Pastoral elegy Shelley's "Adonaïs" is a pastoral elegy written by Shelley immediately after hearing about the death of John Keats. The elegy is 495 lines long, consisting of a total of 55 Spenserian stanzas. "Adonaïs" was composed during the spring of 1821 and was eventually published in July 1821. Studying the works of many classical pastoral elegies himself, Shelley admired Milton's poetic voice and form in "Lycidas". Thus, Shelley composed "Adonaïs" specifically in the tradition of Milton's "Lycidas" Introduced to each other by their mutual friend Leigh Hunt in late 1816, Shelley and Keats often exchanged letters of advice about their works
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard Gloucestershire" is metrically more inventive and written in a six-line stanza that terminates Gray's cross-rhymed quatrain with a couplet. In theme and tendency Shelley's poem closely resembles the setting of the Elegy but concludes that there is something appealing in death that frees it of terror. In the Victorian period, Alfred, Lord Tennyson adopted many features of the Elegy in his own extended meditation on death, "In Memoriam". He established a ceremonial, almost religious, tone by reusing the idea of the "knell" that "tolls" to mark the coming night. This is followed with the poet narrator looking through letters of