Adonais

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1821

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Historical Context

The relationship between Percy Shelley and John Keats gives “Adonais” its historic context. The friendship between Shelley and Keats is and is not central to the argument of “Adonais.” Friendships between writers are often tricky things as such friendships can be distorted by petty jealousy, dark paranoia, and flat-out animosity. Sometimes these friendships become essential in understanding the evolution of a writer, and these relationships—Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, Harper Lee, and Truman Capote—help define each writer’s vision. Friendships between writers often began during periods in their lives when neither felt certain of their talent and drew on others to define the direction their own writing would take.

Within popular imagination, Shelley and Keats seem inseparable. Born just three years apart, they corresponded about the Romantic revolution in poetry of which they were both a part. They both authored towering works that defied inherited conventions of poetry; both dealt with critical lambasting; both led intemperate and scandalous personal lives. They met on several occasions in England and would tragically die at a young age within a year of each other.

But the two were hardly friends. Their relationship is revealed in the argument of “Adonais” itself. Shelley was an intellect, an idealist able to envision an abstract world of transcendent realities, a supernal realm infused with light and defined by Truth, always with a capital T. Shelley looked about his world with anger and frustration, certain that humanity was destined for greater things than it had achieved, thus his ardent and uncompromising activism. A cosmopolitan adventurer, an unapologetic and very vocal atheist, a political radical, a scandalous lover whose intemperate private life of sensual indulgence and free love quite publicly mocked the conventions of his era, Shelley lived as if he saw the role of the poet as provocateur, rebel, iconoclast, and cause célèbre.

Keats, Shelley perceived, was more of a realist given to emotional extravagances and profound melancholy, unable to rise above the conditions of the material world. Thus, in the poem, Shelley uses Keats not as a subject but rather as an occasion to define the possibility of the Poet that he, not the dead Keats, embodied. Mourn not Keats, the poem suggests, but rather the idea of a Poet, a Poet able to transcend the boundary of mortality by dint of a sweeping vision of a greater, wider, broader realm than Keats ever perceived.

Literary Context

“Adonais” is an elegy, a meditation on the emotional response to the death of someone, often a friend or a lover but sometimes a public figure. The elegy as a literary form dates to Antiquity. Because elegies explore the anxieties over mortality and express the vulnerabilities that every person experiences at some point over the hammer-stroke intrusion of death, elegies speak to the common yearning that something survives our death, a soul perhaps, a work of art or a heroic career, or even something in the memory of those left to deal with the loss.

From a psychological standpoint, the poet, so grievously wounded emotionally by the death of someone familiar to him, uses the discipline of writing to organize their thoughts, to take the maelstrom of dark and unsettling emotions and craft from them a response that offers, in turn, a strategy for coping. In “Adonais,” the poet works through his grief. He invites nature to mourn the death of the poet dying young; he invites poets from the past to recognize the sorrow of this poet’s death; he eviscerates those he believes responsible for the poet’s despair that in turn left him weak-spirited and vulnerable to death. Elegies are not content to weep; sorrow is never the last word. In the closing stanzas, the poet reminds himself as much as the reader that poets can, through the possession of their imagination and the expression of that energy into forms, actually move beyond time and defy death: “Death is a low mist which cannot blot / The brightness it may veil” (Stanza XLIV, Lines 4-5). That reassurance is not for everyone. If others, that is, if those who are not artists, cannot experience such transcendence, the argument here is that the speaker will someday follow the “soul of Adonais” like a bright beacon into Eternity. Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, Shelley himself would be dead within months.