Drowned, frozen, dead for ever! We look on the past, And stare aghast At the spectres wailing, pale and ghast, Of hopes which thou andI beguiled To death on life’s dark river. —“Lines,” Percy Shelley, 1817, published 1824 AFTER THE BIRTHof the Shelleys’ latest child, Percy Florence, in November 1819, his father believed that things would return to normal, and Mary’s depression would disappear. Now she had a baby again to make her happy. But Mary could not so easily forget the deaths of her children Clara and William, nor Shelley’s open affection for other women. Mary’s husband, like her father, had a blind spot for her emotional pain and was unable to deal with it except to complain how it affected him. When she was younger, Mary tried to involve herself in the kind of community marriage her husband envisioned. She went through the motions with Thomas Jefferson Hogg, but there is no evidence their relationship was ever consummated, or that it was anything more than playacting on her side.
