derived from Adonis, the handsome youth who had been loved by the goddess Venus and slain by a wild boar. He was restored to life on the condition that he spend only part of every year with Venus in heaven and the other part with Proserpine in the underworld. This cycle of rebirth and death, symbolic of the alternate return of summer and winter, suggests why Adonis was central to ancient fertility myths. 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.
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. 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
2. Saturn and Love were among the deities of a Christ . . . and the 'many unsubdued' [are] the real or imaginary' state of innocence and happiness. monstrous objects of the idolatry of China, India, 'All' those 'who fell' fare] the Gods of Greece, the Antarctic islands, and the native tribes of Asia, and Egypt; the 'One who rose' [is] Jesus America [Shelley's note].
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ADONAIS / 823
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').
Published first in Pisa, Italy, in 1821, Adonais was not issued in England until 1829, in an edition sponsored by the so-called Cambridge Apostles (the minor poet
R. M. Milnes and the more famous poets Alfred Tennyson and A. H. Hallam). The appearance of this edition marked the beginning of Keats's posthumous emergence from obscurity. Adonais
An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion, etc.
[Thou wert the morning star among the living, Ere thy fair light had fled? Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving New splendour to the dead.]'
1 I weep for Adonais?he is dead! O, weep for Adonais! though our tears Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head! And thou, sad Hour,2 selected from all years 5 To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers,0 companions And teach them thine own sorrow, say: with me Died Adonais; till the Future dares Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be An echo and a light unto eternity!
2
io Where wert thou mighty Mother,3 when he lay, When thy Son lay, pierced by the shaft which flies In darkness?4 where was lorn? Urania forlorn When Adonais died? With veiled eyes, 'Mid listening Echoes, in her Paradise
is She sate, while one,' with soft enamoured breath, Rekindled all the fading melodies, With which, like flowers that mock the corse0 beneath, corpse
He had adorned and hid the coming bulk of death.
3
O, weep for Adonais?he is dead!
20 Wake, melancholy Mother, wake and weep! Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed Thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep
1. Shelley prefixed to Adonais a Greek epigram attributed to Plato; this is Shelley's translation of the Greek. The planet Venus appears both as the morning star, Lucifer, and as the evening star, Hesperus or Vesper. Shelley makes of this phenomenon a key symbol for Adonais's triumph over death, in stanzas 44?46. 2. Shelley follows the classical mode of personifying the hours, which mark the passage of time and turn of the seasons.
3. Urania. She had originally been the Muse of astronomy, but the name was also an epithet for Venus. Shelley converts Venus Urania, who in Greek myth had been the lover of Adonis, into the mother of Adonais. 4. Alludes to the anonymity of the review of Endymion.
5. I.e., the echo of Keats's voice in his poems.
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82 4 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Like his, a mute and uncomplaining sleep;
For he is gone, where all things wise and fair
Descend;?oh, dream not that the amorous Deep0 abyss
Will yet restore him to the vital air;
Death feeds on his mute voice, and laughs at our despair.
4
Most musical of mourners, weep again!
Lament anew, Urania!?He6 died,
Who was the Sire of an immortal strain,
Blind, old, and lonely, when his country's pride,
The priest, the slave, and the liberticide,
