'And self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood.'
+Stanza 38,+ 1. 1. _Nor let us weep,_ &c. So far as the broad current of
sentiment is concerned, this is the turning-point of Shelley's Elegy.
Hitherto the tone has been continuously, and through a variety of
phases, one of mourning for the fact that Keats, the great poetical
genius, is untimely dead. But now the writer pauses, checks himself, and
recognises that mourning is not the only possible feeling, nor indeed
the most appropriate one. As his thought expands and his rapture rises,
he soon acknowledges that, so far from grieving for Keats who _is_ dead,
it were far more relevant to grieve for himself who is _not_ dead. This
paean of recantation and aspiration occupies the remainder of the poem.
1. 2. _These carrion kites._ A term of disparagement corresponding
nearly enough to the 'ravens' and 'vultures' of st. 28.
1. 3. _He wakes or sleeps with the enduring dead._ With such of the dead
as have done something which survives themselves. It will be observed
that the phrase 'he wakes _or_ sleeps' leaves the question of personal
or individual immortality quite open. As to this point see the remarks
on p. 54, &c.
1. 4. Thou canst not soar where he is sitting now. This is again
addressed to the 'deaf and viperous murderer,' regarded for the
moment as a 'carrion kite.' As kites are eminently high flyers,
the phrase here used becomes the more emphatic. This line of
Shelley's is obviously adapted from a passage in Milton's _Paradise
Lost_, where Satan addresses the angels in Eden (Book 4)--
'Ye knew me once, no mate
For you, there sitting where ye durst not soar.'
1. 5. _The pure spirit shall flow_, &c. The spirit which once was the
vital or mental essence--the soul--of Adonais came from the Eternal
Soul, and, now that he is dead, is re-absorbed into the Eternal Soul: as
such, it is imperishable.
1. 9. _Whilst thy cold embers choke_, &c. The spirit of Adonais came as
a flame from the 'burning fountain' of the Eternal, and has now reverted
thither, he being one of the 'enduring dead.' But the 'deaf and viperous
murderer' must not hope for a like destiny. His spirit, after death,
will be merely like 'cold embers,' cumbering the 'hearth of shame.' As a
rhetorical antithesis, this serves its purpose well: no doubt Shelley
would not have pretended that it is a strictly reasoned antithesis as
well, or furnishes a full account of the _post-mortem_ fate of the
_Quarterly_ reviewer.
+Stanza 39,+ 11. 1, 2. _Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not
sleep! He hath awakened from the dream of life._ Shelley now
proceeds boldly to declare that the state which we call death is to
be preferred to that which we call life. Keats is neither dead nor
sleeping. He used to be asleep, perturbed and tantalized by the
dream which is termed life. Having at last awakened from the
dream, he is no longer asleep: and, if life is no more than a dream,
neither does the cessation of life deserve to be named death.
The transition from one emotion to another in this passage, and
also in the preceding stanza, 'Nor let us weep,' &c., resembles
the transition towards the close of _Lycidas_--
'Weep no more, woful shepherds, weep no more,
For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,' &c.
The general view has considerable affinity to that which is
expounded in a portion of Plato's dialogue _Phaedo_, and which has
been thus summarised. 'Death is merely the separation of soul
and body. And this is the very consummation at which Philosophy
aims: the body hinders thought,--the mind attains to truth
by retiring into herself. Through no bodily sense does she perceive
justice, beauty, goodness, and other ideas. The philosopher
has a lifelong quarrel with bodily desires, and he should welcome
the release of his soul.'
1. 3. _'Tis we who, lost in stormy visions_, &c. We, the so-called
living, are in fact merely beset by a series of stormy visions which
constitute life; all our efforts are expended upon mere phantoms, and
are therefore profitless; our mental conflict is an act of trance,
exercised upon mere nothings. The very energetic expression, 'strike
with our spirit's knife invulnerable nothings,' is worthy of remark. It
will be remembered that, according to Shelley's belief, 'nothing exists
but as it is perceived': see p. 56. The view of life expressed with
passionate force in this passage of _Adonais_ is the same which forms
the calm and placid conclusion of _The Sensitive Plant_, a poem written
in 1820;--
'But, in this life
Of error, ignorance, and strife,
Where nothing is but all things seem.
And we the shadows of the dream,
It is a modest creed, and yet
Pleasant if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.
That garden sweet, that Lady fair,
And all sweet shapes and odours there,
In truth have never passed away:
'Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed; not they.
For love, and beauty, and delight,
There is no death nor change; their might
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure.'
11. 6, 7. _We decay Like corpses in a charnel_, &c. Human life consists
of a process of decay. While living, we are consumed by fear and grief;
our disappointed hopes swarm in our living persons like worms in our
corpses.
+Stanza 40,+ 1. 1. _He has outsoared the shadow of our night._ As human
life was in the last stanza represented as a dream, so the state of
existence in which it is enacted is here figured as night.
