Elegy and Dream

Abstract

Adonais is an elaborate exercise in a conventional genre, pastoral elegy. Shelley’s decision to write his memorial to Keats within the tradition of pastoral elegy is a choice so far from obvious as to be eccentric. A. S. P. Woodhouse and Douglas Bush, summarising the place of Milton’s Lycidas within this tradition, conclude by remarking that at the time when ‘if not moribund’ the tradition ‘had almost ceased to develop, it was crowned by the greatest exemplar in any language’.¹ The genre within which Shelley writes Adonais died with Lycidas; it retained thereafter only a spectral life in the imitations of Lycidas written in the eighteenth century. Another elegiac tradition, that deriving from Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard, was still vital in 1821. Shelley had written his early lyric, ‘A Summer Evening Churchyard’, within that tradition, but when he came to write his poem on Keats he chose to ignore it. Lycidas is the single most important model for Adonais, and yet Shelley echoes and imitates Milton’s predecessors rather than Milton himself. In a sense, he chose to write Adonais as Milton’s contemporary. His poem is an anachronism.