Adonais

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1821

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

The Reality of Immortality

Shelley’s elegy upends expectations by refusing to concede to the power and the inevitability of death. The poem emphatically celebrates the reality of immortality, that the flesh, corruptible and vulnerable, is itself an illusion, that the speaker—not Adonais/Keats—is in a far more emotionally compromised position because the speaker still clings to the illusion of reality. The speaker only glimpses the reality of an animated universe where any individual death is a mere occasion to validate that cosmic energy. It is we, the speaker argues, “we [who] decay / Like corpses in a charnel” (Stanza XXXIX, Lines 6-7). In this the poem finds its hope in the very reality that appears only to offer despair: Wait, the poet cautions, until we also shed this ever-decaying body, wait until we touch the illuminating animation of immortality through death.

Death, then, is overcome: “Peace, peace! He is not dead, he doth not sleep / He hath awaken’d from the dream of life” (Stanza XXXIX, Lines 1-2). The poem centers on the death of a young, promising poet taken too soon. Death would appear to be the antagonist. As the poem opens, the reader is admonished multiple times that Adonais/Keats is dead. As each element of the material world bids goodbye to the dead poet—the elements of nature, poets who have preceded Keats, the abstract emotions of life, Keats’s own poetic conjuring—the poem turns toward its greater affirmation, saying, “No more let Life divide what Death can join together” (Stanza LIII, Line 9). The poem affirms that death is nothing to fear.

Death, also, should not occasion sorrow. Death finally allows us to reconnect with the spirit that seems somehow secondary as long as we are alive and tending to the needs of the senses, enthralled by a material world we accept as real, or at least real enough. Drawing on Christianity, which itself draws much of its philosophical argument from Plato’s perception of an ideal world that is real but inaccessible through the senses, the speaker affirms the nearness of immortality itself.

The Lure of Despair

The poem pivots on a central conflict: Adonais/Keats is dead. He has rejoined the radiant energy of eternity, and the poet/speaker (presumably Shelley himself) is left behind, alive, yes, but left wanting the spiritual calm and invigorating reach of what Adonais/Keats has achieved. The poem upends traditional notions of an elegy: The speaker not only envies the dead but feels a dark pull to join them. He struggles against his inclination to provoke his own meeting with eternity by surrendering to the suasion of suicide in the closing stanzas.

The speaker tells himself that his hopes are gone, so “why linger, why turn back [presumably to resume living], why shrink, my Heart?” (Stanza LIII, Lines 1-2). If the departure of this young poet leaves the world bankrupt of light, if hope is so distressingly distant, “thou shouldst now depart!” (Stanza LIII, Line 3).

This world-weary angst has long been associated with the Romantic movement, the quick surrender to death, the easy accommodation of eloquent despair. This emotional response borders on a death-wish, and the closing stanzas can read like a suicide note as the speaker struggles to not embrace death as the only way to feel the sweet union with the beauty and light he believes illuminates the spiritual (that is non-material) realm, the same realm he believes Adonais/Keats has found.

The resolution offered in the closing stanzas is hardly the usual stuff of elegies, hardly a joyful embrace of the wonder of being alive and the charge to make every moment count, to live as if every moment is the last. It is not that the speaker hates life but that he cannot shake the idea that he will fuse finally with the very soul of Adonais once the speaker himself dies. That beckoning hope alone cautions the poet not to give in to despair, not to surrender to the “eclipsing Curse / Of birth” (Stanza LIV, Lines 3-4). It is an intoxicating theme, the dark lure of death, which might seem a thematic endorsement of suicide, but Adonais/Keats died of tuberculosis, and, in the end, the speaker decides to anticipate rather than rush to death.

The Role of the Poet

The poem argues for the power and glory of the spiritual dimension, as well as the heroic fusion of Adonais/Keats’s soul to the overarching animated cosmos that thrives all around the material world. Though the poem elegizes Keats, Shelley applies these arguments to the role of the poet at large. Within Shelley’s perception, the poet is a special entity gifted with a sympathy for the spiritual realm that others, too easily distracted by the search for comfort, the pursuit of riches, or the cravings of the senses, never recognize or bother to pursue.

The Spirit (and with Shelley the word needs to be capitalized) that animates the material universe with imperfect perceptions of its possibilities intrigues the poet. Within a society of otherwise complacent individuals, poets exist with an exalted vision, one that embraces faith in this supernal realm. This faith is ultimately what animates their work.

The poet, in turn, struggles to share with the masses this perception of the greater, grander realm. Thus, the speaker celebrates not just the poems completed by Adonais/Keats in his too-brief life but the colossal works of poets who have gone before as well, most notably John Milton and his own towering pastoral elegy “Lycidas.” In shaping this perception into eloquent and artful forms, creative artists both explore nature and then transcend its endless cycle “[o]f lust and blood” and the ever-pressing “gulf of death” (Stanza IV, Lines 7, 8). The speaker then embodies the role of the poet: not to chide readers to live better lives, not to open their eyes to the gorgeous patterns of the natural world, not to offer them consolation at times of grief. Rather, Shelley as poet does what poets must do: He gives hope by putting into words the reality of the shadowy and elusive spiritual beauty that animates the world.