From Poet to Poet or Shelley’s Inconsistencies in Keats’s Panegyric: Adonais as an Autobiographical Work of Art by Caroline Bertonèche (Paris 3) Adonais, in short, is such an elegy as poet might be expected to write upon poet. The author has had before him his recollections of Lycidas, of Moschus and Bion, and of the doctrines of Plato; and in the stanza of the most poetical of poets, Spenser, has brought his own genius, in all its ethereal beauty, to lead a pomp of Loves, Graces, and Intelligences, in honour of the departed. (Leigh Hunt, “Unsigned Review of Adonais”, The Examiner, 7 juillet 1822)1 I have engaged these last days in composing a poem on the death of John Keats, which will shortly be finished; and I anticipate the pleasure of reading it to you, as some of the very few persons who will be interested in it and understand it. It is a highly wrought piece of art, perhaps better in point of composition than anything I have written. (Lettre de Shelley à John et Maria Gisborne, 5 juin 1821, Complete Works, X 270) When Shelley said of Adonais, not long after its completion, that it was its most accomplished piece of art, “better in point of composition than anything [he] ha[d] written” while mentioning, in his Preface, the “feeble tribute of applause” (Shelley’s Poetry and Prose 392) it nonetheless represents, he does not to seem to want to hide his own sense of personal satisfaction, nor does he fail to confess certain obvious limitations in his work as a Romantic elegist. We must indeed respect him for his candour, here shrouded in paradox, as well as for the bold double- sidedness of this critical confession which, while putting forward a great poetic success, also openly discards the original objective of his elegy – the honourable tribute one pays to the memory of a dead poet, with a strong conviction that cannot bear the egotistical whims of a falsely humble writer. This leads us to one of our main theme and source of interest, that of the narcissistic elegist or the biographical art of an auto-elegiac poetic narrative which places the author in the foreground, on the same equally important plane as the form of the poem. In this new scheme of things, where tightly woven influences and formal intricacies often include a reader that needs to be educated and a tradition that needs to be improved, the status of the self-centred elegist and the funerary topoi he chooses to manipulate, superimposing individual purpose to collective grief, would then have more value than the simple object of mourning. “The canonizer is worthy of the saint”, says the Blackwood’s, as it tackles the ironic question, now tinged with an added layer of black humour, of the fellow poet’s canonisation and the illusions of posthumous grandeur for which a consecrated elegist has most daringly sacrificed a part of his revered subject: “Here an hour—a dead hour too—is to say that Mr. J. Keats died along with it! Yet this hour has the heavy business on its hands of mourning the loss of its fellow-defunct, and of rousing all its obscure compeers to be taught its own sorrow, &c. Mr. Shelley and his tribe have been panegyrised in their turn for power of language.” (Anon. 697) Yet this problematic substance of the post-Miltonian elegy, whose secular essence lies in its “dynamics of consolation”, also flaunts as many tokens of a heightened credibility as possible by relying on the new epic values of its modern historicism2. These values, we find them well- performed by an author-actor, first a hero then a playwright, who willingly takes up the entire stage, standing at the centre of the elegiac scene to better reveal himself to the public gaze. And, in the end, a multi-talented elegist does not fail to remind us that common beliefs are not strong enough for the entire body of a submerged plot to resurface on its own. Thus Lycidas’s pastoral orthodoxy, where Christ is silenced and its assistance denied, stems from a progressive re-evaluation of the religious concepts of life and death: “Weep no more, wofull shepherds 1 Quoted in Redpath (383). 2 On this theme, see William A. Ulmer’s seminal article, “Adonais and the Death of Poetry” (438). Bertonèche, Caroline.