1. 5. _From the contagion of the world's slow stain._ It may be said
that 'the world's slow stain'--the lowering influence of the aims and
associations of all ordinary human life--is the main subject-matter of
Shelley's latest important poem, _The Triumph of Life._
1. 9. _With sparkless ashes._ See the cognate expression, 'thy cold
embers,' in st. 38.
+Stanza 41,+ 1. 1. _He lives, he wakes--'tis Death is dead, not he._ In
the preceding three stanzas Adonais is contemplated as being alive,
owing to the very fact that his death has awakened him 'from the dream
of life'--mundane life. Death has bestowed upon him a vitality superior
to that of mundane life. Death therefore has performed an act contrary
to his own essence as death, and has practically killed, not Adonais,
but himself.
1. 2. _Thou young Dawn._ We here recur to the image in st. 14, 'Morning
sought her eastern watch-tower,' &c.
1. 5. _Ye caverns and ye forests_, &c. The poet now adjures the caverns,
forests, flowers, fountains, and air, to 'cease to moan.' Of the flowers
we had heard in st. 16: but the other features of Nature which are now
addressed had not previously been individually mentioned--except, to
some extent, by implication, in st. 15, which refers more directly to
'Echo.' The reference to the air had also been, in a certain degree,
prepared for in stanza 23. The stars are said to smile on the Earth's
despair. This does not, I apprehend, indicate any despair of the Earth
consequent on the death of Adonais, but a general condition of woe. A
reference of a different kind to stars--a figurative reference--appears
in st. 29.
+Stanza 42,+ 1. 1. _He is made one with Nature._ This stanza ascribes to
Keats the same phase of immortality which belongs to Nature. Having
'awakened from the dream of [mundane] life,' his spirit forms an
integral portion of the universe. Those acts of intellect which he
performed in the flesh remain with us, as thunder and the song of the
nightingale remain with us.
11. 6, 7. _Where'er that power may move Which has withdrawn his being to
its own._ This corresponds to the expression in st. 38--'The pure spirit
shall flow Back to the burning fountain whence it came, A portion of the
Eternal.'
1. 8. _Who wields the world with never wearied love_, &c. These two
lines are about the nearest approach to definite Theism to be found in
any writing of Shelley. The conception, which may amount to Theism, is
equally consistent with Pantheism. Even in his most anti-theistic poem,
_Queen Mab_, Shelley said in a note--'The hypothesis of a pervading
Spirit, co-eternal with the universe, remains unshaken.'
+Stanza 43,+ 11. 1-3. _He is a portion of the loveliness Which ones he
made more lovely. He doth bear his part_, &c. The conception embodied in
this passage may become more clear to the reader if its terms are
pondered in connexion with the passage of Shelley's prose extracted on
p. 56--'The existence of distinct individual minds,' &c. Keats, while a
living man, had made the loveliness of the universe more lovely by
expressing in poetry his acute and subtle sense of its beauties--by
lavishing on it (as we say) 'the colours of his imagination,' He was
then an 'individual mind'--according to the current, but (as Shelley
held) inexact terminology. He has now, by death, wholly passed out of
the class of individual minds; and he forms a portion of the Universal
Mind (the 'One Spirit') which is the animation of the universe.
11. 3, 4. _While the One Spirit's plastic stress Sweeps through the dull
dense world_, &c. The function ascribed in these lines to the One Spirit
is a formative or animating function: the Spirit constitutes the life of
'trees and beasts and men.' This view is strictly within the limits of
Pantheism.
+Stanza 44,+ 1. 1. _The splendours of the firmament of time_, &c. As
there are stars in the firmament of heaven, so are there
splendours--luminous intellects--in the firmament of time. The stars,
though at times eclipsed, are not extinguished; nor yet the mental
luminaries. This asseveration may be considered in connexion with the
passage in st. 5: 'Others more sublime, Struck by the envious wrath of
man or God, Have sunk, extinct in their refulgent prime.'
11. 5, 6. _When lofty thought Lifts a young heart_, &c. The sense of
this passage may be paraphrased thus:--When lofty thought lifts a young
heart above its mundane environments, and when its earthly doom has to
be determined by the conflicting influences of love, which would elevate
it, and the meaner cares and interests of life, which would drag it
downwards, then the illustrious dead live again in that heart--for its
higher emotions are nurtured by their noble thoughts and
aspirations,--and they move, like exhalations of light along dark and
stormy air. This illustrates the previous proposition, that the
splendours of the firmament of time are not extinguished; and, in the
most immediate application of the proposition, Keats is not
extinguished--he will continue an ennobling influence upon minds
struggling towards the light.
+Stanza 45,+ 1. 2. _The inheritors of unfulfilled renown Rose from their
thrones._ There is a grand abruptness in this phrase, which makes it--as
a point of poetical or literary structure--one of the finest things in
the Elegy. We are to understand (but Shelley is too great a master to
formulate it in words) that Keats, as an 'inheritor of unfulfilled
renown'--i.e. a great intellect cut off by death before its maturest
fruits could be produced--has now arrived among his compeers: they rise
from their thrones to welcome him. In this connexion Shelley chooses to
regard Keats as still a living spiritual personality--not simply as
'made one with Nature.' He is one of those 'splendours of the firmament
of time' who 'may be eclipsed, but are extinguished not.'
