Page:Poet Lore, volume 28, 1917.djvu/576

 BYRON AND SHELLEY IN ITALY

I. Venice and Ravenna

AMONG the great English poets of the Nineteenth Century, strangely enough, with the exception of Wordsworth and Coleridge, there were no two more closely associated than George Gordon, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The casual reader invariably associates Shelley with Keats; Byron with no one, — he stands by hinself. Yet Shelley saw Keats only four or five times in his life, exchanged letters with him only once; Shelley and Byron were in personal touch with each other for a period extending over six years, an intimacy ended only by the death of Shelley. In the series of dramatic interludes that reveals to us the story of this friendship, the first scene unfolds in the majestic setting of Switzerland by the green-blue waters of "clear placid Leman, " where in the distance "Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky Mont Blanc appears, — still, snowy, and serene." There where " the everlasting universe of things flows through the mind," the two poets spent the four months from May to September, 1816, that marked the inception of a friendship that was to last over a period of six years. After an interval of a year and a half the scenes shift to the "Paradise of exiles, Italy." The second scene is in Venice; the third, in Ravenna; the fourth, in Pisa; and the final tragic scene on the wild shores of the Bay of Spezzia. The epilogue is spoken by Byron himself in his letters written during the year after the death of Shelley. Throughout the drama runs the motif of a child : it is the short life of Allegra Byron that binds the interludes together. When Shelley and Byron met first in Switzerland in May, 554