SOURCE: “The Indeterminacy of Shelley's Adonais: Liberation and Destruction,” in The Keats-Shelley Review, No. 9, Spring, 1995, pp. 15-36.

In the following essay, Magarian analyzes Adonais, and considers its ambivalent confrontation with the problem of death.

Adonias's (1821) treatment of death makes the poem peculiarly provisional in terms of its emotional and intellectual outlook. The subject of death is initially one that fosters a mood of consolatory lamentation. It ends by precipitating and pressing forward a view of imaginative and spiritual liberation. The latter view is intimately connected with the glimpse the poem offers at the end of a higher vision that apparently signals a harmonious union with Adonais while also suggesting a demonic force that, in itself, is at odds with harmony. Such duality, both in the fact of the changing perceptions of death that the poem offers, and in the simultaneously harmonious and demonic vision of life beyond...