ABSTRACT
S. drafted these lines in Nbk 10 ff 45v– 46v rev. as a response to the death of his eldest son. William Shelley fell ill with a stomach complaint on 27 May 1819 while the Shelleys were living in Rome. Under the care of the Scottish émigré Dr John Bell, who had treated S. himself earlier in the year, William appeared to rally. He became seriously ill again on 2 June, however, and died five days later, probably from malaria—there was an epidemic in Rome in 1819 (see SC vi 838)—though perhaps from another disease, cholera, typhoid or dysentery. He was buried the following day in the Cimitero Acattolico or Protestant Cemetery; two days later the Shelleys left the city. The evidence for dating S.’s draft is complex and contradictory. Mary's transcript in Harvard Nbk 1, where it is entitled ‘To William—’, is undated. If her date of June 1819 in 1824 (where the poem is entitled To William Shelley) is accurate, the lines were composed between William's death at midday on 7 June and the end of their first week's residence at the Villa Valsovano in Livorno. This is perfectly possible, though the time was both acutely distressing for each of the Shelleys and regularly disrupted: by the funeral, the arrangements for leaving Rome, their journey to Livorno, a week at an inn there and their installation in what would be their home for the summer. If the draft was made in this interval of about three weeks, then ‘beneath this pyramid’ in l. 6 would refer to the location of William's grave near the pyramid of Cestius, the 30-metre-high tomb erected towards the end of the first century BCE which was later incorporated into the city wall and which dominates the burial ground. S. describes the place in a letter to Peacock of December 1818 as ‘the most beautiful & solemn cemetery I ever beheld’ (L ii 60); he recalls it again in the Preface to Adonais as the location of Keats's grave:
the romantic and lonely cemetery of the protestants … under the pyramid which is the tomb of Cestius, and the massy walls and towers, now mouldering and desolate, which formed the circuit of ancient Rome. The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter by violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.
