Adonaïs Adonaïs Adonaïs: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion, etc. , also spelled Adonaies, is a pastoral elegy written by Percy Bysshe Shelley for John Keats in 1821, and widely regarded as one of Shelley's best and most well-known works. The poem, which is in 495 lines in 55 Spenserian stanzas, was composed in the spring of 1821 immediately after 11 April, when Shelley heard of Keats' death (seven weeks earlier). It is a pastoral elegy, in the English tradition of John Milton's "Lycidas". Shelley had studied and translated classical elegies. The title of the
Monody on the Death of Chatterton sing of Chatterton, and narrator poet responds by describing Chatterton's death: After describing Chatterton's fate and lamenting over his fate, the narrator begins to identify himself with Chatterton. Soon after, the poem returns to Chatterton's death, and the narrator implores Chatterton to help him attain a divine status: Of the final two lines Coleridge said, in a note to the 1823 copy of the first version, that they contain "a sentiment which in his cooler moments he would have abhor'd the thought of". Coleridge removed the Pindaric ode and replaced it with a Romantic elegy structured by heroic couplets. Only