In contrast with “Ode to the West Wind” and “To a Skylark,” Shelley’s “Adonais” does not place a spotlight on any singular aspect of the natural world. Shelley’s famously lengthy Spenserian sonnet, which contains 55 stanzas and 495 lines, is instead predominantly focused on the death of Shelley’s friend and fellow Romantic poet, John Keats. Shelley began his composition of the poem almost immediately after hearing of the young Keats’s passing, and he finished his work in the summer of 1821. The poem follows a grieving Urania, Adonais’s mythical lover, to her eventual acceptance of his passing. Shelley uses his elegy as an opportunity to publicly shame a critic whose harsh review of Keats’s Endymion, he claims, caused Keats to become ill in…show more content… In addition to Urania’s despair, Nature and the narrator himself also weep for Adonais, but the narrator eventually realizes that it is not Keats who suffers, but the world he left behind. The narrator believes Keats’s soul was made one with Nature and that he is now a part of the loveliness of which he so often wrote. In The Apocalyptic Vision in the Poetry of Shelley by author Ross Woodman, Woodman writes, “Within the materialistic framework of the first seventeen stanzas of ‘Adonais,’ Shelley accepts the fact that there is nothing to mourn in the death of Keats. He is the victim of ‘the law/Of change’” (661). On a surface level, Keats’s passing was unavoidable due to the eternal cycle of Nature, which again calls to the forefront the cyclical and certain passage of time. Looking deeper, however, in stanza 42 of “Adonais,” Shelley also introduces the idea that Keats is now “made one with Nature” (line…show more content… Other themes, such as Shelley’s belief in “the heroic, visionary role of the poet” and “the human mind” are equally important to his poetic works (“Shelley’s Poetry”). Even so, in most of his writings, Shelley instinctively turns to imagery and comparisons involving nature. This fact is evident in “Adonais” through the permeation of nature-related similes and metaphors throughout the poem. Phrases such as “The bloom, whose petals nipt before they blew/Died in the promise of the fruit, is waste;/The broken lily lies—the storm is overpast” (lines 52–54) help to incorporate nature into an otherwise somber lament on the death of a young poet. Looking once again at “Rhetoric as Drama: An Approach to the Romantic Ode,” Chayes notes that some themes are simply too integral to who Shelley was as a person to be overlooked—nature being among the most conspicuous of these subjects. She describes the theme of nature’s grandeur as “one that is constant in Shelley’s poetry, so fundamental to his way of thinking that ‘metaphor’ is an inadequate name for it: the working out of... nature as a continuing process of universal death and regeneration” (621). With this being said, nature is often present in the background of every one of Shelley’s poems. Though unseen, nature is a powerful force responsible for contributing a certain
