10 - The Gift of Death

Summary

Shelley's elegy for John Keats, Adonais (R&P 388–406), is his most sustained attempt to imagine death for the greater good as initiation into a larger community. Personal extinction becomes canonization. Shelley's syncretic title combines at least two myths: the Greek one of the young shepherd who is loved by Love itself, the goddess Venus, and is killed by a boar; and the Egyptian fertility myth of the god sacrificed to ensure the fruitfulness of the following spring, in which form he is thought to return and be resurrected. Shelley's implausible attribution of Keats's death to the Tory reviewers lets him connect both myths with yet another one that figures his main dilemma – the myth of Actaeon, the hunter killed by his own hounds as punishment for gazing on the forbidden beauty of Diana. Keats's hounds become his thoughts, the poetry for which he was viciously calumniated. And the enduring excellence of that poetry becomes the enrichment of our common culture and language through which he survives.

The plot, though, leaves Keats's afterlife subject to the vagaries of future interpretations of his poetry. Shelley's own tendentious reading begins the process. To become your readers is to be victim of the whims of the reading public: ‘grief itself be mortal’, Shelley concedes (l. 184).

All he had loved, and moulded into thought,

From shape, and hue, and odour, and sweet sound,

Lamented Adonais.

(ll. 118–20)

But moulding into thought, it turns out, is the act of a Shelleyan poet of mutability, a materialist aware of the dynamism of reality: of the need to grasp its nature through an intellectual construction of its genesis and of its future not received passively in sensation –

while the one Spirit's plastic stress

Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there,

All new successions to the forms they wear.

(ll. 381–3)

Allusive tribute to Keats's infectious poetic idiom shades into a Shelleyan identification with the forces of his own dispersal.