Adonais is a long poem, running 495 lines in fifty-five Spenserian
stanzas. As the poet states in his subtitle,
it is "An Elegy on the Death of John Keats." The younger Keats, an acquaintance and fellow Romantic poet whom Percy Bysshe Shelley had invited to visit with him in Italy, had been seeking warmer climes to relieve the tuberculosis which eventually took his life, at the age of twenty-six, on February 23, 1821.
The poem’s title requires the reader to pause and reflect momentarily on Shelley’s highly conscious design. In keeping with the conventions of the pastoral elegy, Adonais is the fictive name which Shelley assigns John Keats. Readers familiar with Greek mythology will certainly hear an echo of Adonis in the name; he was the decidedly handsome youth whom the goddess Venus loved and who also died a tragic and early death, being killed by a wild boar. One familiar with Judaic traditions might also hear Adonai in Shelley’s choice of name. Adonai in Hebrew means God or Lord, and is a substitute for the ineffable name which even the name Jehovah only betokens.
If it seems presumptuous for Shelley to hint at a godlike quality to the young man whose death he is mourning, it is easier to see an intended symmetry: As a poet, Keats shares a spiritual identity both with a mortal beloved of the gods and with the godhead itself, and he is the inheritor of both the classical and biblical traditions that compose Western culture—an heir, that is, of the ages.
The poem opens boldly with a single, undeniable fact and the poet’s response to it: "I weep for Adonais—he is dead!"
Stanzas 2 through 35 will present a parade of mourners who, with the poet, have come to grieve. The poet pitifully urges the fallen Adonais’ mother, Urania, to awaken to lead the mourners at his bier; in her, Shelley combines both the Venus of the Adonis myth (Venus Urania is one of the goddess’ titles) and Urania, the muse of astronomy. That latter may seem an odd choice unless one knows that Adonais’ ultimate destiny is an eternity represented by the stars.
For the moment, however, there is only despair, and readers are urged to "weep for Adonais—he is dead!"
Stanza 9 brings as leaders of the solemn procession the dead shepherd/poet’s "flocks"—his dreams and inspirations. Continuing through stanza 13, there is a cataloging of the personifications of all those thoughts and feelings, attitudes and skills, which made his genius, as they view the corpse in shocked disbelief. Awakened by the grieving poet as well as by the figure Misery, Urania appears in stanza 22, and the poet repeats his lament: "He will awake no more, oh, never more!" In the wild distraction of her grief she urges her son to arise, to awake; her pleas are in vain.
Stanzas 30 through 34 bring a select group of human mourners. The "Pilgrim of Eternity," to anyone familiar with Byron’s first great work,
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818), is George Gordon, Lord Byron. The next is the Irish poet Thomas Moore, whose themes also comment on the sorrows and losses wrought by time’s passage. Finally, stanzas 31 through 34 present a Shelleyan self-portrait: "one frail Form" who has "fled astray," "his branded and ensanguined brow," a brow "like Cain’s or Christ’s."
This image is not simply of himself but of the poetic soul in general as a gentle, high-strung creature who, as an outcast, survives the darts of his callous fellow mortals with dignity and a quiet grace. The image spurs a substantial shift in the poet’s attitude toward Adonais’ death.
To this point, the poet has lamented his and others’ helplessness to make sense of that death. In stanza 37, however, the poet reflects on a fit punishment for the "nameless worm" and "noteless blot" who is the anonymous and highly critical reviewer of Keats’s
Endymion (1818), who, in Shelley’s eyes, drove John Keats/Adonais to an early grave. The worst punishment that Shelley can contrive is that such a scoundrel should live: "Live thou, whose infamy is not thy fame!/ Live!" Faced with the contradiction that he would wish a long life upon the miscreant who took his hero’s life, in stanza 38 the poet bursts open the gates of consolation that are required of the pastoral elegy: "Nor let us weep that our delight is fled/ Far from these carrion kites."
Adonais "is not dead …/ He hath awakened from the dream of life." Shelley turns his grief from Adonais to "we" who must live on and "decay/ Like corpses in a charnel," and after a series of stanzas (39–49) in which he celebrates the richer and fuller life that Adonais must now be experiencing, the poet becomes mindful that he is in Rome, itself a city rife with visible records of loss and decay. Moreover, he is in the Protestant cemetery there, where Shelley’s three-year-old son is buried as well; and yet, as if mocking all despair, a "light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread." Nature does not abhor death and decay, he sees; it is humans, who fear and hate in the midst of life, who do.
"What Adonais is, why fear we to become?" he asks in stanza 51. The reversal of attitude is completed, and in stanza 52 Shelley makes the most profound profession of faith in the everlasting and transcendent to be found in all English poetry. It is life’s worldly cares—that obscuring and distracting "dome of many-coloured glass"—not Death that is the enemy and the source of human despair. "Follow where all is fled," he urges, and he goads his own heart into having the courage to face not extinction but "that Light whose smile kindles the Universe." The poem concludes by imagining Adonais to be a part of "the white radiance of Eternity." As the poem ends, "like a star," the soul of the dead poet "Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are."