December, 1818, describes it as follows: ' The English burying-place is a green slope near the walls, under the pyramidal tomb of Cains Cestius, and is, I think, the mest■■beautiful and solemn cemetery I have ever seen. To see the sun shining on its bright grass, fresh when we first visited it, with the autumnal dews, and hear the whispering of the wind among the leaves of the trees which have overgrown the tomb of Cestius, and the soil which is stirring in the warm earth, and to mark the tombs, mostly of women and young people who were buried there, one might, if one were to die, desire the sleep they seem to sleep. Such is the human mind, and as it peoples with its wishes vacancy and oblivion.' In this beautiful cemetery Shelley's one son, William, was buried in the June following. In December, a.year and a-half later, Keats died in Rome and found his last earthly resting-place in* the Cimitero Inglese. The erroneous belief that a review of Endymion in the Quarterly killed Keats roused Shelley to the composition of Adonais. 'I have dipped my pen,' he says, in consuming fire for his destroyers; otherwise the style is calm and solemn.' Adonais lies dead, and those who mourn him must seek out his tomb: ' Go thou to Rome —at once the paradise, The grave, the city, and the wilderness; And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise, And flowering weeds and fragrant copses dress The bones of Desolation's nakedness, Pass, till the spirit of the spot shall lead Thy footsteps to a slope of green access, Where like an infant's smile, over the dead A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread ; From the world's bitter wind Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb, What Adonais is, why fear we to become?' Beneath the shadow of these ancient walls, and side by side with John Keats, the mortal remains of Shelley were interred in July, 1822, just before he reached his thirtieth birthday. In the place he loved so clearly his young turbulent heart found its grave. Nearly a century has gone now since Shelley died after such a brilliant meteoric flight across the literary firmament as the world has never known before or since. What a life it was! Think of him, a golden-haired beautiful boy with his head already among the clouds in his schooldays, working out a mad philosophy of his own and losing all the happiness of life in foolish faithfulness to his immature convictions, following the gleam wherever it seemed to lead, rejected by his own father, expelled from his university, at war with all timehonored, human institutions, an iconoclast and a profound atheistthough atheist he never was, I believe—and all the time., in spite of ill-health and poverty and gloom, filling the world with song as clear in its lyric call and as beautiful as the unpremeditated strains of his skylark. i-wl-He.-* had a passionate love for truth, and : _, an unselfishness more than mortal. It was just these qualities, combined with his insane, pernicious theories, that

ruined his life. '.'■] Now that he is *'.so",long dead, and. especially as .his : ■ theories count for so 'little", we can afford to forget find much to admire in his reckless loyalty to ; his idealsto right as he saw it—'a beautiful, ineffectual angel, beating his luminous wings in the void.' When all is said, these words will remain the /truest and justest criticism of Shelley. :.; . \ As a poet he. had his .faults, such faults as one might expect from a man of his temperament. That his work suffers from haste, carelessness, unreality, and; inequality is not surprising. He wanted patience, not: power. He wrote hastily, printed hastily, and hastily passed on to fresh fields of poetic fancy. And still, his defects notwithstanding, he is probably the loftiest and greatest lyric poet in the English language. ; It has : been said that an appreciation of Prometheus Unbound may be reckoned as the test of a man's capacity for understanding lyric poetry ; The Cenci remains the greatest: English tragedy since the days of Shakespeare; lyrics such as ' The Ode to the Westwind ' and 2 The Skylark % permanently prove that our language is capable of verbal harmony and melody of the very highest order.- _ And it is all the work of a boy. For Shelley remained a boy always, to the end of his short life. His twenty-nine years were indeed crowded with incident and experience. One might say truly that, like his death, it was all a tragedy. And his death itself, what a real tragedy it was ! At Pisa in 1821-2, Shelley spent his last winter. His friend, Trelawney, tells us ' he was up at six orseven, reading Plato, Sophocles, or Spinoza, with the accompaniment of a hunch of dry bread then he joined Williams in a sail on the Arno, in a flat-bottomed skiff, book in hand, and from thence he went to the pineforest, or some out-of-the-way place. When the birds went to roost he, returned home, and talked and read 1 till midnight.' He had done a good deal of boating on the Arno and now determined on a yacht for excursions on the sea. According to his own instructions a crank \ little sailing boat was built. . Byron christened her 'Don Juan,' and Shelley, not liking the name, changed it for ' Ariel.' On July 8, between Leghorn and Lerici,'the ' Ariel ' brought Shelley to his death. In a magnificent passage De Quincey tells the story of the sudden tempest swooping down on : the Gulf of. Spezia, passing rapidly but leaving no trace of Shelley's boat on the sea. The god of the storm had blotted out of existence the daring young atheist. The body was thrown up on the beach on July 18. It was burned by Byron, Leigh Hunt, and Trelawney on the sandy between the blue Midland Sea and the marble-crested Apennines; and the ashes were removed to Rome by Trelawney. There they rest beneath the sombre pines, under the shadow of the tombof Cains Cestius, by the side of Keats. Leigh Hunt wrote the simple epitaph : Percy Bysshe Shelley, Cor Cordium. Natus 4 Aug., 1792; Obiit 8 Jul., 1822. I Trelawney added three lines from The Tempest, beloved by Shelley : • .-..,.' ' Nothing of him doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change ; Into something rich and "strange.? '• «^-W 'And so,' writes Lady Shelley, the sea and the earth closed over one who was great as a poet, and still greater as a philanthropist and of whom it may be said, that his wild spiritual character seems to have prepared him for being thus snatched from life under circumstances of mingled terror and beauty, while his powers were yet in their spring freshness, and age had not come to render the ethereal body decrepit, or to wither the heart which could not be consumed by fire.' Trelawney had" rescued the heart from the flames, and it lies at Boscombe. I Thus ended the wild, restless life of this child of genius. _ In the shelter of the Cimitero Inglese,- where the pines murmur and the crocuses and violets cover the graves in the spring, the waste, and the pity. of that life forcibly come home to the pilgrim" to Shelley's grave. Sunt lachrymae rerum! ■.-;.'>".