11. 6-8. Shall that alone which knows Be as a sword consumed before the sheath By sightless lightning? From the axiom ’Nought we know dies’—­an axiom which should be understood as limited to what we call material objects (which Shelley however considered to be indistinguishable, in essence, from ideas, see p, 56)—­he proceeds to the question, ’Shall that alone which knows’—­i.e. shall the mind alone—­die and be annihilated?  If the mind were to die, while the body continues extant (not indeed in the form of a human body, but in various phases of ulterior development), then the mind would resemble a sword which, by the action of lightning, is consumed (molten, dissolved) within its sheath, while the sheath itself remains unconsumed.  This is put as a question, and Shelley does not supply an answer to it here, though the terms in which his enquiry is couched seem intended to suggest a reply to the effect that the mind shall not die.  The meaning of the epithet ‘sightless,’ as applied to lightning, seems disputable.  Of course the primary sense of this word is ‘not-seeing, blind’; but Shelley would probably not have scrupled to use it in the sense of ‘unseen.’  I incline to suppose that Shelley means ‘unseen’; not so much that the lightning is itself unseen as that its action in fusing the sword, which remains concealed within the sheath, is unseen.  But the more obvious sense of ‘blind, unregardful,’ could also be justified.

11. 8, 9. Th’ intense atom glows A moment, then is quenched in a most cold repose. The term ‘th’ intense atom’ is a synonym for ’that which knows,’ or the mind.  By death it is ‘quenched in a most cold repose’:  but the repose is not necessarily extinction.

+Stanza 21,+ 11. 1, 2. Alas that all we loved of him should be, But for our grief, as if it had not been. ‘All we loved of him’ must be the mind and character—­the mental and personal endowments—­of Adonais:  his bodily frame is little or not at all in question here.  By these lines therefore Shelley seems to intimate that the mind or soul of Adonais is indeed now and for ever extinct:  it lives no longer save in the grief of the survivors.  But it does not follow that this is a final expression of Shelley’s conviction on the subject:  the passage should be read as in context with the whole poem.

11. 5, 6. Great and mean Meet massed in death, who lends what life must borrow. The meaning of the last words is far from clear to me.  I think Shelley may intend to say that, in this our mortal state, death is the solid and permanent fact; it is rather a world of death than of life.  The phenomena of life are but like a transitory loan from the great emporium, death.  Shelley no doubt wanted a rhyme for ‘morrow’ and ‘sorrow’:  he has made use of ‘borrow’ in a compact but not perspicuous phrase.

+Stanza 22,+ 1. 2. ’Wake thou,’ cried Misery, ’childless mother!’ We here return to Urania, of whom we had last heard in st. 6.  See the passage translated by Shelley from Bion (p. 63), ’Sleep no more, Venus:... ‘tis Misery calls,’ &c.; but here the phrase, ‘’Tis Misery calls,’ is Shelley’s own.  He more than once introduces Misery (in the sense of Unhappiness, Tribulation) as an emblematic personage.  There is his lyric named Misery, written in 1818, which begins—­