Adonais : Shelley’s elegy on the occasion of the death of Keats.
... poet, Alfred Noyes. He reads in it no real conflict with essential Christianity where also God is spoken of as He "in whom we live and move and have our being". When Shelley sings of the young Keats,"Adonais", becoming by his death a portion of universal Loveliness, he does not mean a dissolution into material Nature as Thompson supposes: he means, says Noyes, an entry into a divine Spirit within Nature... the Many. It was not an extinction, much less a degradation of the individual, but an apotheosis. The being of Keats too is not conceived as merged and lost in the Universal Spirit: The soul of Adonais, like a star, Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are." To be more precise and positive: the being of Keats is not only said by Shelley to suffer no self-loss in the Spirit that is ...
... t of hypersensitive art-conscience, and he was eager to impart to him all the elan and speed through the ether that were his own speciality. When, however, Keats died, Shelley wrote the superb Adonais, in which he recognises and proclaims his own essential oneness with all that Keats stood for and strove after. It was in the fitness of things that one out of the two most purely poetic minds in... should write the greatest of all elegies on the other, affirming with him his unity in death when the unity in life remained unrealised and seeing in a final vision his own death soon following that of Adonais as if in answer to a call and joining them both together in the Vastness and Light that were the inner essence of either one's poetry. Do you remember the closing stanza of Shelley's poem? — The... sails were never to the tempest given; The massy earth and sphered sky 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 Eternals are. 1. Ibid., pp. 1 30-3 1 . Page 350 Now that we have started quoting we may continue with some characteristic ...
... the limits of the intellect and the inspired reason" . 22 This occurs in the more elevated Wordsworthian passages as well as in parts of Shelley's Alastor, Julian and Maddalo, Prometheus Unbound, Adonais and of his fragment, The Triumph of Life; also in sections of Keats's Hyperion, here and there in the famous Odes and almost wholly in the fragment of an Ode ending with the line, Leaving great... resuscitate the attitude of chivalry and the troubadours". But there was much more in it for Shelley. Epipsychidion, that apostrophe to Emilia Viviani which, together with Prometheus Unbound and Adonais , is considered by Sri Aurobindo 30 as the most typical work of Shelley's of long breath, is not just a rhapsody of Mediaeval love: at its most blazing it seeks to kindle to a kind of cosmic s ...
... frittered away the precious energy he should have spent on continuing Hyperion . Shelley's development was much more certain; his death too was more lamentable, since Keats died and inspired Adonais and so in a way his passing was compensated for, while the remembrance of Shelley's dust has never bloomed into immortal poetic beauty. If he had lived, his progress would have been towards reflective ...
... would move through the passage of death ultimately to "the worlds of light" from which it came, the Wordsworthian "God who is our home", the star-beaconed "abode where the Eternal are" of Shelley's Adonais. Page 98 However, while Sri Aurobindo's lines are maturer than the lyric Shelley wrote on ubiquitous Death, they do not rise in their more reflective strain to a full artistic result ...
... travel-narrative in verse, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, three centuries after The Fairie Queene - or Shelley's resort to it at the same distance of time in his highly imagined and deeply felt Adonais? Or look at Shelley's adoption of the still older terza rima of Dante for his Triumph of Life. Talking of subject, can we rightly disapprove of Chaucer or Shakespeare writing of Troilus and Cressida ...
... poetry, not merely opulent and eloquent or bright with the rainbow hues of imagination, but sovereign in poetic perfection and mastery. Towards this need his later style is turning, but except once in Adonais he does not seize on the right subject matter for his genius. Only in the lyric of which he has always Page 142 the secret,—for of all English poets he has perhaps the most natural, s ...
... life it had burned enough — at the same time with love for The Light whose smile kindles the universe and pain at the scorching abuse thrown on it by bigots. The remains of the author of Adonais, that superb elegy on Keats, were buried in the same cemetery at Rome where Keats had been laid earlier. Shelley's grave bears the most Shelleyan epitaph pos- Page 177 sible: Cor ...
... its best, something of true Classicism about it, as also has in its high moments the not infrequent recourse by him to a semi-Miltonic diction without Milton's compactness. Shelley in sections of Adonais and in large tracts of Prometheus Unbound (minus the lyrics), Keats in Hyperion and even Byron in some of his rare forceful sincerities have to a marked degree the same source of inspiration ...
... do". A belief, however, continued that Keats's early death by tuberculosis was caused by the psycho-logical wounds inflicted by the Quarterly Review, and Shelley's elegy on him, the celebrated Adonais, is written under the impres-sion that he fell a victim to the malevolence of critics. Shelley, himself one of the pioneer Romanticists in England, had been attacked too, for his high-flying lyricism ...
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