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Updated: June 5, 2025
"Nothing of him doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange." Poems of Shelley, selected and arranged for use in schools, by E. E. Speight. JOHN KEATS, the poet whose death Shelley mourned in Adonais, was by a few years the younger, having been born in 1795.
Grief will not bring her back. The world must go its way, and we need not darken its sunlight by long regret. Yet when, for once, Theocritus adopted the accent of pastoral lament, when he raised the rural dirge for Daphnis into the realm of art, he composed a masterpiece, and a model for all later poets, as for the authors of Lycidas, Thyrsis, and Adonais.
The concluding stanzas of the "Adonais" pointed out where the remains ought to be deposited; in addition to which our beloved child lay buried in the cemetery at Rome. Thither Shelley's ashes were conveyed; and they rest beneath one of the antique weed-grown towers that recur at intervals in the circuit of the massy ancient wall of Rome. He selected the hallowed place himself; there is
Possibly in using the name 'Adonais' he intended to refer the reader indirectly to the 'Adonis' of Bion; and he prefixed to the preface of his poem, as a motto, four verses from the Elegy of Moschus upon Bion. This may have been intended for a hint to the reader as to the Grecian sources of the poem.
Being prepared for the printer, it is written on one side of the paper only: on the blank pages, but frequently undecipherable for the reason just indicated, are many passages intended for, but eventually omitted from, the preface to Adonais.
A hostile reviewer might have been expected to indulge in one of the most familiar of cheap jokes, and to say that Urania had naturally fallen asleep over Keats's poems: but I am not aware that any critic of Adonais did actually say this. The phrase, 'one with soft enamoured breath, means 'one of the Echoes'; this is shown in stanza 22, 'all the Echoes whom their sister's song.
But these were purely adventitious prices, as was clearly shown in the sale at the same auction rooms, a year or two earlier, of the following: Shelley's Adonais, 1st ed. Pisa, 1821, $19. Alastor, London, 1816, $32. The Cenci, Italy, 1819, $21. Hellas, London, 1822, $2.
In highly figurative language, this stanza pictures the passage of Urania from 'her secret paradise' to the death-chamber of Adonais in Rome, as if the spiritual essence and external form of the goddess were wounded by the uncongenial atmosphere of human malice and detraction through which she has to pass.
This instinctive sense has been very variously expressed by Goethe in Faust's celebrated confession of faith, by Shelley in the stanzas of 'Adonais, which begin 'He is made one with nature, by Wordsworth in the lines on Tintern Abbey, and lately by Mr. Roden Noel in his noble poems of Pantheism.
Had he waited till the day of his maturity, 'the monsters of life's waste' would have fled from him, as the wolves, ravens, and vultures had fled from, and fawned upon, 'the Pythian of the age. Then came the Mountain Shepherds, bewailing Adonais: the Pilgrim of Eternity, the Lyrist of lerne, and among others, one frail form, a pard-like spirit.
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