Adonais (Selected Excerpts)

By Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Adonais” is Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1821 elegy for John Keats, who died of tuberculosis in Rome that February at the age of 25. Across 55 Spenserian stanzas and 495 lines, it moves from bitter lament to a soaring vision in which the dead poet has not perished but joined the eternal. Shelley called it “the least imperfect” of his works.

Our reading: the poem begins as an elegy for Keats and ends as an elegy for Shelley himself. By the last stanza, the mourner is the one being carried away, and a year later, Shelley drowned at sea.

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Summary · The Poem · Background · Analysis and Themes · Form and Technique · Notable Lines · Themes · FAQ
Glossary · In Popular Culture · Related Poems

Summary

The poem opens with a call to weep for Adonais, Shelley’s name for Keats. His mother, the muse Urania, rushes to his deathbed, and the Dreams, feelings, and forces of nature he gave life to gather to mourn him. A procession of fellow poets follows, including Lord Byron and a frail figure who is Shelley himself, and the speaker turns in fury on the anonymous reviewer whose attack, he believes, hastened Keats’s death.

Then, at stanza 39, the poem reverses itself: “Peace, peace! he is not dead.” It is the living who are trapped in a nightmare, while Adonais has woken into eternity and become part of the beauty of the world. The speaker imagines Keats’s grave in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, urges himself to follow the dead, and in the final stanza feels his own spirit being swept out to sea toward the star that Adonais has become.

The Poem

“Adonais” runs to 55 stanzas, so this page gives four of the most important, the first, the 39th, the 52nd, and the last, following the text of the first edition (Pisa, 1821) with its original spelling and punctuation.

I

I weep for Adonais—he is dead!
Oh, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years
To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers,
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!’

XXXIX

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep,
He hath awaken’d from the dream of life;
’Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit’s knife
Invulnerable nothings. We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

LII

The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-colour’d 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.

LV

The breath whose might I have invok’d 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.

Background

John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome on February 23, 1821, and was buried in the city’s Protestant Cemetery. Shelley, living in Pisa, heard the news on April 11 and wrote “Adonais” over the following weeks. He had the poem printed in Pisa in July 1821, and copies were sold in London by his publisher, Charles Ollier. Shelley thought it his best work, calling it “the least imperfect of my compositions.”

In his preface, Shelley blamed Keats’s death on the savage review of Endymion that had appeared, unsigned, in the Quarterly Review in 1818. That was not true, since tuberculosis killed Keats, but the story stuck, and Lord Byron mocked it in Don Juan, joking that Keats’s mind had let itself be “snuffed out by an article.” The poem follows the ancient tradition of the pastoral elegy, in which shepherds and nature mourn a dead poet. Its models include the Greek laments of Bion and Moschus and John Milton’s “Lycidas,” and its title reworks Adonis, the beautiful youth of Greek myth whose death was mourned by the goddess of love.

Less than a year after printing the poem, on July 8, 1822, Shelley drowned when his boat sank in a storm off the Italian coast. According to his friend Edward Trelawny, a volume of Keats’s poems was found in his jacket. His ashes were buried in the same Protestant Cemetery in Rome that the poem describes.

Analysis and Themes

“Adonais” is built like a pivot, with 38 stanzas of mourning and 17 of consolation. Three things repay attention: the sudden reversal at its center, the philosophy behind its most famous image, and the way the elegy turns toward its own author.

“He Is Not Dead”: The Great Reversal

For 38 stanzas, the poem piles up grief. It summons the Hours, the Dreams, the seasons, and the poets of England to weep, and it rages at the critic Shelley blamed for the death. Then stanza 39 overturns everything: “Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep, / He hath awaken’d from the dream of life.” The dead poet is not the one to pity. It is the living who are asleep, wasting themselves in “an unprofitable strife” with phantoms, decaying “like corpses in a charnel.”

From this point the poem’s logic runs backward. Death becomes waking, and life becomes the nightmare. Adonais “is made one with Nature,” present in every flower and in the music of the wind, and the speaker concludes that there is nothing left to mourn. The reversal is so sudden and so complete that the poem seems to argue itself out of its own sorrow.

The Dome of Many-Colored Glass

Stanza 52 gives the consolation its philosophical form. Shelley draws on Plato: behind the changing world of appearances lies a single, eternal reality, “The One,” pure as white light. Earthly life is “a dome of many-colour’d glass” that splits that light into beautiful colors but also “Stains” it. Death shatters the dome, and what was colored becomes pure again.

The image is gorgeous, and it has a dangerous edge. If death is release into the One, why stay alive? The same stanza answers with a command, “Die, / If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!” Shelley is speaking to himself, and the poem’s comfort begins to sound like a longing for death.

An Elegy That Turns on Its Author

Shelley is present throughout the poem. Among the mourners, he paints himself as a frail, hunted figure, a poet as scorned by critics as Keats had been, and the attack on the reviewer is also a defense of himself. The ending completes the turn. In the last stanza, the “breath” he has called on in song descends on him, and his “spirit’s bark is driven, / Far from the shore,” out into the storm, toward Adonais shining “like a star.”

