Lines 316-324

Our Adonais has drunk poisonoh!

What deaf and viperous murderer could crown
Life's early cup with such a draught of woe?
The nameless worm would now itself disown:
It felt, yet could escape, the magic tone
Whose prelude held all envy, hate and wrong,
But what was howling in one breast alone,
Silent with expectation of the song,
Whose master's hand is cold, whose silver lyre unstrung.

The speaker has moved from quiet mourning to anger. He says that our "hero,"
Adonais-Keats, drank poison.
Our speaker is using a metaphor here. The poison is criticism.
And he has some very choice words for the critic who wrote those words. He
calls him "deaf and viperous murderers" (a viper is a snake) who used the poison
of their words to create a "draught" (drink) of woe.
As if that wasn't enough, he calls the critic a "nameless worm" because he
wouldn't put his name on the criticism. The speaker thinks that's pretty cowardly.
He continues his tirade: the speaker says that the critic felt the "magic tone" in
Keats' writing, but criticized the poems anyways because he was envious, full of
hate, and just plain wrong.
Those "magic" words lived inside one person (Keats); he says they were
"howling in one breast alone." We guess that makes Keats irreplaceable.
Those words are still in there, he figures. They wait, silently, but their "master's
hand is cold." He can no longer write them.
The speaker continues to use music as a metaphor for poetry. The speaker
compares Keats' death to a musician whose "silver lyre" is "unstrung." The
instrument is broken. Keats, the instrument of the poems, is also broken.
No music can be made.

Lines 325-333
Live thou, whose infamy is not thy fame!
Live! fear no heavier chastisement from me,

Thou noteless blot on a remember'd name!

But be thyself, and know thyself to be!
And ever at thy season be thou free
To spill the venom when thy fangs o'erflow;
Remorse and Self-contempt shall cling to thee;
Hot Shame shall burn upon thy secret brow,
And like a beaten hound tremble thou shaltas now.

The speaker condemns the critic to live a long life. Um say what?
He wants the critic to live with what he's done, even if nobody else knows about
it. He says the critic's "infamy" is not his fame, meaning that he's not famous for
his criticism.
The critic is just a "noteless blot on a remember'd name." In other words, the
critic is just a stain, unworthy of comment, on famous namesick burn.
Again we get a simile, comparing the critic to a snake, saying that the criticism is
like "venom." The speaker knows that the critic will continue to spread this
poison.
But even so, the critic knows, and should be filled with, "Remorse," "Selfcontempt," and "Hot Shame" forever, burning on his "secret brow" (forehead).
The speaker hopes that the critic will tremble fearfully, like a dog who has been
beaten.
Uf, we told you that Shelley was mad.

Lines 334-342
Nor let us weep that our delight is fled
Far from these carrion kites that scream below;
He wakes or sleeps with the enduring dead;
Thou canst not soar where he is sitting now.
Dust to the dust! but the pure spirit shall flow
Back to the burning fountain whence it came,
A portion of the Eternal, which must glow
Through time and change, unquenchably the same,
Whilst thy cold embers choke the sordid hearth of shame.

Now the speaker is telling us to stop weeping. But didn't he just spend thirtyeight stanza basically telling us why we should mourn? We guess he's changed
his mind.
He says that "our delight" (Adonais-Keats) has gone far away from the "carrion
kites" (corpse-eating birds) on earth. He is now in a more eternal place, a place
that endures. We can't visit him in Heaven. Only "pure spirits" get to hang out up
there.
Shelley uses the imagery of a burning fountain to symbolize eternal life. Keats is
now part of that fountain.
It never changes. Therefore, Keats is always part of this energy. That's Shelley's
version of heaven.
Meanwhile, here on earth, "cold embers" are choking us with shame. He's glad
that Keats is free of all that.
That's why he thinks we shouldn't mourn. Keats is in a better place. So y

Lines 343-351
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep,
He hath awaken'd from the dream of life;
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings. We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

Our speaker continues with the "Keats-is-in-a-better-place" idea from the last
stanza. He argues that now that the dead youth is actually alive for the first time,
and that life was just a dream.
It's we who are asleep, he argues. We are "lost in stormy visions" and have
arguments with phantoms (like when we criticize the dead).
In another metaphor, he says that attacking those that can't fight backbe they
other people or just poemsis like trying to stab a ghost that can't be hurt.
We are the ones who are decaying, because of our fear and grief. They rot out
our insides, emotionally, the way death makes the body decay.

Hope grows cold, he says; we become hopeless. This hopelessness is another

thing that makes us decay; it eats at our "living clay" (body) like worms eat at a
corpse. Eww.

Lines 352-360
He has outsoar'd the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again;
From the contagion of the world's slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain;
Nor, when the spirit's self has ceas'd to burn,
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.

