CANTO 8
SKIES ABOVE LONDON
“IT WAS A RELIEF TO BE FREE…”
‘Body 115’ describes being liberated by the flames…
NOTES:
“MY HEART PLUCKED LIKE SHELLEY’S FROM THE PYRE”
Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 August 1792 – 8 July 1822) an English Romantic poet. After drowning off the Italian coast his body was burnt on the beach in Viareggio. His friends, Byron, the poet Leigh Hunt and Captain Edward John Trelawny, had a portable crematorium built. According to one of Trelawny’s several contradictory accounts: ‘The fire was so fierce as to produce a white heat on the iron and to reduce its contents to grey ashes. The only portions that were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull, but what surprised us all was that the heart remained entire. In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace my hand was severely burnt.’
BODY 115 