Adonais
Adonais,an elegy on the death of Keats , by P. B. Shelley , written at Pisa, published 1821 .
Composed in 55 Spenserian stanzas, the poem was inspired partly by the Greek elegies of Bion and Moschus (both of which Shelley had translated) and partly by Milton's Lycidas . Keats is lamented under the name of Adonais, the Greek god of beauty and fertility, together with other poets who had died young, such as Chatterton , Sidney , and Lucan . His deathbed is attended by various figures, both allegorical and contemporary, including Byron ‘the Pilgrim of Eternity’ (st. 30). Shelley , the atheist, accepts the physical facts of death, but insists on some form of Neoplatonic resurrection in the eternal Beauty of the universe, ‘a portion of the loveliness | Which once he made more lovely’ (st. 43). The style is deliberately grand and marmoreal—‘a highly wrought piece of...
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