3. The rejection of mourning as one-sided,
ignorant, and a reversal of the true estimate of the facts; and a
recognition of the eternal destiny of Keats in the world of mind,
coupled with the yearning of Shelley to have done with the vain shows of
things in this cycle of mortality, and to be at one with Keats in the
mansions of the everlasting. Such is the evolution of this Elegy; from
mourning to rapture: from a purblind consideration of deathly phenomena
to the illumination of the individual spirit which contemplates the
eternity of spirit as the universal substance.
Shelley raises in his poem a very marked contrast between the death of
Adonais (Keats) as a mortal man succumbing to 'the common fate,' and the
immortality of his spirit as a vital immaterial essence surviving the
death of the body: he uses terms such as might be adopted by any
believer in the doctrine of 'the immortality of the soul,' in the
ordinary sense of that phrase. It would not however be safe to infer
that Shelley, at the precise time when he wrote _Adonais_, was really in
a more definite frame of mind on this theme than at other periods of his
life, or of a radically different conviction.
Pages:
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93