The year 1819 saw the publication of a work unique among Shelley’s productions, The Cenci.  This is a drama based upon the tragic story of Beatrice Cenci.  The poem deals with human beings, human passions, real acts, and the natural world, whereas Shelley usually preferred to treat of metaphysical theories, personified abstractions, and the world of fancy.  This strong drama was the most popular of his works during his lifetime.

[Illustration:  FACSIMILE OF STANZA FROM “TO A SKYLARK".]

He returned to the ideal sphere again in one of his great poems, the lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound (1820).  This poem is the apotheosis of the French Revolution.  Prometheus, the friend of mankind, lies tortured and chained to the mountain side.  As the hour redemption approaches, his beloved Asia, the symbol of nature, arouses the soul of Revolution, represented by Demogorgon.  He rises, hurls down the enemies of progress and freedom, releases Prometheus, and spreads liberty and happiness through all the world.  Then the Moon, the Earth, and the Voices of the Air break forth into a magnificent chant of praise.  The most delicate fancies, the most gorgeous imagery, and the most fiery, exultant emotions are combined in this poem with something of the stateliness of its Greek prototype.  The swelling cadences of the blank verse and the tripping rhythm of the lyrics are the product of a nature rich in rare and wonderful melodies.

The Witch of Atlas (1820), Epipsychidion (1821), Adonais (1821), and the exquisite lyrics, The Cloud, To a Skylark and Ode to the West Wind are the most beautiful of the remaining works.  The first two mentioned are the most elusive of Shelley’s poems.  With scarcely an echo in his soul of the shadows and discords of earth, the poet paints, in these works, lands—­

  “...’twixt Heaven, Air, Earth, and Sea,
  Cradled, and hung in clear tranquillity;”

where all is—­

  “Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise."[23]

Adonais is a lament for the early death of Keats, and it stands second in the language among elegiac poems, ranking next to Milton’s Lycidas.  Shelley referred to Adonais as “perhaps the least imperfect of my compositions.”  His biographer, Edward Dowden, calls it “the costliest monument ever erected to the memory of an English singer,” who

  “...bought, with price of purest breath,
  A grave among the eternal.”

Mrs. Shelley put some of her most sacred mementos of the poet between the leaves of Adonais, which spoke to her of his own immortality and omnipresence:—­

  “Naught we know dies.  Shall that alone which knows
  Be as a sword consumed before the sheath
  By sightless lightning?
       * * * * *
  He is a portion of the loveliness,
  Which once he made more lovely.”

Although some of Shelley’s shorter poems are more popular, nothing that he ever wrote surpasses Adonais in completeness, poetic thought, and perfection of artistic finish.