Adonais-Keats has flown so high, the speaker says, that human problems like
"envy," "calumny" (slander), "hate," "pain," and "unrest" cannot torture him. We
guess that's a bright side.
Shelley is again implying (or maybe just hoping) that criticism can no longer
bother Keats.
The corruption of the world is like a stain or a contagious virus, the speaker says,
and it can no longer spread to those who are dead, and that's a good thing.
Adonais-Keats also doesn't have to worry about aging; his heart won't grow cold
and his hair won't turn grey.
He gets to be young forever, remembered (and lamented) as a great poet who
died young.
This is another reason not to mourn him, says the speaker.

Lines 361-369
He lives, he wakes'tis Death is dead, not he;
Mourn not for Adonais. Thou young Dawn,
Turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee
The spirit thou lamentest is not gone;

Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moan!

Cease, ye faint flowers and fountains, and thou Air,
Which like a mourning veil thy scarf hadst thrown
O'er the abandon'd Earth, now leave it bare
Even to the joyous stars which smile on its despair!

All those that the speaker called on to mourn earlier in the poem are now called
on to stop their mourning.
The speaker starts with nature, and gets pretty specific about their (personified)
mourning.
He wants the caves and the forests to stop moaning in grief, he wants the flowers
and fountains to come back to life, and he wants the air to stop fogging up the
earth, like it has been covered in a mourning veil (simile alert).
Even the stars should be allowed to smile down on earth, though they too
despair over the youth's death.

Lines 370-378
He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
Spreading itself where'er that Power may move
Which has withdrawn his being to its own;
Which wields the world with never-wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.

The youth is now one with nature, says the speaker.

His voice is present in thunder and the sounds of birds. You can feel him in the
darkness and in the light, and everywhere along the earth.
Nature (which the speaker also calls the "Power") drew Adonais-Keats back into
itself, but wasn't selfish with the youth. Nature shares him with the world, which
helps keep the world going.
The speaker isn't being literal here; he just feels that Adonais-Keats' spirit isn't
gone, even if his body is.

Lines 379-387
He is a portion of the loveliness
Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear
His part, while the one Spirit's plastic stress
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there
All new successions to the forms they wear;
Torturing th' unwilling dross that checks its flight
To its own likeness, as each mass may bear;
And bursting in its beauty and its might
From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven's light.

Now, Adonais-Keats is a part of the loveliness of the "Spirit," a word which the
speaker uses to represent the entire universe, similarly to the way he used
"Power" and "Nature" in earlier stanzas.
This force may be Shelley's concept of God. Whatever this force is, it contains
everything, including Keats.
The speaker thinks that when we die we become one with the force. (Too bad he
was a century and a half too early to see Star Wars.)
This force is stretchable, like plastic, and covers the whole world, which he
describes as "dull" and "dense."
Compared to the afterlife, apparently it is pretty lame.
In the world, this force changes forms, making "dross" (rubbish) things into itself.
It does this by filling these things (like trees, beasts, and men) with itself until they
are ready to burst with "its beauty and its might."

Lines 388-396
The splendours of the firmament of time
May be eclips'd, but are extinguish'd not;
Like stars to their appointed height they climb,
And death is a low mist which cannot blot
The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought
Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,
And love and life contend in it for what

Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there

And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.

Our speaker's talking about the pleasures of heaven ("firmament" is another word
for "sky"), which may be overshadowed by earthy events for a while but can
never be "extinguished," or made to end.
Death is just some lowly earth thing, like fog ("low mist"), which lingers close to
the earth. It has nothing to do with the real good stuff, which happens in the
afterlife.
What's more, when a young person has a "lofty"(important) thought, it takes their
heart up above earthly things and into this higher realm.
While their heart is up there, personified love and life fight over it, trying to keep it
from returning to earth.
Ultimately, this lofty thought makes it as though the young person has already
died, since they are already kind of in heaven.
Shelley is equating lofty thoughts with self-preservation here. When someone
thinks something profound, that thought lives oneven after they die. He
considers Keats one of these lucky people who, because of their thoughts, never
really die.

Lines 397-405
The inheritors of unfulfill'd renown
Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought,
Far in the Unapparent. Chatterton
Rose pale, his solemn agony had not
Yet faded from him; Sidney, as he fought
And as he fell and as he liv'd and lov'd
Sublimely mild, a Spirit without spot,
Arose; and Lucan, by his death approv'd:
Oblivion as they rose shrank like a thing reprov'd.

Other poets, "inheritors of unfulfilled renown" (inheritors that didn't get a chance
to reach their peak) show up.
They all died young, too, and now sit on "thrones" in the afterlife.

The first is Thomas Chatterton, an English poet that died at 22. He died in 1770
and his agony hasn't "faded from him" yet. In other words, his death is still pretty
fresh.
Next up is Sir Phillip Sidney, who died of dysentery in 1586 at age 32 (not a good
way to go). He is described as "mild" which means he wasn't very extreme or
easily upset. He's also a "Spirit without spot" (without fault).
The final visitor is Lucan, the ancient Roman poet who died at 24. Dude's been
dead a long time.
As these poets "rise" they make "Oblivion" (a.k.a. death) shrink and hide as if it
has been chastised.
The speaker is saying that these three poets are a good example of how death
doesn't mean the end of someone; their work is good enough to live on. In that
sense, they cheat death and oblivionjust like Keats