Classical and Romantic elements in Adonais

“Adonais” is one of the best known poems written by Percy Bysshe Shelley. It is also considered to be one of the best elegies in English literature. The poem is written mourning the death of John Keats. This poem has many Romantic and Classical elements.

Shelley used many characters from Greek mythology in this poem. The title of this poem is “Adonais”, a character of Greek Mythology. The original spelling of the name is “Adonis”. Adonis was a beautiful young man and Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, beauty, pleasure, and procreation, fell in love with him. Adonis was killed by a wild boar and Aphrodite mourned his death. Based on this story, Greek poet Bion composed a poem, “Lament of Aphrodite for Adonis”. Shelley’s “Adonais” was inspired from that poem but Shelley changed the name to Adonais and represented Aphrodite as Aphrodite Urania who was the goddess of heavenly or spiritual love and changed it to mother-son relationship.

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In the beginning of the poem, Shelley tells the reader that Adonais is dead and asks Urania, Adonais’ mother, who is in Paradise at the time of her son’s death, to come down from her comfort and see that her son has been killed by savage attack of the critics.

Shelley also used the mythology of “Echo”, a mountain nymph. According to Greek mythology, Echo loved her own voice. Shelley said that Echo loved Keats. When Keats was alive, she replied to his voice. Now, Keats is dead and she sits in the mountains and would not reply to the sound of winds or fountains or the “amorous birds” on the green branches or herdsman’s horn or bell. Other Greek mythological characters that had been mentioned in the poem are- Narcissus, Hyacinth, and Actaeon.

Shelley is a poet of Romantic era. So, we can find Romantic elements in this poem. The first noticeable Romantic element in “Adonais” is nature. We see a wide range of natural images in this poem. In the beginning of the poem, Shelley says, 
              "She sate, while one, with soft enamoured breath,
               Rekindled all the fading melodies 
               With which, like flowers that mock the corse beneath, 
               He had adorned and hid the coming bulk of death." 

Here Shelley said that Adonais or Keats sang in a beautiful voice while Urania remained in paradise and with these melodies, Keats embellished the heavy figure of death. After Adonais’ death, those songs, like flowers, covered his dead body and mocked it. Here Shelley is actually comparing Keats’ works with flowers.

From Stanza 15 to Stanza 20, Shelley draws natural images and shows that Nature is mourning Keats’ death. All Romantic poets including Shelley believed that God is present everywhere in nature. In the end of “Adonais”, Shelley says that Keats did not die but has become one with nature which means he went close to god.

Romantics hated the present day world. They fantasized about distant, exotic world; sometimes far away in past or future. Critics labeled the romanticist as escapist. Real world is too complex for them. In this poem, we see that Shelley scolds the critics who attacked Keats’ works. When Urania came to know about Adonais’ death, she came out of her “secret paradise” and rushed to Adonais’ grave. She went “Through camps and cities rough with stone, and steel.” This line is a reflection of Shelley’s thoughts about his contemporary society, people, and city. While going to Keats’ grave, hard human hearts resisted Urania and her feet blade from “barbed tongues, and thoughts more sharp than they”. The blood that came out of her tender feet was like the rains of May that causes flowers to spring up.

In Stanza 27, Shelley said that Keats did not follow the convention poetic style and wrote poetry in his own style at a very young age. Because of his young age, he could not defend himself from the attack of the critics. In Stanza 31, Shelley describes his own condition. Because of his revolutionary ideas, he suffered a lot.

Individualism is another important aspect of Romantic poets. They believed in expressing their own ideas. Shelley was expelled from Oxford for publishing a pamphlet titled, “The Necessity of Atheism”. His revolutionary ideas were not well-accepted by the people. Shelley did not gain fame in his lifetime. His condition was, in many ways, similar to that of Keats.

Despite its shortcomings, “Adonais” is a beautiful poem. The revolutionary thoughts and ideas of Romantic poets are present here as well. In the beginning, Shelley started with Greek Mythology and then he shifted towards life and death which according to many critics destroyed the unity of the poem. However, it is a great elegy and anyone would enjoy reading it.