11. 3-5. _Chatterton Rose pale, his solemn agony had not Yet faded from
him._ For precocity and exceptional turn of genius Chatterton was
certainly one of the most extraordinary of 'the inheritors of
unfulfilled renown'; indeed, the most extraordinary: he committed
suicide by poison in 1770, before completing the eighteenth year of his
age. His supposititious modern-antique _Poems of Rowley_ may, as actual
achievements, have been sometimes overpraised: but at the lowest
estimate they have beauties and excellences of the most startling kind.
He wrote besides a quantity of verse and prose, of a totally different
order. Keats admired Chatterton profoundly, and dedicated _Endymion_ to
his memory. I cannot find that Shelley, except in _Adonais_, has left
any remarks upon Chatterton: but he is said by Captain Medwin to have
been, in early youth, very much impressed by his writings.
1. 5. _Sidney, as he fought_, &c. Sir Philip Sidney, author of _The
Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia_, the _Apology for Poetry_, and the
sonnets named _Astrophel and Stella_, died in his thirty-second year, of
a wound received in the battle of Zutphen, 1586. Shelley intimates that
Sidney maintained the character of being 'sublimely mild' in fighting,
falling (dying), and loving, as well as generally in living. The special
references appear to be these. (1) Sidney, observing that the Lord
Marshal, the Earl of Leicester, had entered the field of Zutphen without
greaves, threw off his own, and thus exposed himself to the cannon-shot
which slew him. (2) Being mortally wounded, and receiving a cup of
water, he handed it (according to a tradition which is not
unquestionable) to a dying soldier. (3) His series of sonnets record his
love for Penelope Devereux, sister to the Earl of Essex, who married
Lord Rich. She had at one time been promised to Sidney. He wrote the
sonnets towards 1581: in 1583 he married another lady, daughter of Sir
Francis Walsingham. It has been said that Shelley was wont to make some
self-parade in connexion with Sir Philip Sidney, giving it to be
understood that he was himself a descendant of the hero--which was not
true, although the Sidney blood came into a different line of the
family. Of this story I have not found any tangible confirmation.
1. 8. _Lucan, by his death approved._ Lucan, the author of the
_Pharsalia_, was condemned under Nero as being an accomplice in the
conspiracy of Piso: he caused his veins to be opened, and died
magnanimously, aged about twenty-six, A.D. 65. Shelley, in one instance,
went so far as to pronounce Lucan superior to Vergil.
+Stanza 46,+ 11. 1, 2. _And many more, whose names on earth are dark,
But whose transmitted effluence cannot die_, &c. This glorious company
would include no doubt, not only the recorders of great thoughts, or
performers of great deeds, which are still borne in memory although the
names of the authors are forgotten, but also many whose work is as
totally unknown as their names, but who exerted nevertheless a bright
and elevating ascendant over other minds, and who thus conduced to the
greatness of human-kind.
1. 6. _It was for thee_, &c. The synod of the inheritors of unfulfilled
renown here invite Keats to assume possession of a sphere, or
constellation, which had hitherto been 'kingless,' or unappropriated. It
had 'swung blind in unascended majesty': had not been assigned to any
radiant spirit, whose brightness would impart brilliancy to the sphere
itself.
1. 8. _Silent alone amid an heaven of song._ This phrase points
primarily to 'the music of the spheres': the sphere now assigned to
Keats had hitherto failed to take part in the music of its fellows, but
henceforward will chime in. Probably there is also a subsidiary, but in
its context not less prominent meaning--namely, that, while the several
poets (such as Chatterton, Sidney, and Lucan) had each a vocal sphere of
his own, apposite to his particular poetic quality, the sphere which
Keats is now to control had hitherto remained unoccupied because no poet
of that special type of genius which it demanded had as yet appeared.
Its affinity was for Keats, and for no one else. This is an implied
attestation of Keats's poetic originality.
1. 9. _Assume thy wingèd throne, thou Vesper of our throng!_ The wingèd
throne is, I think, a synonym of the 'sphere' itself--not a throne
within the sphere: 'wingèd,' because the sphere revolves in space. Yet
the statement in stanza 45 that 'the inheritors of unfulfilled renown
rose from their thrones' (which cannot be taken to represent distinct
spheres or constellations) suggests the opposite interpretation. Keats
is termed 'thou Vesper of our throng' because he is the latest member of
this glorified band--or, reckoning the lapse of ages as if they were but
a day, its 'evening star.' The exceptional brilliancy of the Vesper star
is not, I think, implied--though it may be remotely suggested.
