Adonais

Despite the poem’s ornate language, considerable length, and erudite, heavy subject matter, “Adonais” is at its heart a disturbing and angry poem with a radical message as unsettling as it is inspiring. At the turn of the 19th century, death was defined largely by a Christian worldview. Freed by death, the soul was then judged by a merciful but just God who assigned that soul the eternal reward of Heaven or the damnation of Hell. The dead would be kept alive for a time within the memories and recollections of family and friends, but within a generation or two would chill into oblivion. Shelley breaks from this Christian worldview to suggest instead an oblivion crowned with beauty and truth divorced from any traditional viewpoint. Ironically, the poem reflects both first- and second-generation Romantic ideals by placing Shelley’s impassioned verse in an older, traditional form. In Shelley’s hands, however, these ideals contextualize Keats’s specific death to better reflect on the larger role of poetry and poets.

For conventional readers of Shelley’s day, Shelley’s vision of redefining death as something less than the bugaboo of mortality would hardly comfort. They’d also take issue with the thematic concerns of High Romanticism. For contemporary readers, early-19th-century British literature is defined by the works of the so-called High Romantics, most notably Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Lord Byron. It would likely shock the British literati of Shelley’s day to know their culture is now defined by these rebels with their bold, incendiary, anti-everything vision. Britain’s educated elite defined its era and embraced William Wordsworth, the architect of what would come to be called Romanticism. This elite reading class was comfortable with Wordsworth’s conception of poetry as coming more from the heart than from the head, more from feeling and less from the intellect. And they responded to how Wordsworth redefined topics appropriate to poetic treatment to include the splendors of nature, the glories and tragedies of love, and the simple uncomplicated life of everyday folks. However, they were far more cautious, far less inclined to accept Shelley and his ilk as the second generation of Romantics. Too radical, too uncompromising, too arrogant, these so-called Romantics’ bohemian lifestyles deliberately flouted convention, and their poetry spoke to a narrower reach of readers, a kind of counterculture: younger, defiant, and confrontational.

The poem begins with an interjection followed by an exclamation point: “I weep for Adonais—he is dead!” The exclamation point redirects the poem and suggests that perhaps the speaker, far from handwringing sorrow, is joyful, setting the argument that the poem will offer: Adonais has triumphed, shot through the portal of death to tap into an eternal energy, a radiant kinetic field within which those artists transcend, artists who relish the imagination, who live comfortably in the realm of abstracts, who never allow the shoddy cycle of dust and lust to diminish their vision. These artists achieve an immortality that defies the traditional, conventional perception of a Christian heaven and hell. Adonais/Keats, the speaker celebrates, went into the “gulf of death,” despite his youth, despite the sense of lost opportunity, “unterrified” (Stanza IV, Lines 8, 7).

The procession of mourners the speaker details—personifications of allegorical figures from Keats’s own poetry, then elements of nature, other dead poets, and ultimately expressions of emotions—remind the reader that this is no ordinary death, and this is no ordinary memorial service. Stanzas VIII-XV widen the death event rather than narrow it. Come to Rome, the poet invites these figures, come to the very catafalque where the poet lies and testify to the reach of the poet, how death finds resonance in the grand abstract energies of an ideal world that most people never tap, never even recognize, too caught up in the busyness of the day to day, too infatuated by the simple ledger-logic of sin and damnation.

The poet admits to experiencing grief. After all, a friend is dead. The poet speaks of how spring, exploding about him, reminds him inevitably of the irony of the dead poet: Spring manifests itself in traditional expressions, the “beauty and the joy” and “love’s delight” (Stanza XIX, Line 8). Yes, mourning is easy, inevitable, even logical, his thoughts echoing the sorrowful meditations (Stanzas XXII-XXX) of Urania, who in the poem is the allegorical figure of the dead poet’s mother/muse, her thoughts “wild and drear and comfortless” (Stanza XXV, Line 6) as she ponders the poet’s lifeless body.

Grief soon turns to blame, as the speaker introduces “the [murderous] nameless worm” (Line 4) in Stanza XXXVI. The nameless worm symbolizes both a specific person—critic John Wilson Croker—and the British literary scene at large. Croker harshly critiqued Keats’s “Endymion,” and Shelley suggests here that this tone-deaf “worm” (Stanza XXXVI, Line 4) was the direct cause of Keats’s inability to stave off illness.

The poet, however, cannot concede to grief. As an artist, he maintains a lifelong correspondence with the realm of transcendent beauty and truth that inspires his poetic expressions. Why would such a realm be suddenly ironic? Why are we mesmerized by the corpse of the poet, that “carrion kite” (Stanza XXXVIII, Line 2)? Stop weeping, the poem says, for nothing is lost save that fallible, vulnerable, corruptible form: “Peace, peace! [H]e is not dead, he doth not sleep / He hath awaken’d from the dream of life” (Stanza XXXIX, Lines 1-2). These lines begin the poem’s glorious discourse, one that would hardly inspire God-fearing Christians of Shelley’s era. After all, the glories of the closing stanzas and their affirmation of eternity seem oddly reserved for artists, not for farmers or bankers or kings or generals. The poet does not ascend but rather transcends. The heart is cold, yes, but the soul leaps into that same realm of beauty and truth in which the poet (all true poets) invest their faith. Beyond the dreary tick of time, beyond the terrifying reality of decomposition, poets affirm a luminous immortality, a reassuring reality that makes mourning itself at best ironic, at worst pointless. The poet’s soul is not destined for paradise or perdition. Rather, the soul of the poet is now beyond “earthly doom” (Stanza XLIV, Line 8) and is now part of the timeless beauty of Nature itself, from the “trees and the beasts” (Stanza XLIII, Line 9) to the very stars themselves.