Mirroring the Future Adonais, Elegy, and the Life in Letters - Critical Essay

Adonais is thus not a poem about the life and death of people. Nor is it a poem about the acceptance of death as an ontological condition. Rather, it is a poem about the life and death of letters. Failing to recognize this fact leads to an insuperable quandary at the end of the poem as one must reconcile what seems to be a suicidal gesture with the ends of the genre that Shelley has adopted with such care.(19) Indeed, any reading of Adonais that filters the poem through humanistic assumptions is bound to run into trouble, for Adonais is not a humanistic, but a lettristic, poem. Shelley does not mourn in any conventional sense but rather engages in something more akin to a critical exercise, albeit one in which he is an interested party. We should recall that Shelley intended to accompany the elegy with a projected but unrealized critical commentary on Keats's poetry, and made reference to this project in his preface to the poem. What humanistic value Adonais may have derives not from Shelley's fear of death, but from his concern both with the fate and the reception of his poetry.

No reading of Adonais can conclude without visiting the final stanzas of the poem. The imaginary voyage to Rome underscores the poem's fundamental concern with the immortality available to the artwork and its creator in the present era. Rome, "more like a sepulchre than a city; beautiful, but the abode of death," as Shelley wrote to Amelia Curran (Letters, 159), provides Shelley with an appropriate setting within which to explore how the "remnants" of an artist's mind persist in an era of increasing cultural dispersion and moral degradation. "What shall I say of the modern City?" Shelley wrote in one of several letters to Peacock describing Rome and its monuments. "Rome is yet the Capital of the World. It is a city of palaces & temples more glorious than those which any other city contains, & of ruins more glorious than they" (Letters 87). Rome is a city that juxtaposes with a sublime and even monstrous quality the vitality of life in all of its myriad moral and political complexity with the monumental preservation of a past fallen into ruin. It is "at once the Paradise, / The grave, the city, and the wilderness" (433-34). More specifically, however, Rome figures for Shelley the site par excellence of the cultural transmission that Shelley's own poem has performed on or for the dead Keats. The link becomes clear as Shelley writes:

   Seen from any of the eminences that surround it, [Rome] exhibits domes
   beyond domes & palaces & colonnades interminably even to the horizon,
   interspersed with patches of desart & mighty ruins which stand girt by
   their own desolation in the midst of the fanes of living religions & the
   habitations of living men in sublime loneliness. (Letters 87, emphasis
   added.),

Shelley's letter brings Rome into close proximity with his own self-representation as the frail form, the pardlike Spirit, "a Love in desolation masked;--a Power / Girt round with weakness" (281-82). The strong parallel that holds between the frail but powerful force of Shelley's own reading and the Rome towards which Shelley's poem tends inscribes Shelley's reading within the arena of history, as a part of that larger process by which culture is preserved and transmitted through the ages. As Shelley comes to Rome, he offers himself, and the written traces that he will and, indeed, has already become, up to the "white radiance of Eternity" (463), which is also the "shadow of white Death" (66), the "gigantic shadow that futurity casts upon the present," for it is the immortality granted to the dead through the aegis of unknown readers.