+Stanza 47,+ 1. 3. _Clasp with thy panting soul_, &c. The significance
of this stanza--perhaps a rather obscure one--requires to be estimated
as a whole. Shelley summons any person who persists in mourning for
Adonais to realise to his own mind what are the true terms of comparison
between Adonais and himself. After this, he says in this stanza no more
about Adonais, but only about the mourner. He calls upon the mourner to
consider (1) the magnitude of the planet earth; then, using the earth as
his centre, to consider (2) the whole universe of worlds, and the
illimitable void of space beyond all worlds; next he is to consider (3)
what he himself is--he is confined within the day and night of our
planet, and, even within those restricted limits, he is but an
infinitesimal point. After he shall have realised this to himself, and
after the tension of his soul in ranging through the universe and
through space shall have kindled hope after hope, wonderment and
aspiration after aspiration and wonderment, then indeed will he need to
keep his heart light, lest it make him sink at the contemplation of his
own nullity.
1. 9. _And lured thee to the brink._ This phrase is not definitely
accounted for in the preceding exposition. I think Shelley means that
the successive hopes kindled in the mourner by the ideas of a boundless
universe of space and of spirit will have lured him to the very brink of
mundane life--to the borderland between life and death: he will almost
have been tempted to have done with life, and to explore the
possibilities of death.
+Stanza 48,+ 1. 1. _Or go to Rome._ This is still addressed to the
mourner, the 'fond wretch' of the preceding stanza. He is here invited
to adopt a different test for 'knowing himself and Adonais aright';
namely, he is to visit Rome, and muse over the grave of the youthful
poet.
11. 1, 2. _Which is the sepulchre, Oh not of him, but of our joy._ Keats
is not entombed in Rome: his poor mortal remains are there entombed,
and, along with them, the joy which we felt in him as a living and
breathing presence.
11. 2, 3. _'Tis nought That ages, empires, and religions, &c._ Keats,
and others such as he, derive no adventitious honour from being buried
in Rome, amid the wreck of ages, empires, and religions: rather they
confer honour. He is among his peers, the kings of thought, who, so far
from being dragged down in the ruin of institutions, contended against
that ruin, and are alone immortal while all the rest of the past has
come to nought. This consideration may be said to qualify, but not to
reverse, that which is presented in stanza 7, that Keats 'bought, with
price of purest breath, a grave among the eternal'; those eternal ones,
buried in Rome, include many of the 'kings of thought.'
+Stanza 46,+ 11. 3, 4. _And where its wrecks like shattered mountains
rise, And flowering weeds_, &c. These expressions point more especially,
but not exclusively, to the Coliseum and the Baths of Caracalla. In
Shelley's time (and something alike was the case in 1862, the year when
the present writer saw them first) both these vast monuments were in a
state wholly different from that which they now, under the hands of
learned archaeologists and skilled restorers, present to the eye.
Shelley began, probably in 1819, a romantic or ideal tale named _The
Coliseum_; and, ensconced amid the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, he
composed, in the same year, a large part of _Promethens Unbound_. A few
extracts from his letters may here be given appropriately. (To T.L.
Peacock, 22 December, 18i8). 'The Coliseum is unlike any work of human
hands I ever saw before. It is of enormous height and circuit, and the
arches, built of massy stones, are piled, on one another, and jut into
the blue air, shattered into the forms of overhanging rocks. It has been
changed by time into the image of an amphitheatre of rocky hills
overgrown by the wild olive, the myrtle, and the figtree, and threaded
by little paths which wind among its ruined stairs and immeasurable
galleries: the copsewood overshadows you as you wander through its
labyrinths.'--(To the same, 23 March, 1819). 'The next most considerable
relic of antiquity, considered as a ruin, is the Thermae of Caracalla.
These consist of six enormous chambers, above 200 feet in height, and
each enclosing a vast space like that of a field. There are in addition
a number of towers and labyrinthine recesses, hidden and woven over by
the wild growth of weeds and ivy. Never was any desolation so sublime
and lovely.... At every step the aërial pinnacles of shattered stone
group into new combinations of effect, and tower above the lofty yet
level walls, as the distant mountains change their aspect to one
travelling rapidly along the plain.... Around rise other crags and other
peaks--all arrayed, and the deformity of their vast desolation softened
down, by the undecaying investiture of Nature.'
1. 7. _A slope of green access._ The old Protestant Cemetery. Shelley
described it thus in his letter to Mr. Peacock of 22 December, 1818.
'The English burying-place is a green slope near the walls, under the
pyramidal tomb of Cestius, and is, I think, the most beautiful and
solemn cemetery I ever beheld. To see the sun shining on its bright
grass, fresh, when we visited it, with the autumnal dews, and hear the
whispering of the wind among the leaves of the trees which have
overgrown the tomb of Cestius, and the soil which is stirring in the
sun-warm earth, and to mark the tombs, mostly of women and young people
who were buried there, one might, if one were to die, desire the sleep
they seem to sleep. Such is the human mind, and so it peoples with its
wishes vacancy and oblivion.'--See also pp. 69, 70.
