‘Where the Eternal Are’: Adonais (1821)

This chapter argues that Shelley’s elegy for John Keats, Adonais (1821), represents his most sustained, and accomplished, attempt to ‘illumine’ (l. 175) nebulous, inscrutable death. It argues that, over the course of fifty-five carefully conceived stanzas, Shelley effectively enacts a process—firstly, using the example of Keats the man, and, secondly, of Adonais, the mythologised version of him—of coming to terms with, and then ultimately triumphing over, death. His means for doing so partly marks a return, after a wide-ranging intellectual excursion of almost a decade, to his earliest mode of thinking: through a Platonic understanding of death, but now inflected with Neoplatonic insights, primarily those of Plotinus. This chapter also explores the significant influence on Shelley, in thinking about and reconciling himself to the reality of death, of the Greek lyric poetry of the elegists Bion and Moschus.