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
Pastoral elegy then, the term elegy usually refers to a meditative poem of lamentation with no set metrical form. Examples of modern elegies include Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,” which reflects on the death of Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", which mourns humanity as a whole. Other examples include e e cumming's “my father moved through dooms of love,” John Peale Bishop's “Hours,” A E Housman's “To an Athlete Dying Young,” and W H Auden's “In Memory of W.B. Yeats." Pastoral poetry is a genre that typically relates to country/rural life and