+Stanza 50,+ 1. 3. _One keen pyramid._ The tomb (see last note) of Caius
Cestius, a Tribune of the People.
11. 4, 5. _The dust of him who planned This refuge for his memory._
Shelley probably means that this sepulchral pyramid alone preserves to
remembrance the name of Cestius: which is true enough, as next to
nothing is otherwise known about him.
1. 8. _Have pitched in heaven's smile their camp of death._ The practice
which Shelley follows in this line of making 'heaven' a dissyllable is
very frequent with him. So also with 'even, higher,' and other such
words.
+Stanza 51,+ 11. 3, 4. _If the seal is set Here on one fountain of a
mourning mind._ Shelley certainly alludes to himself in this line. His
beloved son William, who died in June 1819, in the fourth year of his
age, was buried in this cemetery: the precise spot is not now known.
11. 5-7. _Too surely shalt thou find Thine own well full, if thou
returnest home, Of tears and gall. From the world's bitter wind_, &c.
The apposition between the word 'well' and the preceding word 'fountain'
will be observed. The person whom Shelley addresses would, on returning
home from the cemetery, find more than, ample cause, of one sort or
another, for distress and discomposure. Hence follows the conclusion
that he would do well to 'seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb': he
should prefer the condition of death to that of life. And so we reach in
stanza 51 the same result which, in stanza 47, was deduced from a
different range of considerations.
+Stanza 52,+ 1. 1. _The One remains, the many change and pass._ See the
notes on stanzas 42 and 43. 'The One' is the same as 'the One Spirit' in
stanza 43--the Universal Mind. The Universal Mind has already been
spoken of (stanza 38) as 'the Eternal.' On the other hand, 'the many'
are the individuated minds which we call 'human beings': they 'change
and pass'--the body perishing, the mind which informed it being (in
whatever sense) reabsorbed into 'the Eternal.'
1. 2. _Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly._ This is in
strictness a physical descriptive image: in application, it means the
same as the preceding line.
11. 3-5. _Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white
radiance of eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments._ Perhaps a
more daring metaphorical symbol than this has never been employed by any
poet, nor one that has a deeper or a more spacious meaning. Eternity is
figured as white light--light in its quintessence. Life, mundane life,
is as a dome of glass, which becomes many-coloured by its prismatic
diffraction of the white light: its various prisms reflect eternity at
different angles. Death ultimately tramples the glass dome into
fragments; each individual life is shattered, and the whole integer of
life, constituted of the many individual lives, is shattered. If
everything else written by Shelley were to perish, and only this
consummate image to remain--so vast in purport, so terse in form--he
would still rank as a poet of lofty imagination. _Ex pede Herculem._
11. 5, 6. _Die, If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek._ This
phrase is addressed by the poet to anybody, and more especially to
himself. As in stanza 38--'The pure spirit shall flow Back to the
burning fountain whence it came, A portion of the Eternal.'
11. 7-9. _Rome's azure sky, Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are
weak The glory thy transfuse with fitting truth to speak._ I follow here
the punctuation of the Pisan edition--with a comma after 'words,' as
well as after 'sky, flowers,' &c. According to this punctuation, the
words of Rome, as well as her sky and other beautiful endowments, are
too weak to declare at full the glory which they impart; and the
inference from this rather abruptly introduced recurrence to Rome is (I
suppose), that the spiritual glory faintly adumbrated by Rome can only
be realised in that realm of eternity to which death gives access. Taken
in this sense, the 'words' of Rome appear to mean 'the beautiful
language spoken in Rome'--the Roman or Latin language, as modified into
modern Italian. The pronunciation of Italian in Rome is counted
peculiarly pure and rich: hence the Italian axiom, 'lingua toscana in
bocca romana'--Tuscan tongue in Roman mouth. At first sight, it would
seem far more natural to punctuate thus: Rome's azure sky, Flowers,
ruins, statues, music,--words are weak The glory, &c. The sense would
then be--Words are too weak to declare at full the glory inherent in the
sky, flowers, &c. of Rome. Yet, although this seems a more
straightforward arrangement for the words of the sentence, as such, it
is not clear that such a comment on the beauties of Rome would have any
great relevancy in its immediate context.
+Stanza 53,+ 1. 2. _Thy hopes are gone before_, &c. This stanza contains
some very pointed references to the state of Shelley's feelings at the
time when he was writing _Adonais_; pointed, but not so clearly defined
as to make his actual meaning transparent. We are told that his hopes
are gone before (i.e. have vanished before the close of his life has
come), and have departed from all things here. This may partly refer to
the deaths of William Shelley and of Keats; but I think the purport of
the phrase extends further, and implies that Shelley's hopes
generally--those animating conceptions which had inspired him in early
youth, and had buoyed him up through many adversities--are now waning in
disappointment. This is confirmed by the ensuing statement--that 'a
light is past from the revolving year [a phrase repeated from stanza
18], and man and woman.' Next we are told that 'what still is dear
Attracts to crush, repels to make thee [me] wither.' The _persons_ who
were more particularly dear to Shelley at this time must have been (not
to mention the two children Percy Florence Shelley and Allegra
Clairmont) his wife, Miss Clairmont, Emilia Viviani, and Lieutenant and
Mrs. Williams: Byron, Leigh Hunt, and Godwin, can hardly be in question.
