Shelley: The Pursuit (138 page)

‘Do you not hear the Aziola cry?

Methinks she must be nigh,’

Said Mary, as we sate

In dusk, ere stars were lit, or candles brought;

And I, who thought

This Aziola was some tedious woman,

Asked, ‘Who is Aziola?’ How elate

I felt to know that it was nothing human,

No mockery of myself to fear or hate:

And Mary saw my soul,

And laughed, and said ‘Disquiet yourself not;

’Tis nothing but a little downy owl.’

Sad Aziola! many an eventide

Thy music I had heard

By wood and stream, meadow and mountain-side,

And fields and marshes wide, —

Such as nor voice, nor lute, nor wind, nor bird,

The soul ever stirred;

Unlike and far sweeter than them all.

Sad Aziola! from that moment I

Loved thee and thy sad cry.
¹¹⁷

[1]
The sinister mace-like stone tower which stands isolated at the north-western gate of Pisa is not now identified as the historical Torre della Fame, which has been located as the squat municipal prison in Piazza dei Cavalieri.

[2]
Friedrich Anton Mesmer was born in Austria in 1733 and died in Switzerland in 1815. His magnetic experiments led to his ejection from Vienna by the police, and his later denunciation by an official investigating committee in Paris in 1785. Nevertheless he contributed an original theme to nineteenth-century gothic fiction, and must be regarded as the occult forefather of modern therapeutic hypnotism and psycho-analysis. ‘Lithotomy’ — an eighteenth-century word meaning the art of cutting out stones from the bladder. In Shelley’s time it was still an agonizing and dangerous operation, depending for success entirely on the doctor’s skill with a surgical knife, and for anaesthesia on the patient’s own powers of endurance. Shelley dreaded having to submit to this operation, and there is some evidence that he contemplated suicide as a better alternative.

[3]
But not, as Shelley makes out in his Advertisement, from the
Vita Nuova
. The actual sources are the first
canzone
of the
Convivio
; for the free love passage,
Purgatorio
, Canto XV, where Dante questions Virgil on the nature of divine love; and for the vision of Emilia as an ‘incarnation of the Sun’ — the central image of the whole poem —
Purgatorio
Canto XXVIII. The full moral and social implications of Shelley’s mature philosophy of free love filtered gradually down through two generations of Victorian readers, and began to emerge clearly in such texts as John Stuart Mill’s
The Subjection of Women
(1869), and Edward Carpenter’s
Love’s Coming-of-Age
(1896).

[4]
The comet image, like most of Shelley’s best, had been long germinating. It is the same comet — no doubt a pure anticipated cognition — that Shelley first saw in 1811 at Edinburgh; first described in the ‘dark-red night’ of the revolutionary poem ‘Zeinab and Kathema’ also of 1811. It flashes through
Prometheus
in the lovely line of Act III, scene 3, ‘And long blue meteors cleansing the dull night’. The MS Notebook, Bod. MS Shelley Adds. e. 9, which contains the draft of the comet passage (p. 196 rev.) also has a dramatic ink drawing of a comet drawn diagonally across the whole of p. 317.

[5]
Which may be rendered, in the Hogg manner, as

From our grey worlds of commonplace

Your skills attract bright forms of grace

Horace,
Ars Poetica
, 1. 243

[6]
Horace Smith made permanent arrangements for Shelley’s quarterly payment of £220 to be remitted regularly to the Poste Restante Pisa under personal supervision, while Sir Timothy agreed to pay the £30 quarter due to Hume straight from his own account. This in effect put Sir Timothy in the position of direct financial trustee for Charles and Ianthe, and it was later to bring out his grandfatherly tendencies, especially towards Charles.

Illustrations: Section III

27. The Albergo
Tre Donzelle
where the Shelleys stayed when they first came to Pisa

28. The view of the Arno from Shelley’s apartments at Pisa in 1821; the white façade of the Palazzo Lanfranchi is diagonally across the river with its private landing steps

29. Sleeping Hermaphrodite, Roma

30. A page of Shelley’s manuscript of stanzas 47–8 of ‘The Witch of Atlas’

31. Detail of a sketch of Shelley made by Edward Williams in November 1821

32. Jane Williams, by George Clint

33. Shelley’s sketches on inside cover of Italian notebook 1821–22

34 left
Mary in 1841, nineteen years after Shelley’s death