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Shelley’s Heart
&
Other Organs

by Mark Worden

   “‘Is that a human body?’ exclaimed Byron, ‘why it’s more like the carcass of a sheep, or any other animal, than a man: this is a satire on our pride and folly.’”
    “Byron looking on, muttered, ‘The entrails of a worm hold together longer than the potter’s clay, of which man is made. Hold! let me see the jaw. . . . I can recognize any one by the teeth, with whom I have talked. I always watch the lips and mouth; they tell me what tongue and eyes try to conceal!’”
    “Byron asked me to preserve the skull for him; but remembering that he had formerly used one as a drinking cup, I was determined Shelley’s be not so profaned. . . . After the fire was well-kindled . . . more wine was poured over Shelley’s dead body than he had consumed during life. This, with the oil and salt, made the yellow flames glister and quiver. The heat from the sun and fire was so intense that the atmosphere was tremulous and wavy. The corpse fell open and the heart was laid bare...and as the back of the head rested on the red-hot bottom bars of the furnace, the brains literally seethed, bubbled and boiled as in a cauldron, for a very long time.   
    The fire was so fierce as to produce a white heat on the iron, and to reduce its contents to grey ashes. The only portions that were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw and the skull, but what surprised us all was that the heart remained entire. In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace my hand was severely burnt; and had anyone seen me do the act I should have been put in quarantine.”

Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron, E.J. Trelawny, quoted in The Last Days of Percy Bysshe Shelley, by Dr. Guido Biagi, who calls Trelawny’s account romantic and highly embellished (1898).

Nothing of him that doth fade
But that doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange
—Inscription on Shelley’s gravestone

Shelley’s heart. What better topic
to muse upon: a perfect muscle
miraculous organ, plucked smoking hot
from the smoldering ashes and bone clinkers
of Percy’s crematorium, while his burnt out brains
seethed and bubbled like toasted marshmallows.

Remember: Sanitary regulations required
that, poet or not, he be put to flame,
cremated there on the spot, on the beach
not far from where his badly decomposed body
washed ashore. Sea-changed and crab-nibbled,
gibbets of protein, delicacy aplenty
for Proteus’ finny friends: Shelley.

Marred beyond recognition, he
could not be identified with any certainty.
Byron had delusions about shards of bone,
but pragmatists examined the clothes,
found books in the pockets: Keats
and Aeschylus, waterlogged, but readable.
Shelley. His books, his shoes, his bones.

They limed him over before they caught something,
limed him over and arranged for a public burning.

But the heart.
Did it truly survive the sanitary trial by fire,
the miasma-cleansing holocaust?
Was it adamant, after all?
(Does it matter? To whom?)

And Mary — did she save the stout well-done heart
to horde like a precious family heirloom,
or to place it, with special rites, in a sylvan tomb?
Was there an Honor Guard of Nightingales?

That chunk of fireproof gristle could end up
pickled and utterly unacclaimed
like Einstein’s brain in a garage Kansas,
“Right there, in the cardboard box.
Third shelf down from the top.”

I would like to have the Shelley heart concession.
As sole curator, I’d make a killing: post cards
posters and paraphernalia. And best, the heart
itself in a soft carnelian light, pulsing
& burnished like strong oxhide.

A shrine to a blithe spirit. Come touch
the true heart of Shelley, touch and be inspired.
Come, DeBakey, and scope it for fat deposits,
plaque and granules of cholesterol.
Yes, yes, he exercised, Shelley: A vegetarian!

No triple bypass needed here. “But,you know, I feel the yen
to write it up for the New England Journal of Medicine.”

Christian Barnard will jet in from Africa.
Guard the heart closely; some nut with money
might want to snatch it for a transplant.

“Guess whose heart I’m wearing?”

Such a heart was never meant to lie
engrafted within a double-breasted bosom.

I read today about a collector
who accumulated a fine assortment
of clean service station rags,
kept them neatly stacked in his basement.
He had several hundred of them, each
with a story, local habitation and a name.

I would have a story at my Shelley Heart Stand.
“O it was a doomed heart from the start,” I’d croon,
“it was like a homemade bomb discarded
by a tinkering terrorist because it madly thumped
and tended to explode at the wrong time.”

No: “It came to me through a distant relative
(O it’s in my blood, in my very DNA)
who desperately needed money and had to sacrifice
the family heirloom — the Shelley heart.
A bleak day. Rain. Grey grass wavering in the wind.”

Any story will do, told the right way,
and there’s always an audience, empty-hearted
eager to be rapt and beguiled.

Step right up.

How did you burn your hand?
O, Placing wood in the stove.

Damn the rules, the sanitary regulations,
that I must lie and nod and smile
and hide my fond anarchist’s heart all the while.

There was, of course, a physician in attendance
who eased the pain. He was gentle and kind
a friend of the family:
one Doctor Frankenstein.

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
— The Tempest, Shakespeare