Thursday 8 July 2021

nothing of him that doth fade but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange

Early advocate for political reform through nonviolence, atheist, free love proponent, vegetarian and Romantic poet, the anniversary of the death of Percy Bysshe Shelley (*1792 - †1822, previously) during a boating accident caused by a sudden storm in the Gulf of La Spezia, setting sail from Livorno for Lerici, having concluded a meeting with Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron about starting a new journal falls on this day. As the bodies of Shelley and the crew were not recovered for ten days, their remains were cremated on the beach. Not widely read outside of his close circle of friends, Shelley gained a posthumous fame and legacy. His gravestone in Rome bears the above epithet from the interlude “Ariel’s Song” in The Tempest.