Readers have found that stanza hard to read without thinking of what came next. A year after writing it, Shelley was drowned when his boat went down in a squall. The poem did not predict his death, but it shows a poet who imagined his own end as a voyage out to sea, and who welcomed it.

Form and Technique

The poem has 495 lines in 55 Spenserian stanzas, the form Edmund Spenser invented for The Faerie Queene. Each stanza has nine lines rhyming ABABBCBCC: eight lines of iambic pentameter, “the ONE re-MAINS, the MAN-y CHANGE and PASS,” followed by a longer line of six beats, called an alexandrine. That last line slows each stanza down and gives it a grave, falling close, as in “And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.” Keats and Byron had both used the form, so Shelley’s choice honors the Romantic tradition he and Keats shared.

The poem also keeps the conventions of the pastoral elegy: the invocation to mourn, the procession of mourners, the attack on those responsible, and the final turn to consolation. Shelley fills this old frame with his own philosophy, so that the expected Christian heaven becomes a Platonic realm of light. The language grows more abstract as the poem rises, from frost and tears in the first stanza to “the white radiance of Eternity” in the fifty-second.

Notable Lines

Three passages trace the poem’s journey from grief to transcendence.

I weep for Adonais—he is dead!
Oh, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!

Lines 1 to 3

The opening lament. Tears are warm and the dead are frozen, and the image admits at once that grief can change nothing.

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep,
He hath awaken’d from the dream of life;

Lines 343 to 344

The turning point of the poem, and its most quoted consolation. Death is reimagined as waking up, which makes life the dream.

The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-colour’d glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,

Lines 460 to 463

Shelley’s most famous image. Life is stained glass, beautiful because it colors eternal light and imperfect for the same reason.

Themes

Four ideas run through the elegy, all of them about what survives a death.

Grief and consolation. The poem moves from helpless mourning to the claim that the dead poet is more alive than the living.

The immortality of the poet. Adonais lives on in nature and in the eternal light that inspires all poetry.

The cruelty of critics. Shelley blames a hostile review for Keats’s death and defends poets against a world that wounds them.

The longing for death. The consolation is so powerful that it becomes a wish to follow, and the poem ends with the speaker being carried away.

Frequently Asked Questions

These are the questions readers most often ask about Shelley’s elegy.

Who Is Adonais?

Adonais is Shelley’s name for the poet John Keats, who died in Rome in February 1821. The name is based on Adonis, the beautiful young man of Greek myth whose early death was mourned by the goddess of love.

When Was “Adonais” Written?

Shelley wrote it in the spring of 1821, soon after learning on April 11 that Keats had died. It was printed at Pisa in July 1821.

Why Did Shelley Write “Adonais”?

He wrote it to mourn Keats and to defend him. Shelley believed a harsh review of Keats’s Endymion had hastened his death, and he wanted to honor a poet he felt the world had failed to recognize.

What Does “Who Mourns for Adonais?” Mean?

It is the opening of stanza 47, where Shelley challenges anyone still grieving to rise above the earth and see Adonais as he truly is, part of the eternal. The line later became the title of a 1967 episode of Star Trek.

Is Adonais the Same as Adonai?

No. Adonai is a Hebrew word for God, meaning “my Lord,” while Adonais is Shelley’s own form of Adonis, the youth of Greek myth. Some critics hear an echo of the Hebrew word in the name, but Shelley never explained his choice.

Glossary

These words and names from the stanzas above help unlock the poem.

• compeers (line 5): Companions or equals, here the other hours of time.
• charnel (line 349): A charnel house, a building where the bones of the dead are stored.
• The One (line 460): In Platonic thought, the single, eternal reality behind the changing world.
• transfuse (line 468): Pass on or pour into something else.
• bark (line 488): A small sailing ship.
• massy (line 491): Massive and heavy.
• riven (line 491): Torn apart.

In Popular Culture

Shelley’s elegy has echoed far beyond the literature classroom, from American poetry to a rock concert in London.

A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass (1912): Amy Lowell took the title of her first poetry collection from stanza 52.

Star Trek (1967): The original series episode “Who Mourns for Adonais?,” in which the crew of the Enterprise meets the Greek god Apollo, borrows its title from stanza 47.

The Rolling Stones in Hyde Park (1969): On July 5, 1969, two days after the death of guitarist Brian Jones, Mick Jagger read from “Adonais,” beginning “Peace, peace! he is not dead,” to a crowd of hundreds of thousands before the band released thousands of white butterflies.

Related Poems

These poems share the elegy’s tradition, its subject, or its author.

• Lycidas by John Milton: The great English pastoral elegy, and the model Shelley followed most closely.
• When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be by John Keats: Keats’s own sonnet about the fear of dying before his work was done.
• Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats: The ode in which Keats, too, feels “half in love with easeful Death.”
• In Memoriam A.H.H. by Alfred Tennyson: The Victorian elegy for a friend who died young, written over 17 years.
• Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley: Another poem in which Shelley longs to be carried away by a force greater than himself.