Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley was sailing back to his home at Villa Magni in Lerici, on the Bay of Lerici, when he drowned.

He had just completed a voyage to Livorno, where he met his friends and fellow Romantic poets Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt, to discuss their new journal, The Liberal.

He was eager to return home that same evening, despite warnings of an approaching storm. His boat, the Don Juan (which he had renamed Ariel), was caught in a sudden and violent squall and sank.

Ten days later, the sea returned his body along with those of his two companions, Edward Williams and the young boatman, Charles Vivian, to the shore near Viareggio.

English Literature Subscribers

When they found him, there was a small book of Keats’s poems still in his pocket.

A poet drowned with another poet’s words pressed against his chest. It’s hard to imagine a more fitting or more heartbreaking ending.

English Literature

Shelley had always been chasing storms, in his thoughts, in his love, in his life.

He was brilliant, defiant, and impossible to contain. He defied religion, marriage, and society, believing in freedom so fiercely that it sometimes burned the people around him.

His wife, Mary Shelley, knew this side of him better than anyone.

She was just sixteen when she followed him across Europe, leaving everything behind for love and conviction. Together they dreamed of changing the world, and together they faced relentless loss.

They buried three of their children. They lived in exile, surrounded by debt, illness, and grief.

Mary adored Percy, but she also suffered because of him. He was passionate but reckless, loving yet distant, a man who could write about eternal beauty while forgetting how fragile the people beside him were.

When Percy drowned, Mary was only twenty-four, widowed, isolated, and carrying the weight of their story. She spent the rest of her life preserving his work, editing his poems, and protecting his name. But she also wrote in her journal that loving him had been both her greatest gift and her deepest wound.

When they burned his body on the beach, his heart refused to burn.

They said it had hardened from illness, but to Mary it felt like something else, a strange defiance, a last refusal to be destroyed by the fire that had consumed everything else.

She kept that heart for the rest of her life, wrapped in silk, not as a romantic gesture, but as a symbol of something she could never fully let go of: a man who had loved too intensely to last.

“Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

“He was all I had and yet, in loving him, I lost myself.”

Mary Shelley (Journal, 1822)

Percy Shelley died young, with poetry in his pocket and a storm in his lungs.

He lived and loved like fire, brilliant, destructive, unforgettable.

And maybe that’s why, more than two centuries later, his story still feels alive.

Not because it was perfect, but because it was real.

[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley)

[2](https://www.gothickeatspress.com/essay/on-the-death-of-percy-bysshe-shelley-8-july-1822)

[3](https://www.clayfjohnson.com/writings/on-the-200th-anniversary-of-percy-bysshe-shelleys-death)

[4](https://discoverportovenere.com/percy-shelley-literary-park-san-terenzo/)

[5](https://www.facebook.com/ps.midastouch/posts/percy-bysshe-shelley-was-sailing-back-to-his-home-at-villa-magni-in-lerici-on-th/820655097260285/)

[6](https://wordsworth.org.uk/blog/2016/05/27/the-shelleys-in-italy/)

[7](https://lordbyron.org/monograph.php?doc=ThMedwi.Shelley.1847&select=II.ch32)

[8](https://ornaoreilly.com/category/shelley/)

[9](https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g2297772-d14141998-Reviews-Villa_Magni-San_Terenzo_Lerici_Italian_Riviera_Liguria.html)

[10](http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Biographies/Literary/Shelley10.htm)

[11](https://theliberal.unifi.it/vp-37-san-terenzo-lerici-villa-magni-english-version.html)

[12](https://www.theliberal.unifi.it/vp-37-san-terenzo-lerici-villa-magni-english-version.html)

[13](https://wordsworth.org.uk/blog/2014/07/08/full-fathom-five-the-poet-lies-the-death-of-percy-bysshe-shelley/)

14. https://medium.com/@musleh.saadi/percy-bysshe-shelley-37a2543f8a94