Adonais

The death of the young has been a thematic concern in literature since Antiquity. That untimely demise not only exposes human vulnerability but makes for melancholic contemplation over the waste of beauty, confidence, and youth’s energy. And when that person is an artist, still young and learning, the implications seem more tragic. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Adonais” (1821) is at one level a contemplation of the sudden death in 1821 of fellow poet John Keats. Keats died at the age of 25 from tuberculosis, a particularly virulent bacterial infection that attacks the lungs, at the time one of world’s most feared infectious diseases.

The poem, however, is also a sweeping anatomy of the implications of the untimely death of a creative artist whose achievements to that point promised only significant and important work, art that now would never be realized. In drawing on the tragic figure of Adonis from Greek mythology, a splendid, handsome young man killed pointlessly by savage boars while he was hunting, Shelley creates a towering elegy, nearly 500 lines, that shares his own private struggle to handle the loss of a compatriot, a dashing and promising talent done in too soon. Ironically, within months of completing “Adonais,” Shelley himself would be dead, drowned in the Bay of Lerici off the coast of Italy.