“From poet to poet or Shelley’s inconsistencies in Keats’s panegyric: Adonais as an 35 autobiographical work of art.” EREA 5.1 (Printemps 2007): 35-44. <www.e-rea.org> weep no more, / For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead, / Sunk though he be beneath the watry floar (…) So Lycidas, sunk low but mounted high, / Through the dear might of him that walkt the waves (…) (v. 165-67, 172-73)” (163). As for Shelley’s elegy, Adonais, heir to Milton’s throne, like its Victorian counterpart, Thyrsis,3 it turns its dialectic of immortality in survival, “a Love in desolation masked”, into an iconic pretext for the omnipotent writer and his wider spectrum of visionary outbursts in terms of cultural and Romantic canonisation: “A pardlike Spirit beautiful and swift – / (…) a Power / Girt round with weakness (…) On the withering flower / The killing sun smiles brightly (XXXII, 280-81, 286-87)” (400). Similarly, Shelley’s slippery slope of historicist displacements or misplacements provides him with a better grasp of the subjective sphere of elegiac memory. This all-encompassing power of influence he seems to exert over the rotations of history and the recollections of the dead, he acquires it fully when he learns how to master, with greatness, the historical meaning of his elegy. There, at this point in time and space, roles are inverted between a Keats reliving his youth as a traditional poet of canonical dimension and an Adonais which survives as a metonymic voice of both individual and monumental historicity. A descendant of Urania, “mighty Mother”4 called to her son’s bedside, both prone to the same sense of desertion and neglect, Shelley, bewitched by the former, henceforth restored to her proper rank of “historicist Muse”5, seems to be speaking out in her favour. But as he seems to disregard his long-lasting attachment to the contemporary memorial and the vivid influence of his deceased peer6, he can, from here onwards, entirely devote himself to the cult of narcissistic memory, that which links him back, as wished, to the last branch of this elegiac genealogy: O weep for Adonais—he is dead! Wake, melancholy Mother, wake and weep! Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed Thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep Like his, a mute and uncomplaining sleep; For he is gone, where all things wise and fair Descend;—oh, dream not that the amorous Deep Will yet restore him to the vital air; Death feeds on his mute voice, and laughs at our despair. (III, 19- 21 & 25-27, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose 393). Shelley is here voluntarily following his elder’s footsteps. In Wordsworth, indeed, the contemplative and specular dilemmas of the first Narcissus of Romantic memory, renowned character (“the rememberer”) of the Prelude which likes to represent and commemorate a past that is both autobiographical, both cultural, emerge from a semblance of poetic aporia dressed in the simpler form of a myth with no outcome. It depicts this young hero with a tilted head who, unable to take his eyes off the riveting sight of “his own image”, still manages to stay out of danger and onto safe grounds. His obsessed gaze fixed on the few imperceptible shimmers of a quiet lake, another metaphor for his endless imagination, he now belongs to a protected category of bodies and spirits that no longer deserve to drown. The “discovery” of the self, further distanced from mortal sin, can therefore be sufficiently appreciated by the poet. And after having deprived the famous myth of its fatal ending, Wordsworth invites us to 3 We could add here that, in Matthew Arnold’s work, the elegist’s survival is dependent upon a repetitive and overwhelming struggle – as is illustrated by its chiasmic structure – against the unfair abandonment and desperate loss of the poet-friend: “There thou art gone, and me thou leavest here / Sole in these fields! yet will I not despair. / Despair I will not (…) (v.191-93)”. My emphasis. Haunted by the memory of Clough’s bohemian spirit, who has breathed elegiac motifs of Romantic wanderings and erudition into the mind of an attentive successor, Arnold makes sure to canonise this scholarly spectre by questioning, in the process, his own poetic resistance as well as the egotistical potentialities of such a speculative immortalisation: “Our Gypsy-Scholar haunts, outliving thee! / Fields where soft sheep from cages pull the hay, / Woods with anemonies in flower till May, / Know him a wanderer still; then why not me? (v.197-200)”. My emphasis. See Arnold, Matthew, “Thyrsis” (998). 4 “Where wert thou mighty Mother, when he lay, / When thy Son lay, pierced by the shaft which flies / In darkness? Where was lorn Urania / When Adonais died? (II, 10-13)”. (See Shelley’s Poetry and Prose 392). 5 This expression, we owe it to William A. Ulmer (445). 6 “Keats’s actual death is actively forgotten in Shelley’s memorial act of writing Adonais”. (See Sandy 86). Bertonèche, Caroline.“From poet to poet or Shelley’s inconsistencies in Keats’s panegyric: Adonais as an 36 autobiographical work of art.” EREA 5.1 (Printemps 2007): 35-44. <www.e-rea.org> contemplate, with him, a sketched version of his new lyricism or what he conceives to be a poetics of infinite impossibilities: As one who hangs down-bending from the side Of a slow-moving boat upon the breast Of a still water, solacing himself With such discoveries as his eye can make (…) now is crossed by gleam Of his own image, by a sunbeam now, And motions that are sent he knows not whence, Impediments that make his task more sweet (IV, 246-49 & 258-61, Prelude 138).