Nature in Adonais

Nature has a great role in Romantic poetry. Similarly, Shelley is not beyond this tendency. Adonais, one of his most famous poems, being a pastoral elegy, contains natural setting, natural elements, natural characters etc. In addition, Shelley extracts images, symbols and nature myths from nature. Besides, in thematic aspect, nature has a great philosophic concern in this poem.

In the form of a pastoral elegy, the speaker and the person whom he mourns both are shown as shepherds; and we know that shepherds are closely related with nature and natural environment. Moreover, there are many other mourners derived from nature.

Like all other poems of Shelley, in Adonais, there are numerous nature images well drawn by an experienced hand. For example, the young spring, made ‘wild’ with grief, throws down ‘her kindling buds as if she Autumn were’; Again –

The airs and streams renew their joyous tone,

The ants, the bees, the swallows reappear,

Fresh leaves and flowers deck and dead seasons

The amorous birds now pair in every brake,

And build their mossy homes in field and brere

And the green lizard, and the golden snake,

Like unimprisoned flames, out of their trance awake.

The concrete images of these lines present, with great success, the mood of enraptured joy associated with the season.

With symbolism, Shelley gives concrete shape to his abstract thoughts and emotions. The vastness of Nature is an unending source of symbols to him. In Adonais “pansies” are the symbol of the fate of his poetry and “violets” of his modesty and innocence. Objects of Nature, such as sky, stars, sun, moon, wind and river, often stand for eternity in Shelley’s poetry. In ‘Adonais’, too, we find such a reference to the immortality of stars –

“And the immortal stars awake again”

With the capacity to feel Nature and its phenomena, Shelley creates nature myths in ‘Adonais’. “He can detach himself from the past and the present and go on creating fresh and new nature myths at will. ‘Adonais’ is full of such myths, that is, personifications of Nature. Morning, thunder, ocean, winds, echo, spring and other aspects of Nature have been personified and made to mourn the death of Keats to establish the bond of love that united nature with mankind.”