Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's poetry podcast. This week I want to talk about Percy

Bish Shelley, the famous romantic poet. I first heard the poetry of Shelley read aloud

by Mick Jagger on a stage in Hyde Park in London in 1969. I was watching it on the

telly, I should say, I wasn't there. And Mick Jagger said, peace, peace, I'm not doing

the impression. Peace, peace, he is not dead, he doff not sleep, he hath awakened from

the dream of life. Now those were lines from a poem by Shelley called Adonius, which he wrote

for John Keats, a poet we've discussed in her previous podcast, and who had recently died

aged 25. Mick Jagger was applying those lines to the former Rowling Stone's guitarist Brian Jones,

who just died aged 27. And of course we like our delicate, beautiful creatives to die young.

And Shelley himself, I don't want to cut to the end so soon, but I'm going to tell you he

drowned aged 29 in Italy. And I'm going to be honest, this is Goulish, but a great story. He was

cremated on the beach in the presence of Lord Byron, no less, but his heart was rescued before

the flames took hold. And it was given to his wife Mary Shelley herself, no stranger to

Gothic horror, yes she wrote Frankenstein. And Mary Shelley kept her husband's heart,

wrapped in a copy of that poem Adonius, and it's actually buried with her in Bournemouth.

So I know I don't do much biography stuff on here, but I do like to give you the juices,

and that is it's a good one, isn't it? Although it's obviously shot through with tragedy.

So yes, so as far as Shelley was concerned, he, like all, free love Bohemians left behind

a matrile of broken hearted lovers and neglected children, but happily he also left behind a lot

of brilliant poetry. And the poem I want to talk about is called England in 1819. I say it's called

that. Shelley didn't call it that. It was called that 20 years later by Mary his wife when she

finally published it. There was never really any chance that this poem would be published in

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