982 shelley, Percy Bysshe
peers, or spies” (ll. 28–29) and led by Anarchy, “On
[whose] brow this mark I saw— / “I AM GOD,
AND KING, AND LAW!” (ll. 36–37). These
characters destroy England from the countryside to
the heart of London, where they are welcomed by
their fellow conservatives, leaving common citizens
“panic-stricken” at their conquest. However, Shel-
ley reminds England’s working class, through the
voice of Hope, that they embody the true virtues of
their land, including justice, wisdom, peace, and
love. If they defend themselves through nonviolent
resistance, their sheer numbers and the legitimacy
of their cause will allow them to triumph over the
futile ambitions of tyrants. This belief in “bloodless
revolution” is common in Shelley’s work, depicted at
length in his drama Prometheus Unbound.
Finally, “Ozymandias,” published during his
lifetime, addresses not only the ambition of lead-
ers but also the ambition of Shelley’s fellow art-
ists. This often-quoted sonnet tells the tale of
a traveler who stumbles across the remains of a
once-impressive statue, commissioned in antiquity
to represent the grand ambitions of Ramses II.
Parallels can be drawn between the ruler described
in the poem, a cold, calculating, and heartless leader,
and the Prince Regent (not to mention the recently
deceased Napoleon), although the reference is not
as blatant as in “England in 1819” and “The Mask
of Anarchy.” The current condition of the statue, of
which all that remains is a pair of “trunkless legs”
and a “shattered visage” (ll. 2, 4), is a testament to
the ephemeral nature of any ruler’s lasting influence.
While the statue’s base still boasts, “My name is
Ozymandias, King of Kings, / Look on my Works,
ye Mighty, and despair!” (ll. 10–11), this king’s
“works” are nowhere to be found. This “colossal
Wreck” (l. 13) is the only remaining legacy of his
reign, a testament more to the skill of its sculp-
tor than to the ambitions of the man it represents.
Ultimately, this illustrates the futility of ambition in
two areas: those who succeed in their ambitions for
power will find its influence transitory, and those
whose ambitions for fame lead in a more artistic
direction will find themselves unappreciated by
their contemporaries. As he observes in his essay “A
Defence of Poetry,” “[N]o living poet ever arrived at
the fulness of his fame; the jury which sits in judg-
ment upon a poet . . . must be impanelled by Time
from the selectest of the wise of many generations.”
Caroline E. KimberlyGrIeF in the Poems of Percy Bysshe shelley
Of the many themes addressed in the poetry of
Percy Bysshe Shelley, perhaps the most significant
to the literary canon is that of grief. Shelley’s use of
grief as a central theme is exemplified in Adonais,
his 1821 work written in 55 Spenserian stanzas
on the occasion of John Keats’s death. Adonais is
considered one of the most important elegies writ-
ten in the English language, ranking alongside such
other noteworthy poems as John Milton’s Lycidas,
Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s in memoriam a.h.h.;
and Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the
Dooryard Bloom’d.”
Shelley narrates Adonais in the first person,
emphasizing the immediacy of his grief in its open-
ing line, “I weep for Adonais—he is dead!” (l. 1), a
refrain that is taken up in various forms throughout
the poem. The stanzas that follow form a eulogy
in the style of a Greek pastoral elegy, one that calls
upon pagan deities and deceased and living poets
alike to mourn Adonais, who personifies Keats, and
to welcome him into his rightful place as a star in
the heavens. In doing so, Shelley moves through
commonly identifiable stages of grief, including
denial, anger, bargaining, and acceptance, which
underscore the sympathetic value of his emotions
for the reader.
Shelley begins by calling on Urania, Milton’s
muse and the embodiment of the purity of ideal
love, to grieve with him for her “youngest, dearest
one, [who] has perished” (l. 46). Urania is urged to
rush to Adonais’s deathbed, but she is also reminded
repeatedly that, despite her denial of his death, “He
will awake no more, oh, never more!” (l. 64). Urania
is not the only one who refuses to accept the young
poet’s death as fact; angelic figures signifying Keats’s
“Dreams,” or poetic visions, also crowd Adonais’s
corpse, refusing to leave their lifeless creator. They
form a troupe of mourners who attempt, but fail,
to revive him, and they are joined by a stream of
gods, including Echo, Phoebus, and Narcissus, and
by England as a nation, the “Albion [who] wails for
thee” (l. 151).