The rude wind is singing 
The dirge of the music dead ; 
The cold worms are clinging 
Where kisses were lately fed.  
 

No doubt Percy Bysshe Shelley would have been a welcome member of the contemporary speculative fiction community.  Many of his poems are electrifed with the undercurrent of horror.  For, as Douglas Winter puts it most accurately, “horror is an emotion.”  So, let’s slink from the brightly lit path of the popular Shelley, and treated in every other essay about him, and wander down a different path.  The dark path.

One might assume Shelley’s darker facet was fashioned by his wife Mary Shelley. Mary, however, was his second wife and Shelley himself strayed from society’s confines early on, despite his father’s sway.  Of course, most of the impetus to stray was his freedom-fighting romanticism, but the devices he used were frequently dark and/or speculative in nature.
 

From Queen Mab
 
I

How wonderful is Death,
Death, and his brother Sleep !
One, pale as yonder waning moon
With lips of lurid blue ;
The other, rosy as the morn
When thorned on ocean’s wave
It blushes o’er the world ;
Yet both so passing wonderful !

Hath then the gloomy Power
whose reign is in the tainted sepulchres
Seized on her sinless soul ?
Must then that peerless form
Which love and admiration cannot view
Without a beating hear, those azure veins
Which steal like streams along a field of snow,
That lovely outline which is fair
As breathing marble, perish ?
Must putrefaction’s breath
Leave nothing of this heavenly sight
But loathsomeness and ruin ?
Spare nothing but a gloomy theme,
On which the lightest heart might moral-ize ?
Or is it only a sweet slumber
Stealing o’er sensation,
Which the breath of roseate morning
Chaseth into darkness ?
Will Ianthe wake again,
And give that faithful bosom joy
Whose sleepless spirits waits to catch
Light, life and rapture, from her smile ?
 

 
 
Shelley reanimates a corpse -- years before Mary:

From Queen Mab:

 
I
 
Sudden arose
Ianthe’s Soul; it stood
All beautiful in naked purity,
The perfect semblance of its bodily frame;
Instinct with inexpressible beauty and grace --
Each stain of earthliness
Had passed away -- it reassumed
Its native dignity and stood
Immortal amid ruin.
 

 

Shelley was not a particularly healthy individual.  His characters, however, were filled with vigor.  Their power was either physical or magical; states that were beyond his grasp.  Indeed, beyond any mortal’s grasp, but by trying to reach for a stronger condition himself, his readers are also able to touch the fantastical.
 

From The Witch of Atlas:
 
I

Before those cruel Twins, whom at one
          birth
Incestuous Change bore to her father
          Time,
Error and Truth, had hunted from the
          earth
All those bright natures which adorned
          its prime,
And left us nothing to believe in, worth
 The pains of putting into learned rhyme,
A Lady-Witch there lived on Atlas moun-
          tain
Within a cavern by a secret fountain.

 
II

Her mother was one of the Atlantides ;
The all-beholding Sun had ne’er beholden
In his wide voyage o’er continents and seas
So fair a creature, as she lay enfolden
In the warm shadow of her loveliness ;
He kissed her with his beams, and made
               all golden
The chamber of gray rock in which she lay ;
She, in that dream of joy, dissolved away.

 
III

‘Tis said, she first was changed into a va-por,
And then into a cloud, such clouds as flit,
Like splendor-winged moths about a taper,
Round the red west when the sun dies
               in it ;
And then into a meteor, such as caper
On hill-tops when the moon is in a fit ;
Then, into one of those mysterious stars
Which hide themselves between the Earth
               and Mars.
 

Death, darkness, doom...themes that emerge often in his writings.  If he were alive today, he would probably be a Goth.  Picture him in black lipstick, kohl lining his eyes, raven hair to frame his already deathly-pale face and hunched over his desk in a reverie of all that is Dark . . .

 
To Night

 
I

Swiftly walk o’er the western wave,
          Spirit of the Night !
Out of the misty eastern cave,
Where all the long and lone daylight
Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear,
Which make thee terrible and dear,--
          Swift be thy flight !

 
II

Wrap thy form in a mantle gray,
          Star-inwrought !
Blind with thine hair the eyes of Day ;
Kiss her until she be wearied out ;
Then wander o’er the city,and sea, and land,
Touching all with thine opiate wand --
          Come, long-sought !

 
III

When I arose and saw the dawn,
          I sighed for thee ;
When light rode high, and then was
     gone,
And noon lay heavy on flower and tree,
And the weary Day turned to his rest,
Lingering like an unloved guest,
          I sighed for thee.

 
IV

Thy brother Death came, and cried,
          Wouldst thou me ?
Thy sweet child Sleep, the filmy-eyed,
Murmured like a noontide bee,
Shall I nestle near thy side ?
Wouldst thou me ? -- and I replied,
          No, not thee !

 
V

Death will come when thou art dead,
          Soon, too soon ;
Sleep will come when thou art fled ;
Of neither would I ask the boon
I ask of thee, beloved Night, --
Swift be thine approaching flight,
          Come soon, soon !
 

They say that when Shelley’s body was cremated, only his heart did not burn.  Perhaps because, during life, his heart burned metaphysically as he wrung his poems from within it . . .

 
A Dirge

Rough wind, that moanest loud
          Grief too sad for song ;
          Wild wind, when sullen cloud
Knells all the night long ;
Sad storm, whose tears are vain,
Bare woods whose branches strain,
Deep caves and dreary main, --
          Wail, for the world’s wrong.
 

 
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s immortality is unquestioned among the literary community due to his poetic skill with words, phrases and rhymes.  Other circles, darker circles, might find an undead icon in the shadows of some of his more haunted works.   Exhume the dead . . . you might like what you find.

The babe is at peace within the womb ;
The corpse is at rest within the tomb :
     We begin in what we end.
 
 
All poetry copyright Percy Bysshe Shelley (date, publication).
 

 

About the Author:

Luna Sea is a poetess and the  
Attendant to the Muse, Blood Moon  
zine's poetry editor.  

Adrift without a vessel  
on the waves of the Luna Sea, 
my liquiform body ebbs and flows  
as the ocean tide along a coastline... 
  ...building... 
                   ...eroding... 
                                   ...building... 
  
...eroding down to the foundation 
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