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World of Arts:
The mutual intellectuality between Byron and Shelly
Gwen HERAT
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The very water he homaged, took his life when his boat caught
fire. |
Percy Bysshe Shelly |
The vibrant spirit of Shelly is reflected in his poems much superior
to Byron because of his adoration of liberty but in the process, it led
him to excesses of opinion among many that were not the call of the day
in which he lived. His weakness came from an ethercal spirit that failed
to relate to people of the time.
After Shelly’s second marriage to a wife who understood his desires,
his writings were produced abroad.
He was just twenty four years old and one year later left England and
during the four years that followed wrote a succession of spectacular
poems with great beauty and strength of character and lyrical drama. And
he met up with Byron destined to have an inseparable intellectual
relationship.
They were both nature lovers and took pleasure in roaming by the
Adriatic. It was a sensational vision of the two poets amid one of the
most beautiful scenes in the world, revelling in their friendship and
making its bond stronger and meaningful especially during Shelly’s wild
days that were vague, confused and unable to comprehend the approach of
manhood.
Academics were of opinion that had Shelly the wise influence of an
appreciative wife, he would have lived a few more years to complete his
wizardry.
Perhaps, it may have been the reason that Shelly found an everlasting
friendship in Byron.
The Adriatic scene recalled a somewhat later scene by the shore of
the Mediterranean where Byron and Leigh Hunt rode the rough seas on the
Trelawny that caught fire and later the body of Shelly who was in
another wrecked boat, was cast upon the waves.
He was only twenty nine years of age and his work was done.
The sudden squall had quenched his mind; a mind that had so much of
musicality. It could be said of him;
‘O dream not that amorous Deep
Will yet restore him to the vital air
Death feeds on his mute voice
And laughs at our despair’...
It was a pathetic end for a young icon when his friends burned the
battered body on the beach and carried the ashes to Rome and buried them
by the grave of Keats. It was to become a doubly place for pilgrimage
and to all those who revered the two beloved poets.
More than Byron or Keats, Shelly reached his tragic and at a time
when he was on the threshold of overtaking them when alive and every
year was adding perceptibly to the poetic power on his writing. It was a
time that Shelly was shedding rapidly the great luxuriance of his
youthful imagination.
It was also a time that Shelly was returning for a void to the solid
earth and the sobering facts of human existence.
And all the time Byron remained his inspiration and mentor. When he
died tragically, the world lost a natural champion of liberty who was
starting to evaluate the restraints of wisdom.
His was the exuberance of youth and through visionary, he rose to be
one of the best loved English poets. He achieved enough during his young
life, to prove that a continuance of his life might have ranked him as
an icon poet who rose above his contemporaries.
His friend Byron never used his good talents though he had won his
way straight to victory as a writer. He used his opportunities badly and
in distant imitation of Scott’s romantic tales of British history with
their honest chivalry but he failed beside Shelly.
The historians called him a pity and the tragedy of a wasted genius.
The Julian and Maddalo in which Shelly tells how he and Byron rode
and talked together on the Lido outside Venice;-
‘Where ‘twas our wont to ride while day went down.
This ride was my delight. I love all water
And solitary places, where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see,
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be;
And such was the wide ocean, and this shore
More barren than its billows; and yet more
Than all, with remembered friend I love
To ride as then I rode; for the wind drove
The living spray along the same air
Into our faces, the blue heavens were bare
Stripped to their depths by the awakening north
And from the waves sound like delight broke forth... |
