Adonais

Adonais, an elegy on the death of Keats, by P. B. Shelley, written at Pisa, published 1821.

Composed in 55 Spenserian stanzas, the poem was inspired partly by the Greek elegies of Bion and Moschus (both of which Shelley had translated) and partly by Milton's Lycidas. Keats is lamented under the name of Adonais, the Greek god of beauty and fertility, together with other poets who had died young, such as Chatterton, Sidney, and Lucan. His death-bed is attended by various figures, both allegorical and contemporary, including Byron ‘the Pilgrim of Eternity’ (st. 30). Shelley, the atheist, accepts the physical facts of death, but insists on some form of Neoplatonic resurrection in the eternal Beauty of the universe, ‘a portion of the loveliness | Which once he made more lovely’ (st. 43). In his preface he attacks the Tory reviewers with a pen ‘dipped in consuming fire’.