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Updated: June 5, 2025
Adonais is now dead: the Hour which witnessed his loss mourns him, and is to rouse the other Hours to mourn. He was the son of the widowed Urania, her youngest and dearest son. Urania should now wake and weep; yet wherefore? 'He is gone where all things wise and fair descend. Nevertheless let her weep and lament. Adonais had come to Rome.
All readers have found it in the last splendid verse of 'Adonaïs. It proclaims itself in Keats in the wild naïveté of the inquiry, 'Muse of my native land, am I inspired? The faculty of the very greatest among the great lies in the existence of this inrush of emotion, in strict subordination to the intellectual powers.
Furnivall has suggested to me that Adonais is 'Shelley's variant of Adonias, the women's yearly mourning for Adonis. Disregarding details, we may perhaps say that the whole subject of his Elegy is treated by Shelley as a transposition of the lament, as conceived by Bion, of the Cyprian Aphrodite for Adonis; and that, as he changes the Cyprian into the Uranian Aphrodite, so he changes the dead youth from Adonis into Adonais.
The stars are said to smile on the Earth's despair. This does not, I apprehend, indicate any despair of the Earth consequent on the death of Adonais, but a general condition of woe. A reference of a different kind to stars a figurative reference appears in st. 29. +Stanza 42,+ 1. 1. He is made one with Nature. This stanza ascribes to Keats the same phase of immortality which belongs to Nature.
The ashes of the body were placed in the oaken box; those of the heart, handed by Trelawny to Hunt, were afterwards given into the possession of Mary, who jealously guarded them during her life, in a place where they were found at her death, in a silken case, in which was kept a Pisan copy of the Adonais.
In April, 1770, at the age of seventeen, he left Bristol for London, where he took poison in August of the same year to escape a slower death by starvation. His romantic poetry and pathetic end appealed to all the great poets. Wordsworth spoke of him as "the marvelous boy"; Coleridge called him "young-eyed Poesy"; Shelley honored him in Adonais; and Keats inscribed Endymion to his memory.
He loved to quote from Adonais: "He is made one with Nature: there is heard His voice in all her music, from the moan Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird; He is a presence to be felt and known In darkness and in light, from herb and stone, Spreading itself where'er that Power may move Which has withdrawn his being to its own.
Adonais calls thee: be no longer divided from him. The soul of Adonais beacons to thee 'from the abode where the Eternal are. This may he the most convenient place for raising a question of leading importance to the Argument of Adonais Who is the personage designated under the name Urania? a question which, so far as I know, has never yet been mooted among the students of Shelley. Who is Urania?
I can write nothing; and if "Adonais" had no success, and excited no interest, what incentive can I have to write?" Again: "I write little now. It is impossible to compose except under the strong excitement of an assurance of finding sympathy in what you write."
His face bore a confusion of ideals; he had the brow of a Covenanter and the mouth of Adonais, the flame of religious ardour in his eyes and the composure of perceived philosophy on his lips.
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