A Lecture Note on Shelley's Adonais

May 31, 2018

1. The Conventions of Funeral Elegies

The primary conventions include: a pastoral context; the use of repetitions, refrains and repeated questions; outbursts of anger and cursing; a procession of mourners; a movement from grief to consolation; and concluding images of resurrection. The secondary conventions include: division of mourning between several voices; questions of reward, contest and inheritance between elegist and subject; the elegist¡¯s reluctant submission to language and an accompanying protestation of incapacity; and his need to draw attention to his own surviving powers. (Peter Sacks, The English Elegy, p. 2)

The pastoral elegy is a highly conventional form. Typically, it includes reference to the deceased as a shepherd, the trappings of pagan mythology, the mourning of all nature, a procession of mourners, a contrast between revival in spring and the finality of death, and a praise of immortality. Shelley adapted these elements from tradition but jettisoned the conventional mechanics in a final strophe, an inspired Platonic exaltation. (from Enote on Adonais)

2. Title and Occasion

With a title conflating Adonis, Aphrodite¡¯s slain lover, with Adonai, a Hebrew word translated as ¡°Lord,¡± Adonais is as much about Shelley as about Keats. The anonymous evaluation of Endymion in the Quarterly Review, while unpleasant for Keats, did not kill him. Shelley wrongly thought that the older poet Robert Southey had written condemning reviews in the Quarterly Review, not only of Endymion but also of Shelley¡¯s own poetry. The review of Endymion was actually written by John Wilson Croker, and that on Shelley¡¯s poetry was the work of John Taylor Coleridge. (from Enote on Adonais)

3. A "Suicidal Poem?"

Sacks observes that Shelley¡¯'s conclusion is ¡°profoundly disturbing,¡± particularly when we remember, as we must, that Shelley died a year later at sea, ¡°refusing to follow a passing crew¡¯s advice to strike his sail during the storm.¡± Others, like Earl Wasserman and Stuart Curran, have stressed the triumphant tone of the poem, precisely where it seems most suicidal. This paradox, in both ¡°Ode to the West Wind¡± and ¡°Adonais,¡± is related to the phenomenon of self-canonization. One feels as if the author were dying into eternal life, or not dying at all, but being translated directly, like Enoch and Elijah, into a lasting presence. (Neil Arditi, from Bloom's Comprehensive Research Guide p.75)

4. Shelley's idea of Life and Death in Adonais

Adonais¡¯s treatment of death makes the poem peculiarly provisional in terms of its emotional and intellectual outlook. The subject of death is initially one that fosters a mood of consolatory lamentation. It ends by precipitating and pressing forward a view of imaginative and spiritual liberation. The latter view is intimately connected with the glimpse the poem offers at the end of a higher vision that apparently signals a harmonious union with Adonais while also suggesting a demonic force that, in itself, is at odds with harmony. Such duality, both in the fact of the changing perceptions of death that the poem offers, and in the simultaneously harmonious and demonic vision of life beyond the grave, accounts for the poem¡¯s difficulty. The poem, like all pastoral elegies, begins by grieving for the loss of a life but ends, unlike other elegies, by grieving for life itself and insisting on the need to get beyond its distorting veil (¡®Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, / Stains the white radiance of Eternity¡¯). It, like The Triumph of Life, conveys a sense of life as the progenitor of a process of victimization and disfiguration. The poem is indeterminate because it vividly recreates this sense of life as a cul de sac that stifles, as opposed to enlarges, imaginative and spiritual possibilities, while suggesting a solution-an entry into a higher realm-that may be merely an act of pragmatic escapism. Adonais strains to reach toward a solution to the problem of loss and bereavement. Such straining lifts the poem into realms of the imagination, while also confronting both Shelley and the reader with a sceptical and comfortless view of the problem of death. . . .(Barry Magarian, from Bloom's Comprehensive Research Guide pp. 87-88)

Keats, like Chatterton or Sidney, is one of "the splendours of the firmament of time," and he goes now to join them, the Vesper of their throng. But Shelley's thought returns to groundling earth, where he himself still abides. As he ponders the problem of earthly consolation, his mind turns to Rome, scene of Keats's death and burial, and to the Protestant cemetery where lie the remains of Keats, and where he himself was to lie not so long after. Though the Spirit's breath moves, the world's wind remains bitter:

From the world's bitter wind

Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb.

What Adonais is, why fear we to become?

This is the poem's great moment of transition, its dialectical resolution as Shelley chooses the fate of Keats for himself. In a stanza justly celebrated two opposing realities are brought together, with neither negating the other:

The One remains, the many change and pass;

Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

Stains the white radiance of Eternity,

Until Death tramples it to fragments.-Die,

If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!

Follow where all is fled!-Rome's azure sky,

Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak

The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.

Though life stains the white radiance of Eternity, the staining is not all loss, for the dome produces the colors that Eternity merely subsumes. Death smashes the dome and tramples it into fragments, but the fragments are at least brightly colored, for they are identical with the azure sky, with flowers, ruins, statues, music, and the words of Shelley's own poem. Yet he turns from them and seeks the deathly glory they transfuse:

(From Bloom's The Visionary Company, pp. 340-341)

5. "a triumph of human despair"

The breath whose might I have invoked in song

Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven

Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng

Whose sails were never to the tempest given;

The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!

I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;

Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,

The soul of Adonais, like a star,

Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

We mistake this triumph of rhetoric if we read it as other than a triumph of human despair. The imagination holding life open to death is not the burden of this great but suicidal stanza. Shelley is surrendering to Heaven, though it is the Heaven not of any orthodoxy but of his own agnostic will. A known is yielding to an unknown, and a vision collapses into mystery. Adonais is an imperishable poem, but it is also the sepulcher of a humanist and heroic quest.

(From Bloom's The Visionary Company, p. 341)