ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -The marriage was intended to help secure Shelley’s custody of his children by Harriet and to placate Godwin who had refused to see Shelley and Mary because of their previous adulterous relationship.

Detailed explanation-2: -On 8th July 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned when his boat overturned off the Italian coast. He’d been travelling home from visiting his friends, fellow Romantic poets, Lord Byron and James Leigh Hunt, to his home on the bay of Lerici in the north-west of the country.

Detailed explanation-3: -Shelley asks the wind to be his spirit, and in the same movement he makes it his metaphorical spirit, his poetic faculty, which will play him like a musical instrument, the way the wind strums the leaves of the trees.

Detailed explanation-4: -Shelley’s gravestone bears the Latin inscription, Cor Cordium (Heart of Hearts), and, in reference to his death at sea, a few lines from Ariel’s song in Shakespeare’s The Tempest: ‘Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange’.