Adonais and Lycidas

As kat mentioned, there are a lot of similarities between “Adonais” and “Lycidas,” but Shelley’s pastoral elegy is much stronger than Milton’s in my opinion, even though he does play around with the form. 

Shelley didn’t write the elegy out of obligation, like Milton did for King (who was just a classmate, not a close friend) so the mourning and emotion is much stronger, as shown by how Nature really, really mourns for Keats “And the wild winds flew round, sobbing in their dismay.” The fact that Shelley also thinks about the nature of death in the poem also shows how much Keats’ death is on his mind, because we are often reminded of our own mortality when someone close dies. Because Shelley doesn’t speak in hyperbole like Milton, he is also much more genuine, as I think is shown by the very fact that he wrote an elegy, a poem that was supposed to be written early in one’s career, as Milton did with “Lycidas.” However, Shelley does go off the beaten path a bit by wishing he were dead and with Keats at the end of the poem This is not at all common with pastoral elegies, but I think this is another instance that underlines how much passion and tears were put into the elegy, unlike “Lycidas.”