Shelley: The Pursuit (133 page)

Claire had been taken ill with a scrofulous gland on reaching Florence, and Shelley wrote sadly: ‘It seems that it would have been better for you to remain at Pisa. Yet being now at Florence make the best profit of your situation. . . .’
He advised her to pursue Mrs Mason’s social contacts assiduously so that she might make herself more independent. Later they were to discuss a plan for Claire set to up a small school for English children at Pisa. Meanwhile he prescribed ‘bustle and occupation’. His own health was still bad: ‘I have suffered also considerably from my disease; and am already in imagination preparing to be cut for the stone, in spite of Vaccà’s consolatory assurance.’ There was one other source of comfort. ‘I see Emilia sometimes, who always talks of you and laments your absence. She continues to enchant me infinitely; and I soothe myself with the idea that I make the discomfort of her captivity lighter to her by demonstration of the interest which she has awakened in me.’
³⁷

The relationship between the invalid Shelley and the 19-year-old prisoner of the convent was developing rather more rapidly than Shelley would quite admit to Claire. The whole thing had in his mind a strangely unreal quality, almost as if she was part of his illness, as a vivid hallucination is part of a fever. Shelley sent a little verse letter in reply to a bunch of flowers which Emilia had had delivered to the Casa Galetti, on a day when he was ill and could not visit:

Madonna, wherefore has thou sent to me

Sweet-basil and mignonette?

Embleming love and health, which never yet

In the same wreath might be.

Alas, and they are wet!

Is it with thy kisses or thy tears?
³⁸

It tells a good deal about his feelings for Emilia, and the way in which he tried to modulate them, when this is compared with the first draft he made in his notebook, but never sent:

Oh my beloved why have you

Sent sweet basil & mignonette?

Why when I kiss their leaves find I them wet

With thine adored tears dearer than heavens dew.
³⁹

In two other notebooks he made fragmentary drafts of five Italian letters to Emilia, though it is impossible to say on exactly which days Shelley sent them. In the second letter he promised to help her by having an influential friend write to the Prior of St Nicholas at Pisa. In the third, he wrote: ‘Here we are then, bound by a few days’ friendship, gathered together by some strange fortune from the ends of the earth to be perhaps a consolation to each other . . . .’ In the fourth, the whole fragment consists simply of: ‘tu Emilia ch’era più bella a vedere che il giglio bianco sul suo verde stelo e più fresca che la Maia quando . . .’
You, Emilia, who were lovelier to behold than the white lily on its green stem and fresher than May when . . .

The fifth letter fragment seems to contain the essence of the fever dream which she had become for Shelley. ‘Many times you thus [appear to] me. Your dark eyes, ever most beautiful, are above me. I seem to feel your hand on mine and your lips — but then I close my eyes until you cease to love — then it will be quenched like a flame which lacks fuel. I have suffered much in health today . . . .’ Most expressive of all is the fact that Shelley having written this passage struck the whole of it through with his pen, and probably never sent it.
⁴⁰

Some of Emilia’s letters, both to Mary and to Shelley during these weeks, have survived.
⁴¹
They show perfectly Emilia’s mixture of naïvété and charming adolescent cunning in dealing with Mary, notably in a letter of the end of December: ‘You seem to me a little cold, on some occasions, and this makes me a little nervous of you [
un po’ di soggezionie
]; but I realize that your Husband speaks justly, and that your apparent coldness is only the ash which covers a radiant heart [
un cuore affettuoso
].’
⁴²
To Shelley, her notes are pitched at an altogether more impassioned level, and one can see in the almost Petrarchan use of sun and moon and stars as love-witnesses, the immediate source of the imagery which Shelley was now preparing to use in his poem about her. ‘Dear Friend, and my own Brother: — I write to you by the radiance of the Moon. I cannot bear to use any other light, for that would appear as an insult to this most clear and beautiful Daughter of Heaven. What sweetness I feel when I gaze upon her. . . . I have made my usual evening prayer on my knees before the window, and I have made it with greater devotion. These stupid people here believe that I worship the Moon. . . .’
⁴³

Mary does not at first seem to have had any grasp of what was going on in Shelley’s mind. On the 14th she wrote that she had seen little of Emilia, ‘but she was in much better spirits when I did see her than I had found her for a long time before’.
⁴⁴
Ten days later it was the same — surprisingly she was in ‘much better spirits’. Anyway Mary was busily engaged in other directions, taking private Greek lessons from Prince Mavrocordato, and holding
tête à têtes
with Tommaso Sgricci, as she explained to Claire.
⁴⁵

Meanwhile Emilia wrote an essay for Shelley on ‘Il Vero Amore’, which flew effortlessly between earth and heaven on the wings of adolescence: ‘But where is he, susceptible of such love? Where? Who is capable of inspiring it? Oh love! I am all love. . . . Love has no wish but for virtue. . . . Love is a fire that burns and destroys not, a mixture of pleasure and pain, a pain that brings pleasure, an essence eternal, spiritual, infinite, pure, celestial.’
⁴⁶
It sounded less adolescent in Italian, and some of the phraseology was imported from Shelley’s conversations.
⁴⁷

