The Triumph of Life

The Triumph of Life was the last major work by Percy Bysshe Shelley before his death in 1822.

Shelley wrote the poem at Casa Magni in Lerici, Italy in the early summer of 1822.

[1] He modelled the poem, written in terza rima, on Petrarch's Trionfi and Dante's Divine Comedy.

[1] Shelley was working on the poem when he accidentally drowned on 8 July 1822 during a storm on a voyage from Leghorn.

[1] For Shelley, life itself, the "painted veil" which obscures and disguises the immortal spirit, is a more universal conqueror than love, death, fame, chastity, divinity, or time, and, in a dream vision, he sees this triumphal chariot pass, "on the storm of its own rushing splendour," over the captive multitude of men.