poems 983While Urania attempts to bargain with Death,
her eloquent pleas on behalf of Adonais fail to
reverse the natural order of creation. She begins
to accept the finality of what has happened, and as
she does so, she is joined in her grief by “mountain
shepherds” (l. 262), symbolizing Keats’s poetic con-
temporaries Lord Byron, Thomas Moore, Leigh
Hunt, and Shelley himself. It is through his accep-
tance of Keats’s mortality that Shelley acknowledges
his own mortality, for “in another’s fate [he] now
wept his own” (l. 300). Yet within this grief there is
hope for life after death, a belief in an “Eternal” from
which all comes and to which all will return: “What
Adonais is, why fear we to become?” (l. 459).
Ultimately, by progressing through his grief from
denial to acceptance, Shelley is able to make peace
with the untimely death of his young friend. He
recognizes that Keats is not truly dead, but “hath
awakened from the dream of life— / ’Tis we, who
lost in stormy visions, keep / With phantoms an
unprofitable strife” (ll. 344–346). In fact, it is only
in death that we can ever be truly alive, as we are
divorced from all the pains and cares of everyday liv-
ing. With this realization, Shelley’s refrain changes;
the oft-echoed “weep for Adonais” from earlier in
the poem now becomes “Mourn not for Adonais” (l.
362), who has rejoined “the loveliness / Which once
he made more lovely” (ll. 379–380). Perhaps more
important for Shelley, it is through death that Keats
has gained true immortality as a poet, a situation for
which Shelley holds no small amount of envy.
Adonais represents the complexity of the grieving
process, and despite a final note of hopefulness, it is
also influenced by Shelley’s attempt to place blame
for his friend’s demise. By specifically attributing
Keats’s death to the influence of a hostile review,
despite the fact that closer friends knew that the
review’s true influence on the younger poet had
been minor and fleeting, Shelley may have actually
ensured the immortality he foretold for Adonais in
his poem. It is a testament to the power of grief and
the moving sentiment in Shelley’s elegy that the
legend of Keats’s death represented in Adonais was
still generally accepted as historical fact for much
of the 19th century, despite many biographies that
claimed the contrary.
Caroline E. Kimberly
StaGeS oF LIFe in the Poems of
Percy Bysshe shelley
Shelley’s common theme of the transience of life,
the unstoppable march of time to which all human-
ity is subject, is connected to his interest in human
ambition and the futility of the search for fame.
His contrast of the linear and unstoppable stages
of human life with the cyclical patterns of nature
appears throughout his poetry and may be influ-
enced by his spiritual preference for Eastern reli-
gions over the orthodox dogma of the Christianity
of the West. Two works in particular that use the
stages of life as a central theme are “Mutability” and
“Ode to the West Wind.”
The appearance of the stages of life first occurred
early in Shelley’s career in his 1816 poem “Mutabil-
ity.” This 16-line piece addresses its theme from two
angles. The first occurs in the originating eight lines
and is concerned with the unpredictable brevity of
man’s time on earth: “We are as clouds that veil the
midnight moon / . . . Streaking the darkness radi-
antly!—yet soon / Night closes round, and they are
lost forever” (ll. 1, 3–4). Here, man is like nature, yet
not of it; nature’s patterns are immortal, timeless,
and repetitious, whereas man’s “frail frame” (l. 7) is
mortal, his end unpredictable. This leads into the
second point examined in the poem, the “mutability”
of human existence noted in the title. In contrast to
the relative constancy of nature, where any present
change or ending only leads in a cyclical manner
back again to the beginning, the only thing that can
be considered a constant for man is change: “Man’s
yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow; / Nought
may endure but Mutability” (ll. 15–16). Shelley’s
dark tone here, as he reflects on the inevitable final
stage of human life—death—reflects his own lack of
confidence in an afterlife and is reiterated in other
works that incorporate this same theme.
One of Shelley’s most famous works, “Ode to
the West Wind” (1820), offers a more extended
comparison between the passage of the seasons and
the passage of human life (specifically his own). In
this poem, Shelley takes the less-traveled route by
exploring the inspirational potential of the mori-
bund “breath of Autumn’s being” (l. 1), rather than
praising its “azure sister of the Spring” (l. 9), which
hearkens new life (as would be typical of a pastoral