Claire, despite the distance of several score miles, seems to have been more
au fait.
The correspondence was private between her and Shelley — her letters were addressed to him at the Casa Silva, not to the Casa Galetti
⁴⁸
— and she was also in touch with Emilia. In a ‘kind & tender’ letter towards the end of January, she appears to have quizzed Shelley mildly on the subject. His reply was warm, but slightly defensive. ‘I see Emilia sometimes: & whether her presence is the source of pain or pleasure to me, I am equally ill-fated in both. I am deeply interested in her destiny, & that interest can in no manner influence it. She is not however insensible to my sympathy, & she counts it among her alleviations. As much comfort as she receives from my attachment to her,
I lose.
— There is no reason that you should fear any mixture of that which you call
love
.’
⁴⁹
He slipped into this letter the fact that the secret scheme for the Eastern expedition was ‘broken up’. But the letter was signed off: ‘I took up the pen for an instant, only to thank you. — & if you will to kiss you for your kind attention to me, & I find I have written in ill spirits. . . . Yours most tenderly.’

On the last two days of January Mary noted that Shelley was reading Dante’s essay on love and poetry, the
Vita Nuova.
Under the intense vision of his relationship with the beautiful Emilia, under the auspices of Dante, and struggling against his own ill health, he now wrote the extraordinary piece of autobiography,
Epipsychidion.
It was done within a fortnight, for a clean copy of the poem was in the post to Ollier for printing by 16 February.

Shelley’s
Epipsychidion
is just over 600 lines long, written without stanza form, in couplets which often flow freely on over a dozen lines. It is a conscious piece of rhetorical improvisation partly influenced by the performances of Sgricci. The whole poem is explicitly addressed to ‘the Noble and Unfortunate Lady, Emilia V — , Now imprisoned in the Convent of — ’. But it is formed from two divergent inspirations, which are in the end conflicting. The first is a courtly love-hymn to Emilia, an invitation to her to escape from the convent and take ship with him on his long-imagined expedition to the East:

Emily,

A ship is floating in the harbour now,

And wind is hovering o’er the mountain’s brow. . . .

Say, my heart’s sister, wilt thou sail with me?

Our bark is as an albatross, whose nest

Is a far Eden of the purple East;

And we between her wings will sit. . . .
⁵⁰

This courtly invitation ends in a vision of spiritual union which is presented with great and indeed almost violent erotic intensity:

Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound,

And our veins beat together; and our lips

With other eloquence than words, eclipse

The soul that burns between them, and the wells

Which boil under our being’s inmost cells,

The fountains of our deepest life, shall be

Confused in Passion’s golden purity,

As mountain springs under the morning sun.
⁵¹

But it is a failing vision. The difficulty which Shelley had with the word ‘purity’, which is a substitute word, indicates one of the characteristic weaknesses of this part of the poem. It attempts to hold simultaneously a spiritual and a physical image of human passion, like one of the ‘multiple images’ of
Prometheus.
Such a union was possible for Shelley, but not within the circumstances of his feverish dream relationship with a convent heiress. The contradictions were too great, and this showed vividly in the straining and flinching in the poetry of the courtly part of
Epipsychidion.
The ‘invitation’ was also complicated by the bisexual or hermaphroditic status which he assigned to Emilia, implicitly in the published text, and explicitly in the subsidiary fragments, one of which refers to the ‘sweet marble monster’ of the Borghese statue.
⁵²
The second inspiration of
Epipsychidion
is, like
Alastor
, a retrospective review of his own emotional development since adolescence. To this extent the work is a
poème à clef
, and there are a series of references to actual women and events in Shelley’s life which are only intended to be partially disguised, and were certainly meant to be interpreted by the most intimate of his circle:

In many mortal forms I rashly sought

The shadow of that idol of my thought.

And some were fair — but beauty dies away:

Others were wise — but honeyed words betray:

And One was true — oh! why not true to me?
⁵³

The shadows of Elizabeth Shelley, Harriet Grove, Harriet Westbrook, Elizabeth Hitchener, Cornelia Boinville, Sophia Stacey and perhaps others all fit along the margins of the verse. The only definite identifications are Emilia herself, Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont. Part of the general argument of the poem thus becomes the autobiographical fact, and also to Shelley the philosophical necessity, of the lifelong search among many women for a
donna ideale
: the Beautiful of Diotima’s ladder in the
Symposium
; or the divine Beatrice of Dante’s
Vita Nuova
; or even in one of Shelley’s references to the mysterious Beloved of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
⁵⁴
It is in this sense that the poem is about free love. Shelley’s original tenet of physical freedom as expressed in his letters of 1811–12, and in the notes to
Queen Mab
, and
The Revolt of Islam
, is maintained and extended into a complete if heterogeneous philosophical system.

Previous to
Epipsychidion
the evidence is that Shelley’s belief in free love was simply based on a liberal view of men and women’s biological needs, and a violent disagreement with the social institutions which defined them in terms of monogamous property. With
Epipsychidion
, Shelley had added to these a new philosophical dimension in which free love was understood to be an integral part of a full spiritual education. Free love, as it were, led to true love or universal love — and hereby became not merely a social but a moral and philosophical necessity. Much of the language for this was taken directly from Dante.
[3]
The poem is not a very consistent literary achievement, but it is a fascinating intellectual one, and a unique picture of Shelley’s emotional life at the age of 28.

I never was attached to that great sect,

Whose doctrine is, that each one should select