Jan 8, 2009

Adonais | Adonais

At a glance:

Author: Percy Bysshe Shelley
First Published: 1821
Type of Work: Elegaic Poetry
Genres: Poetry, Lyric poetry, Elegy
Subjects: Mythology or myths, Nineteenth century, Poetry or poets, Death or dying, Bereavement or grief, Romanticism, Great Britain, Greece or Greek people, Joy or sorrow

Adonais, like Milton’s Lycidas, is a remarkably successful English adaptation of the classical elegy form perfected by the Greek poets Bion, Moschus, and Theocritus. Keats, whose early works Shelley had greatly admired, had died at Rome in 1821. The cause of death was tuberculosis, but Shelley believed that a hostile review of Keats’s Endymion had crucially contributed to the poet’s death. Thus the poem’s allusion to Adonis, a beautiful youth loved by Venus and killed by a savage boar, is aptly ironical as well as conventionally classical.

Shelley’s poem, written in 55 Spenserian stanzas, closely follows the pattern of the pastoral elegy. The mournful beginning includes a reproachful invocation to the muse Urania, the natural world’s sympathetic participation in the bereaved poet’s sorrow over Adonais, a procession of mourners (among them Shelley depicts himself and Lord Byron), and the obligatory attack on debased literary practitioners, the specific reference here being to Keats’s harsh critic, John Wilson Croker of the Quarterly Review.

At stanza 38, the mood shifts from grief to comfort. Keats’s spirit has become part of the Eternal, made one with nature and immortalized through his enduring works. Toward the end of the elegy, after the view of Keats’s grave at Rome’s Protestant Cemetery, Shelley offers one of the finest English analogies for Plato’s doctrine of the ideal: “Life, like a dome of many-colored glass/ Stains the white radiance of Eternity/ Until death tramples it to fragments.”