In Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Adonais,” the elegy commemorates the death of John Keats. Shelley wrote the poem after Keats died in Rome in 1821 at the age of twenty-five.
The title invokes Adonis, the beautiful youth of Greek mythology whose death was mourned by Aphrodite. Shelley uses this classical framework to transform Keats into a mythic figure and to place the young poet’s death within a larger cycle of nature, art, and renewal.
Shelley also responds to attacks on Keats’s poetry and to the belief that hostile criticism had worsened his health. Modern scholarship treats that claim cautiously, because Keats died from tuberculosis. The poem’s close is famous for its assertion that the dead poet’s spirit has become part of the universe.
“Adonais” was published in 1821. It is one of the major English pastoral elegies, alongside Milton’s “Lycidas” and Shelley’s own later elegiac writing. A common mix-up is to confuse its subject with Adonis himself, but Shelley’s immediate subject is Keats.