Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it. Percy Bysshe Shelley, clothed in black, lies on the branches of the funeral pyre; his pale face might be sleeping, his hair is swept back, his hand has fallen to his side. He still has on his leather shoes. Like the “blithe spirit” in “To a Skylark”, he is ready to transcend his physical form. Smoke billows across the barren wastes of Viareggio, Italy, the sky is autumnal and overcast and the sea in which he drowned is a blade of silver on the horizon. To the left we see a watch tower, a waiting carriage, a bare and solitary tree and, in the foreground, three Heathcliffian figures: Lord Byron, his necktie blowing raffishly in the wind, Byron’s “bulldog” Edward John Trelawny, and the poet and journalist Leigh Hunt, clutching a white handkerchief. Behind them the poet’s widow, Mary Shelley, kneels in prayer. The scene might be a mockery of the central tableau in her novel Frankenstein, where the creature the scientist has pieced together is stretched along the bench, waiting to be jolted into life.
