8 - “Compelling / All new successions”: death and the poet's figurations in Adonais

Summary

Like Epipsychidion, Adonais uses allegorical personification not to unleash the agency of a central, structuring concept but instead to encircle, enshroud, and transform an actual historical person. As in Epipsychidion, the narrator bears a close but complex relationship to the scribal hand which sketches and drafts and to the actual, historical Percy Shelley. The earlier poem creates a fiction of a highly subjective expression of love; Adonais employs two highly conventional fictions for expressing grief, a grief that mourns both for a person and for his vocation. Although conventional, those fictional devices – the sub-genre of the pastoral elegy “spoken” by a grieving fellow shepherd and that shepherd's description of a figure resembling the actual Shelley – push the reader toward a belief in the writer's subjective encounter with loss. Earl Wasserman and, following him, Peter Sacks, argue powerfully that the published poem moves through the mourning rituals of the traditional elegy with a figurative language that generates its own level of healing transformations. While Wasserman briefly notes biographical readings, Sacks argues that this formal process of mourning also expresses Shelley's own grief and anxieties about Keats' death. I locate this autobiographical, psychological work, instead, in his manuscript drafts. The “successions” of his revisionary process create a consoling artifice of mourning that can discover within its own figurations a skeptic's hypotheses of immortality.