No doubt Shelley's acute feelings and mobile sympathies involved him in
some considerable agitations, from time to time, with all the four
ladies here named: but the strong expressions which he uses as to
attracting and repelling, crushing and withering, seem hardly likely to
have been employed by him in this personal sense, in a published book.
Perhaps therefore we shall be safest in supposing that he alludes, not
to _persons_ who are dear, but to circumstances and conditions of a more
general kind--such as are involved in his self-portraiture, stanzas
31-34.
1. 8. _'Tis Adonais calls! oh hasten thither!_ 'Thither' must mean 'to
Adonais': a laxity of expression.
+Stanza 64,+ 1. 1. _That light whose smile kindles the universe_, &c.
This is again the 'One Spirit' of stanza 43. And see, in stanza 42, the
cognate expression, 'kindles it above.'
11. 3, 4. _That benediction which the eclipsing curse Of birth can
quench not._ The curse of birth is, I think, simply the calamitous
condition of mundane life--so often referred to in this Elegy as a
condition of abjection and unhappiness. The curse of birth can eclipse
the benediction of Universal Mind, but cannot quench it: in other words,
the human mind, in its passage from the birth to the death of the body,
is still an integral portion of the Universal Mind.
1. 7. _Each are mirrors._ This is of course a grammatical
irregularity--the verb should be 'is.' It is not the only instance of
the same kind in Shelley's poetry.
1. 9. _Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality._ This does not imply
that Shelley is shortly about to die. 'Cold mortality' is that condition
in which the human mind, a portion of the Universal Mind, is united to a
mortal body: and the general sense is that the Universal Mind at this
moment beams with such effulgence upon Shelley that his mind responds to
it as if the mortal body no longer interposed any impediment.
+Stanza 55,+ 1. 1. _The breath whose might I have invoked in song._ The
breath or afflatus of the Universal Mind. It has been 'invoked in song'
throughout the whole later section of this Elegy, from stanza 38
onwards.
1. 2. _My spirits bark is driven_, &c. As was observed with reference to
the preceding stanza, line 9, this phrase does not forecast the author's
death: it only re-emphasises the abnormal illumination of his mind by
the Universal Mind--as if his spirit (like that of Keats) 'had flowed
back to the burning fountain whence it came, a portion of the Eternal'
(stanza 38). Nevertheless, it is very remarkable that this image of 'the
spirit's _bark_,' beaconed by 'the soul of Adonais,' should have been
written so soon before Shelley's death by drowning, which occurred on 8
July, 1822,--but little more than a year after he had completed this
Elegy. Besides this passage, there are in Shelley's writings, both verse
and prose, several other passages noticeable on the same
account--relating to drowning, and sometimes with a strong personal
application; and in various instances he was in imminent danger of this
mode of death before the end came.
11. 3, 4. _Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng Whose sails
were never to the tempest given._ In saying that his spirit's bark is
driven far from the shore, Shelley apparently means that his mind, in
speculation and aspiration, ranges far beyond those mundane and material
interests with which the mass of men are ordinarily concerned. 'The
trembling throng' is, I think, a throng of men: though it might be a
throng of barks, contrasted with 'my spirit's bark.' Their sails 'were
never to the tempest given,' in the sense that they never set forth on a
bold ideal or spiritual adventure, abandoning themselves to the stress
and sway of a spiritual storm.
1. 5. _The massy earth_, &c. As the poet launches forth on his voyage
upon the ocean of mind, the earth behind him seems to gape, and the sky
above him to open: his course however is still held on in darkness--the
arcanum is hardly or not at all revealed.
1. 7. _Whilst burning through the inmost veil_, &c. A star pilots his
course: it is the soul of Adonais, which, being still 'a portion of the
Eternal' (st. 38), is in 'the abode where the Eternal are,' and
testifies to the eternity of mind. In this passage, and in others
towards the conclusion of the poem, we find the nearest approach which
Shelley can furnish to an answer to that question which he asked in
stanza 20--'Shall that alone which knows Be as a sword consumed before
the sheath By sightless lightning?'
+Stanzas 4. to 6+--(I add here a note out of its due place, which would
be on p. 101: at the time when it occurred to me to raise this point,
the printing had gone too far to allow of my inserting the remark
there.)--On considering these three stanzas collectively, it may perhaps
be felt that the references to Milton and to Keats are more advisedly
interdependent than my notes on the details of the stanzas suggest.
