Adonais

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1821

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form

By genre, “Adonais” is an elegy, a work expressing grief, inspired most often by the sudden and unexpected death of a friend or, in some cases, the death of a public figure. In its execution, “Adonais” reflects the elements of a traditional pastoral elegy in that Shelley uses an idealized rural landscape—the springtime, the green hills, the budding trees, the carelessly babbly brooks, the songbirds—to express the depth of the mourning over Keats’s death. Nature herself mourns the poet’s loss. In the city of Rome, the actual site of Adonais/Keats’s death, the poem further enhances the pastoral element: Far from the gentle bosom of nature, the city is toxic.

“Adonais” is executed in a tightly controlled, predesigned form: 55 Spenserian stanzas. It might seem a curious choice. Shelley’s argument—that Keats was essentially killed by bad press, by critics unwilling or unable to understand the achievement of his verse—is enhanced by his deft use of the Spenserian stanza.

First developed by Edmund Spenser (1552-1599), the format is intricate and demanding. Each stanza is nine lines. The first eight lines are set in iambic pentameter (10 syllable beats), the ninth in iambic hexameter (12 syllable beats). The ninth line gives each of the stanza sections a kind of closure, a finality to whatever problem the stanza sets up. In addition, the rhyme scheme is demanding: ABABBCBCC. Add to that the sheer epical size of Shelley’s endeavor—close to 500 lines—and the form becomes a major statement of the poem itself.

By the time of Shelley’s generation, the Spenserian stanza had all but disappeared as a curiosity, an unnecessarily cumbersome architecture. In reviving that form—and executing it with confidence and authority—Shelley reminds his contemporary readers that the critical establishment’s rejection of these young poets as careless radicals was not only misplaced but poorly informed. The form makes the case for Keats’s—and by extension Shelley’s—achievement.

Meter

The poem’s meter is at once stately and subtle. The poem is set in 55 nine-line stanzas, the first eight in iambic pentameter, the ninth line in iambic hexameter. The meter is hardly percussive, not musical in the popular perception. It does not lend the poem to theatrical recitation, nor is it designed to appeal to the untrained, untutored ear. Rather, the poem’s meter rewards a meditative recitation, which matches the poem’s elegiac tone.

A line of poetry is a carefully designed measure of beats. In “Adonais,” most of the lines follow a strict 10-syllable pattern. Each line has five units of paired beats, the first unstressed, the second beat stressed, as in the word “diVIDE” or the word “comPLAIN.” To the ear, that unit sounds like “da-DUM.” The unit of unstressed-stressed is termed an iamb; and because most of the lines have five such units, the pattern is termed iambic pentameter. Consider this line from Stanza XXXVIII with boldface indicating the stressed syllable:

He wakes and sleeps with the enduring dead (Line 3).

The closing line of each stanza, however, adds a sixth unit, or iamb. That line has iambic hexameter. Consider this line from Stanza LIII with boldface indicating the stressed syllable:

No more than Life divide what Death can join together (Line 9).

Shelley, despite or because of his reputation as a rebel, draws on the metrical patterns of major works of the English Renaissance, most notably the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser’s The Fairie Queene, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and most formidably, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, works that were by Shelley’s time more than four centuries old. In drawing on this metrical pattern, Shelley, for all his “bad-boy” Romantic energy, his revolutionary perception of the role of the poet and his heretical notions of a world absent the Christian God, is rooted in the hoary traditions of British poetry. In the process, he aligns himself, and by extension the dead poet Keats, with the reverence and respect of those towering figures from Britain’s glorious literary past.

Speaker

It is tempting to accept the obvious: given the work’s subtitle (“An Elegy on the Death of John Keats”) and the friendship that existed between Shelley and Keats, that the speaker in the poem is Shelley himself. The issue, however, is the tenuous nature of that friendship. To call it a friendship is to exaggerate (the two young poets met only infrequently and exchanged a few letters). Indeed, Shelley was never entirely taken by Keats’s poetry and often revealed a tinge of jealousy over the ambitions of the younger (by three years) poet. In Shelley’s pettier moments, he questioned Keats’s talents.

The speaker is therefore not limited to a friend of a dead poet (the model for such an elegy in British poetry, which Shelley knew, is the epical “Lycidas,” in which John Milton struggled to understand the drowning death of a close university friend). In “Adonais,” the speaker is not so much Shelley the person as Shelley the Poet struggling with the implications of what the world is denied when a poet dies too young, the business of art left unfinished. Keats then is the occasion of such a meditation. The speaker-poet uses the death of this poet and recreates Keats into the figure of Adonais, Shelley’s coinage, a name that fuses the mythological name Adonis and the ancient Hebrew term Adonai, meaning Lord or master. Thus, the speaker is defined not as Shelley but as a Poet contemplating how the gift of poetry, the music of the poet, ensures the poet (Shelley included) a way to defy mortality and soar into the realm of the immortal.