Or Frost to Flowers, that their gay When first the White-thorn blows; ear. What is found here but timeless, worldwide feeling, natural as sympathetic, fittingly worded and but fitly tinged and flavored by the special thought and mode of Milton's time? What, in "Adonais," Shelley's lovely lament and elegy for Keats, but the universal, world-old love of comrade for comrade, all the deeper and richer for the wonderful poetic setting of expression and verbal frame? I weep for Adonais-he is dead! tears Thaw not the frost which binds so And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure And teach them thine own sorrow. Say: "With me Died Adonais; till the Future dares Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be An echo and a light unto eternity!" Oh, weep for Adonais!—the quick The passion-wingéd ministers of Who were his flocks, whom near the living streams Of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught The love which was its music, wander not Wander no more, from kindling brain to brain, But droop there, whence they sprung; and mourn their lot Round the cold heart, where, after their sweet pain, They ne'er will gather strength, or find a home again. He lives, he wakes-'tis Death is dead, not he; Mourn not for Adonais-Thou young Dawn, Turn all thy dew to splendor, for from thee The spirit thou lamentest is not gone; Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moan! Cease, ye faint flowers and fountains, and thou Air, Which like a mourning veil thy scarf hadst thrown O'er the abandoned Earth, now leave it bare Even to the joyous stars which smile on its despair! He is made one with Nature: there is heard His voice in all her music, from the moan Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird; He is a presence to be felt and known In darkness and in light, from herb and stone, Spreading itself where'er that Power may move Which has withdrawn his being to its own; Which wields the world with neverwearied love, Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above. He is a portion of the loveliness Which once he made more lovely; he doth bear His part, while the one Spirit's plastic stress Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there, All new successions to the forms they wear; Torturing the unwilling dross that checks its flight To his own likeness, as each mass may bear, And bursting in its beauty and its might From trees and beasts and men into the Who, with a sweet and early-dead friend and beloved in memory, spiritual vision, would not thrill responsive to the mighty music of the few quoted “Adonais" stanzas? The popular message of the poem is in no whit lessened because of its majestic rhythms, its harmonious rhymes, its sweeping, splendid swing. Gray's "Elegy," with its sweet succession of fine verses strung like rare pearls on a delicate thought-thread; Tennyson's "In Memoriam," with its unforgettable expression and strong if sentimental treatment of a tenderly hallowed subject; Stevenson's self-directed "Requiem," these are too well known, too well loved to need merest hint of quotation. Richard le Gallienne's "What of the Darkness?" dedicated to "the happy dead people," strikes a similar note. |