Norton Introduction to Adonais

1. John Keats died in Rome on February 23, 1821, and was buried there in the Protestant Cemetery. Shelley had met Keats, had invited him to be his guest at Pisa, and had gradually come to realize that he was "among the writers of the highest genius who have adorned our age" (Preface to Adonais).

2. The name "Adonais" is derived from Adonis, the handsome youth who had been loved by the goddess Venus and slain by a wild boar. Shelley in his poem gives the role of the boar to the anonymous author of a vituperative review of Keats's Endymion in the Quarterly Review, April 1818 (now known to be John Wilson Croker), whom Shelley mistakenly believed to be responsible for Keats's illness and death.

3. Shelley in a letter described Adonais, which he wrote in April—June 1821 and had printed in Pisa in July, as a "highly wrought piece of art." Its artistry consists in part in the care with which it follows the conventions of the pastoral elegy, established more than two thousand years earlier by the Greek Sicilian poets Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus—Shelley had translated into English Bion's Lament for Adonis and Moschus's Lament for Bion.

4. We recognize the centuries-old poetic ritual in many verbal echoes and in devices such as the mournful and accusing invocation to a muse (stanzas 2—4), the sympathetic participation of nature in the grieving (stanzas 14— 17), the procession of appropriate mourners (stanzas 30—35), the denunciation of unworthy practitioners of the pastoral or literary art (stanzas 17, 27—29, 36—37), and above all, in the turn from despair at the finality of human death (lines 1, 64, 190: "He will awake no more, oh, never more!") to consolation in the sudden and contradictory discovery that the grave is a gate to a higher existence (line 343: "Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep").