In 1821, Shelley gave a guitar to Jane Williams with a handwritten poem, "To a Guitar, to Jane." On July 8, 1822, the week before his thirtieth birthday, he, Williams's partner Edward Ellerker Williams, and young neighbor Charles Vivian, age seventeen, all drowned in the Bay of Spezzia, off of Lerici, when Shelley and WIlliams's boat capsized in a storm. Shelley and Williams had named the boat the Ariel, after the transoceanic-flying fairy sprite in Shakespeare's play The Tempest. In "With a Guitar--To Jane," it is Ariel -- a stand-in for Shelley himself--who gives the guitar to "Miranda" (Shakespeare's heroine, but also clearly Jane.)
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