Shelley may have wished to indicate a certain affinity between the
inspiration of Milton as the poet of _Paradise Lost_, and that of Keats
as the poet of _Hyperion_. Urania had had to bewail the death of Milton,
who died old when 'the priest, the slave, and the liberticide,' outraged
England. Now she has to bewail the death of her latest-born, Keats, who
has died young, and (as Shelley thought) in a similarly disastrous
condition of the national affairs. Had he not been 'struck by the
envious wrath of man,' he might even have 'dared to climb' to the
'bright station' occupied by Milton.--The phrase in st. 4, 'Most musical
of mourners, weep again,' with what follows regarding grief for the loss
of Milton, and again of Keats, is modelled upon the passage in Moschus
(p. 65)--'This, O most musical of rivers, is thy second sorrow,--this,
Meles, thy new woe. Of old didst thou love Homer:... now again another
son thou weepest.' My remark upon st. 13, that there Shelley first had
direct recourse to the Elegy of Moschus, should be modified accordingly.
_Cancelled Passages of Adonais, Preface._ These are taken from Dr.
Garnett's _Relics of Shelley_, published in 1862. He says: 'Among
Shelley's MSS. is a fair copy of the _Defence of Poetry_, apparently
damaged by sea-water, and illegible in many places. Being prepared for
the printer, it is written on one side of the paper only: on the blank
pages, but frequently undecipherable for the reason just indicated, are
many passages intended for, but eventually omitted from, the preface to
_Adonais_.'
_I have employed my poetical compositions and publications simply as the
instruments of that sympathy between myself and others which the ardent
and unbounded love I cherished for my kind incited me to acquire._ This
is an important indication of the spirit in which Shelley wrote, and
consequently of that in which his reader should construe his writings.
He poured out his full heart, craving for 'sympathy.' Loving mankind, he
wished to find some love in response.
_Domestic conspiracy and legal oppression_, &c. The direct reference
here is to the action taken by Shelley's father-in-law and
sister-in-law, Mr. and Miss Westbrook, which resulted in the decree of
Lord Chancellor Eldon whereby Shelley was deprived of the custody of the
two children of his first marriage. See p. 12. _As a bankrupt thief
turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic._
Various writers have said something of this kind. I am not sure how far
back the sentiment can be traced; but I presume that Shelley was not the
first. Some readers will remember a passage in the dedication to his
_Peter Bell the Third_ (1819), which forestalled Macaulay's famous
phrase about the 'New Zealander on the ruins of London Bridge.' Shelley
wrote: 'In the firm expectation that, when London shall be an habitation
of bitterns;... when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the
nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of
their broken arches on the solitary stream; some Transatlantic
commentator will be weighing, in the scales of some new and unimagined
system of criticism, the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges,
and their historians, I remain,' &c.
_The offence of this poor victim seems to have consisted solely in his
intimacy with Leigh Hunt_, &c. See the remarks on p. 45. There can be no
doubt that Shelley was substantially correct in this opinion. Not only
the _Quarterly Review_, of which he knew, but also _Blackwood's
Magazine_, which did not come under his notice, abused Keats because he
was personally acquainted with Hunt, and was, in one degree or another,
a member of the literary coterie in which Hunt held a foremost place.
And Hunt was in bad odour with these reviews because he was a hostile
politician, still more than because of any actual or assumed defects in
his performances as an ordinary man of letters.
_Mr. Hazlitt._ William Hazlitt was (it need scarcely be said) a
miscellaneous writer of much influence in these years, in politics an
advanced Liberal. A selection of his writings was issued by Mr. William
Ireland in 1889. Keats admired Hazlitt much more than Hunt.
_I wrote to him, suggesting the propriety_, &c. See pp. 14, 15.
_Cancelled Passages of Adonais_ (the poem). These passages also were in
the first instance published in the _Shelley Relics_ of Dr. Garnett.
They come, not from the same MS. which contains the prefatory fragments,
but from some of Shelley's notebooks.
+Stanza 1,+ 1. 1. _And the green paradise_, &c. The green paradise is
the 'Emerald Isle'--Ireland. This stanza refers to Thomas Moore, and
would have followed on after st. 30 in the body of the poem.
+Stanza 2,+ 1. 1. _And ever as he went he swept a lyre Of unaccustomed
shape._ 'He' has always hitherto, I think, been understood as the 'one
frail form' of st 31--i.e. Shelley himself. The lyre might be of
unaccustomed shape for the purpose of indicating that Shelley's poetry
differs very essentially, in tone and treatment, from that of other
writers. But I incline to think that Shelley, in this stanza, refers not
to himself but to Moore. Moore was termed a 'lyrist,' and here we are
told about his lyre. The latter would naturally be the Irish harp, and
therefore 'of unaccustomed shape': the concluding reference to
'ever-during green' might again glance at the 'Emerald Isle.' As to
Shelley, he was stated in st. 33 to be carrying 'a light spear': if he
was constantly sweeping a lyre as well, he must have had his hands
rather full.
