ABSTRACT
The rough draft of this poem is in Nbk 6, and there are two holograph fair copies, in Bodleian MS Shelley e. 5, and in the Morgan Library & Museum. Both copies give the date of composition as December 1818, as do Mary S.’s texts in 1824 and 1839. S. was in Naples from 1 December 1818 to 28 February 1819. The poem’s opening description seems to echo phrasing from S.’s letter to Peacock of 23–24 January (see note to lines 1–4) describing the Shelleys’ visit to Pompeii on 22 December (Mary Jnl i 245), which suggests a more specific date in late December; but S. was impressed by the scenery around Naples from the period of his first arrival, and the dejection articulated in the poem appears to have persisted throughout his stay in the city. Following the death of Clara in Venice, Mary’s mood was very dark, which in turn strongly affected S. Her ‘Note on Poems of 1818’ recalls that at this time S. ‘suffered greatly in health … Constant and poignant physical suffering exhausted him; and though he preserved the appearance of cheerfulness … many hours were passed when his thoughts, shadowed by illness, became gloomy, and then he escaped to solitude, and in verses, which he hid from fear of wounding me, poured forth morbid but too natural bursts of discontent and sadness. One looks back with unspeakable regret and gnawing remorse to such periods …’ (1839 iii 162; see also e.g. Mary L i 85 for Mary’s own depression in Naples). The note goes on to make plain the extent of S.’s feelings of isolation and despair. A letter to Peacock of mid-December closes on an uncharacteristically subdued note: ‘I have depression enough of spirits & not good health, though I believe the warm air of Naples does me good. We see absolutely no one here’ (L ii 64), and a few days later he strikes the note again in a letter to Hunt (‘I have neither good health or spirits just now’: L ii 68). According to a story of Trelawny’s, S. actually attempted suicide in Naples (see White ii 570–1). S.’s chastened sense of responsibility for the calamity of Clara’s death (see headnotes to Behold, sweet Sister mine (Longman ii 423, no. 181) and The Two Spirits), and his reaction to Mary’s own consequent depression, may also have coincided with a renewed sense of the injustice and malicious distortions of public attacks on him in the Quarterly Review and elsewhere (see L ii 66, and headnotes to Alas, this is not what I thought life was, (Longman ii 415–6, no. 174) and Lift not the painted veil). He was also involved at this time in the mysterious affair of the ‘Neapolitan baby’. White ii 546–50 prints documents from Neapolitan archives which register that a child named ‘Elena Adelaide’ was born to S. and Mary at their lodgings in the Riviera di Chiaia on 27 December 1818. She was baptised on 27 February 1819, and according to a death certificate died on 10 June 1820. It is obviously impossible that this child could actually have been Mary’s, and although scurrilous stories, circulated by a disaffected former servant of the Shelleys, claimed that the child was Claire Clairmont’s by S., that too seems under the circumstances entirely incredible, not to say physically impossible. Mary Jnl i 249–50 gives a lucid review of the circumstances and known facts of the affair (and see also Claire Jnl 97). It has also been suggested that this child was possibly born to the Shelleys’ nursemaid, Elise, and that S. was the father, but this too seems implausible (see Ursula Orange, ‘Elise, Nursemaid to the Shelleys’, KSMB vi (1955) 24–34). A possible explanation is that S. sought in his desperation to console Mary for the loss of Clara by the adoption of a little girl, and that for unknown reasons, the scheme, once in train, was abandoned. A further separate but possibly related story, that S. was followed to Naples by a lady admirer who had conceived a passion for the poet after reading his verses, and who after meeting with S. subsequently died in Naples, lacks any corroborating evidence (see headnote to Misery. — A Fragment, Longman ii 701–3, no. 202). Whatever the true circumstances, it is scarcely surprising against such a background that S. should suffer from depression in December 1818, and that he should during this period produce one of the most openly personal of all his lyrics.
