That garden sweet, that Lady fair,
And all sweet shapes and odours there,
In truth have never passed away: 
’Tis we, ’tis ours, are changed; not they.

For love, and beauty, and delight,
There is no death nor change; their might
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure.’

11. 6, 7. We decay Like corpses in a charnel, &c.  Human life consists of a process of decay.  While living, we are consumed by fear and grief; our disappointed hopes swarm in our living persons like worms in our corpses.

+Stanza 40,+ 1. 1. He has outsoared the shadow of our night. As human life was in the last stanza represented as a dream, so the state of existence in which it is enacted is here figured as night.

1. 5. From the contagion of the world’s slow stain. It may be said that ’the world’s slow stain’—­the lowering influence of the aims and associations of all ordinary human life—­is the main subject-matter of Shelley’s latest important poem, The Triumph of Life.

1. 9. With sparkless ashes. See the cognate expression, ’thy cold embers,’ in st. 38.

+Stanza 41,+ 1. 1. He lives, he wakes—­’tis Death is dead, not he. In the preceding three stanzas Adonais is contemplated as being alive, owing to the very fact that his death has awakened him ’from the dream of life’—­mundane life.  Death has bestowed upon him a vitality superior to that of mundane life.  Death therefore has performed an act contrary to his own essence as death, and has practically killed, not Adonais, but himself.

1. 2. Thou young Dawn. We here recur to the image in st. 14, ’Morning sought her eastern watch-tower,’ &c.

1. 5. Ye caverns and ye forests, &c.  The poet now adjures the caverns, forests, flowers, fountains, and air, to ‘cease to moan.’  Of the flowers we had heard in st. 16:  but the other features of Nature which are now addressed had not previously been individually mentioned—­except, to some extent, by implication, in st. 15, which refers more directly to ‘Echo.’  The reference to the air had also been, in a certain degree, prepared for in stanza 23.  The stars are said to smile on the Earth’s despair.  This does not, I apprehend, indicate any despair of the Earth consequent on the death of Adonais, but a general condition of woe.  A reference of a different kind to stars—­a figurative reference—­appears in st. 29.

+Stanza 42,+ 1. 1. He is made one with Nature. This stanza ascribes to Keats the same phase of immortality which belongs to Nature.  Having ‘awakened from the dream of [mundane] life,’ his spirit forms an integral portion of the universe.  Those acts of intellect which he performed in the flesh remain with us, as thunder and the song of the nightingale remain with us.

11. 6, 7. Where’er that power may move Which has withdrawn his being to its own. This corresponds to the expression in st. 38—­’The pure spirit shall flow Back to the burning fountain whence it came, A portion of the Eternal.’