1. 3. _Now like the ... of impetuous fire_, &c. Shelley compares
the strains of the lyre--the spirit of the poetry--to two things:
(1) to a conflagration in a forest; and (2) to the rustling of wind
among the trees. The former image may be understood to apply
principally to the revolutionary audacity and fervour of the ideas
expressed; the latter, to those qualities of imagination, fantasy,
beauty, and melody, which characterise the verse. Of course all
this would be more genuinely appropriate to Shelley himself than
to Moore: still it would admit of _some_ application to Moore, of
whom our poet spoke highly more than once elsewhere. The
image of a forest on fire is more fully expressed in a passage
from the _Lines written among the Euganean Hills_, composed by
him in 1818:--
'Now new fires from antique light
Spring beneath the wide world's might,--
But their spark lies dead in thee [i.e. in Padua],
Trampled out by Tyranny,
As the Norway woodman quells,
In the depths of piny dells,
One light flame among the brakes,
While the boundless forest shakes,
And its mighty trunks are torn,
By the fire thus lowly born;--
The spark beneath his feet is dead;
He starts to see the flames it fed
Howling through the darkened sky
With a myriad tongues victoriously,
And sinks down in fear;-so thou,
O Tyranny! beholdest now
Light around thee, and thou hearest
The loud flames ascend, and fearest.
Grovel on the earth! ay, hide
In the dust thy purple pride!'
+Stanza 3,+ 1. 1. _And then came one of sweet and earnest looks._ It is
sufficiently clear that this stanza, and also the fragmentary beginning
of stanza 4, refer to Leigh Hunt--who, in the body of the Elegy, is
introduced in st. 35. The reader will observe, on looking back to that
stanza, that the present one could not be added on to the description of
Hunt: it is an alternative form, ultimately rejected. Its tone is
ultra-sentimental, and perhaps on that account it was condemned. The
simile at the close of the present stanza is ambitious, but by no means
felicitous.
+Stanza 4,+ 11. 1, 2. _His song, though very sweet, was low and faint, A
simple strain._ It may be doubted whether this description of Hunt's
poetry, had it been published in _Adonais_, would have been wholly
pleasing to Hunt. Neither does it define, with any exceptional aptness,
the particular calibre of that poetry.
+Stanza 5,+ 11. 1, 2. _A mighty Phantasm, half concealed In darkness
of his own exceeding light._ It seems to have been generally
assumed that Shelley, in this stanza, describes one more of the
'Mountain Shepherds' (see st. 30)--viz. Coleridge. No doubt, if
any poet or person is here indicated, it must be Coleridge: and
the affirmative assumption is so far confirmed by the fact that in
another poem--the _Letter to Maria Gisborne_, 1820--Shelley spoke
of Coleridge in terms partly similar to these:--
'You will see Coleridge; he who sits obscure
In the exceeding lustre and the pure
Intense irradiation of a mind
Which, with its own internal lightning blind,
Flags wearily through darkness and despair--
A cloud-encircled meteor of the air,
A hooded eagle among blinking owls.'
But the first question is--Does this cancelled stanza relate to a
Mountain Shepherd at all? To speak of a Mountain Shepherd as
a 'mighty Phantasm,' having an 'awful presence unrevealed,'
seems to be taking a considerable liberty with language. To me
it appears more likely that the stanza relates to some abstract
impersonation--perhaps Death, or else Eternity. It is true that
Death figures elsewhere in _Adonais_ (stanzas 7, 8, 25) under an
aspect with which the present phrases are hardly consistent: but,
in the case of a cancelled stanza, that counts for very little. In
_Prometheus Unbound_ (Act ii, sc. 4) Eternity, symbolised in
Demo-gorgon, is described in terms not wholly unlike those which we
are now debating:--
'I see a mighty Darkness
Filling the seat of power, and rays of gloom
Dart round, as light from the meridian sun,
Ungazed upon and shapeless. Neither limb,
Nor form, nor outline; yet we feel it is
A living Spirit.'
As to the phrase in the cancelled stanza, 'In darkness of his own
exceeding light,' it need hardly be observed that this is modified
from the expression in Paradise Lost (Book 3):--
'Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appear.'
1. 5. _Thunder-smoke, whose skirts were chrysolite._ Technically,
chrysolite is synonymous with the precious stone peridot, or
olivine--its tint is a yellowish green. But probably Shelley thought
only of the primary meaning of the word chrysolite, 'golden-stone,' and
his phrase as a whole comes to much the same thing as 'a cloud with a
golden lining.'
+Stanza 6,+ 1. 1. _And like a sudden meteor._ We here have a
fragmentary simile which may--or equally well may not--follow
on as connected with St. 5. See on p. 147, for whatever it may
be worth in illustration, the line relating to Coleridge:--
'A cloud-encircled meteor of the air.'
1. 5. _Pavilioned in its tent of light._ Shelley was fond of the word
Pavilion, whether as substantive or as verb. See St. 50: 'Pavilioning the
dust of him,' &c.