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

The way that Shelley's poem consistently questions the efficacy of mourning and of his own verse drains the traditional compensatory figures of elegy of their energy In stanza 13, the mourners form a "slow pomp ... Like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream" (116-17). In stanza 14, Morning, her eyes "Wet with tears" and her hair unbound, allows the melancholy moan of thunder, the pale and unquiet ocean, and sobbing winds to take the day (120-26). In stanza 16, Spring becomes wild, and throws down her kindling buds, "as if she Autumn were," but does so in a syntax that undercuts the energy of her protest. Hyacinth and Narcissus stand by, wan and sere (140-42).

We might expect the inadequacy of elegiac language and its strategies of symbolic compensation to either provoke a crisis for the poet or at least to elicit his protest. In Alastor, for example, Shelley uses the frailty of conventional elegiac language as a foil to the dead poet's surpassing spirit. "Art and eloquence, / And all the shews o' the world are frail and vain / To weep a loss that turns their lights to shade," the poet proclaims (710-12). But such restlessness and proud intensity are absent from Adonais. The contrast is clearly marked in how Adonais interpolates Lycidas, a poem that also begins with crisis and question. In Lycidas we read:

   Yet once more, 0 ye Laurels, and once more
   Ye Myrtles brown, with Ivy never sere,
   I come to pluck your Berries harsh and crude,
   And with forc'd fingers rude,
   Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.

(1-5)

These lines have a rough emotional intensity The poet is not ready, but the occasion is pressing and compels him to sing, despite his immaturity. Lycidas "must not float upon his wat'ry bier / Unwept, and welter to the parching wind, / Without the meed of some melodious tear" (12-14). Adonais follows Milton's lead carefully Milton's muse, Urania, plays a central role in Adonais, and, like Milton, Shelley uses the juxtaposition of water and fire imagery as an organizing structure to map the juxtaposition of death and life and to open a path for transmuting mortality into immortality But where Lycidas is intense, Adonais is numb. Notably, the urgency and anguish that Lycidas associates with the "wat'ry" death of King and the crisis of knowing words to be but false surmise in its face is absent in Shelley's handling of the same set of associations. In the first place, not only does the poet send Urania back to sleep before she has even roused herself, but he too is deadly calm. Adonais's wat'ry descent into death provokes neither calamity nor crisis. In Lycidas, the poet asks, "Where were ye Nymphs when the remorseless deep / Clos'd o'er the head of your lov'd Lycidas?" (50-51). Shelley's poem asks the same question, but what was for Milton a "remorseless deep" that "Clos'd o'er the head of ... lov'd Lycidas," is for Adonais an "amorous deep" where the dead poet can take his fill of "dewy sleep" and "of deep and liquid rest" (62, 63). Later, in the penultimate stanza of Lycidas, Milton recognizes how very remorseless the deep is when he sees that what he has brought to bear in the face of this death has been but "false surmise," as futile as that of the absent Nymphs. All the flowers of poetic language are now seen as a mere interlude, "a little ease" (152), that defers recognition of the finality of death. For Milton, however, seeing figurative language and the poet's work as false surmise leads to an abysmal understanding that Lycidas is truly gone, his body and bones lost and scattered beneath the whelming tide. The depth of this despair, in turn, lays the groundwork for the poem's turn from grief to affirmation, for in its extreme passion the poet finds himself still alive. Thus the final stanza opens with, "Weep no more, woeful Shepherds weep no more, / For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead, / Sunk though he be beneath the wat'ry floor" (165-67). In Adonais, however, the flowers of poetry, which, like Milton's "false surmise" hide the "coming bulk of death," provoke no crisis. Indeed, Shelley scandalously describes the stench of death and decomposition--what the flowers ought to mask-as itself sweet. The leprous corpse "exhales itself in flowers of gentle breath / Like incarnations of the stars, when splendour / Is changed to fragrance, they illumine death / And mock the merry worm that wakes beneath" (173-76).