On the morning of 1 July, 1822, Shelley set sail in his boat, Ariel, to visit Byron. He had a copy of Keats’ poems tucked in his favourite nankeen trousers. He arrived safely, and wrote to Mary that he would return within a week. He did not return. It seems that a storm blew up in the Gulf of Spezia. Shelley’s boat, with its top-heavy masts, capsized. Shelley had never learned to swim. His body was found some days later, washed ashore in a state of decomposition, the volume of Keats still in his pocket. He was twenty-nine.
