The origin of the Greek elegy, it is said, lies in the Lydian double flute. Won’t it soon be looked for in the human spirit as well?

—Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragment 315

In this sort of irony, everything should be playful and serious, guilelessly open and deeply hidden…. It is the freest of all licenses, for by its means one transcends oneself; and yet it is also the most lawful, for it is absolutely necessary. It is a very good sign when the harmonious bores are at a loss about how they should react to this continuous self-parody, when they fluctuate endlessly between belief and disbelief until they get dizzy and take what is meant as a joke seriously and what is meant seriously as a joke.

—Friedrich Schlegel, Critical Fragment 108

In England, people make jokes of everything, even things as serious as death.

—Buchi Emecheta, Second Class Citizen

Is Adonais a joke? This may seem a singularly impertinent question to ask of a pastoral elegy, a genre infamous for its formal artifice and meticulous, frequently monotonous, dignity. Even apart from generic considerations, what we know of Shelley’s poetic temperament appears to argue against comic readings of his poetry. While simplistic portraits of Shelley as a feminized phantom have long since been dismissed or modified—he certainly was no "ineffectual angel"—neither was he a sardonic prankster. According to Edward Trelawny, an early biographer, Shelley "did not laugh, or even smile." T. S. Eliot, though hardly an impartial judge or first-hand witness in the matter, found him "humourless, pedantic, self-centered, and sometimes almost a blackguard." And yet, if little evidence exists to suggest that Adonais was intended as a joke, an abundance of evidence testifies to the presence of an audience disposed to receive it as one. The reliance of Shelley’s elegy on the tale of a young poet annihilated by the cruelty of the Quarterly Review strained the credulity of many, even as it was incorporating itself into the mythos of premature Romantic death. Two years before he composed his own satirical elegy for Keats, Byron interrogated Shelley about the seriousness with which he advanced the story of a Chatterton "snuffed out by an Article": "Is it actually true? I did not think criticism had been so killing . . . in this world of bustle and broil, and especially in the career of writing, a man should calculate upon his powers of resistance before he goes into the arena." Shelley’s feminizing of Keats, a strategy crucial to the tragic tone of Adonais, is precisely what Byron finds amusing. The codes of masculinity implicit in Byron’s inquiry demand that poets enter the "arena" as gladiators, not as Christians for the lions. The Literary Gazette echoes Byron’s skepticism, finding it difficult to believe that any such scheme could be proposed as a serious autopsy: "Solemn as the subject is (for in truth we must grieve for the early death of any youth of literary ambition) it is hardly possible to help laughing at the mock solemnity with which Shelley charges the Quarterly Review for having murdered his friend with—a critique!"

This snicker of the Gazette’s only returns us to the initial question of whether Adonais can be helpfully understood as elaborate farce. Usually when the seriousness of Shelley’s elegy is questioned in this way, it is done under the rubric of Romantic irony. According to this reading, the poem’s pastoral and cosmic vacillations between weeping and celebration are best analyzed as a dialectical hovering resolved only by the apocalyptic final stanza. As William Ulmer points out, however, this sort of irony has no teeth; it reduces ultimately to an irony that is not dangerous, dizzy, or self-consuming:

In this chapter, I propose to clarify the nature of this relationship by historicizing Shelley’s irony as a rhetorically pragmatic necessity. Crucially, however, this historicizing of irony—its entry into sexual politics—must not be seen as a reduction of it to mere rhetorical technique, or tricksterism. It is that, of course, but also much more. Friedrich Schlegel, the ringmaster of Romantic irony, describes this paradox in a famous fragment: "Only poetry can also reach the heights of philosophy in this way, and only poetry does not restrict itself to isolated ironical passages, as rhetoric does. There are ancient and modern poems that are pervaded by the divine breath of irony throughout and informed by a truly transcendental buffoonery." Adonais stands as a marvelous exemplar of this buffoonery, since its mechanisms strain always to make its urbanity indistinguishable from its vulgarity. In the very impossibility of deciding between these readings of the elegy, irony’s invisible triumphs are made manifest, "guilelessly open and deeply hidden." Irony, which is so obviously a cheap rhetorical trick, never allows us the satisfaction of catching it in the act of deception. Its invulnerable evasions are at once the evidence of its buffoonery and the materialization, in readerly dizziness, of its transcendence. If we could pin it down, it would cease to be what it is. For this reason, Ulmer, Mellor, and Hogle might all be said to participate in an oversimplification of Shelley’s irony. The problem is not whether Shelley succeeds in decentering binary oppositions, but whether we are to take the poles of those oppositions seriously to begin with. That is why irony, to be understood, must be historicized. Without reference to political content, its structure will continue to be a (laughing) matter of unresolvable debate.

In the coming pages, I will argue that Shelley’s irony is neither idealistic method nor primordial process, but rather a self-referential rhetorical strategy that emerges as the only viable poetic solution to a homosocial politics. Shelley becomes automatically implicated in this politics by expressing grief for a feminized Keats as a fallen "brother poet." His irony generates a constant fluctuation which allows him to claim dual citizenship in a number of heated border disputes: to mourn Keats or to deride him, to surpass him as a successor or to worship him as a belated disciple, to defend him as a brother or to suckle him as a mother. Irony’s doubleness, its heteronomy, represents a powerful tactic which Shelley uses to attack his critics while pandering to them, to assert masculinity while exorcising it, to embrace and disavow Cockney poetics. Adonais’s irony, in other words, initiates a multiple and self-contradictory sexual and political revaluation. It is not "transference," but intransigence. Adonais is a joke, and the joke is this: that we can never be sure whether or not it is a joke. The self-referential absurdity of this situation precisely constitutes its effectiveness: since we can never be quite sure where Shelley’s elegiac speaker stands, he ends up standing everywhere and nowhere.

Irony, however, is not merely a rhetorical ruse; in order to understand its function in Adonais it must also be read as a category of gender politics. When Ulmer charges most "ironic or skeptical approaches" to Shelley’s poetry with ignoring the complicities of the oscillations of opposites, he is more correct than even he realizes. His facile conflation of irony with skepticism only serves to foreground his involuntary insight. While I intend to show that the fluctuation of gender identity in Adonais is "ironic," since it allows Shelley’s speaker to masquerade under multiple names or regimes (mother/father, lover/brother), I would resist any reading of it as skepticism. To translate this resistance into the cultural context of widowhood introduced in the previous chapter, it is useful to point out that, for women, nineteenth-century mourning remains an inherently ironic activity. The paradox I will explore in this chapter, and indeed throughout the rest of this study, is that this form of ironic female mourning becomes an exemplary mode in the nineteenth-century British elegy. What is at stake therefore, in the cultural analogue of the widow’s black veil, is the insight that a predominantly female-gendered mode of mourning has invaded the penultimate male homosocial genre. Just as the irony of the veiled widow (a visual irony or doubleness created by the concurrent projection of a dread spectacle and realization that this very projection allows the widow to "go out for business or pleasure, fearless of any intrusion") described by Mrs. John Sherwood in the previous chapter both secures her freedom and risks her disfigurement, Shelley’s irony plays for a similarly tenuous balance of irreconcilable opposites, a balance that remains closely tied to acts of veiling and unveiling, concealing and making bare. A mourning veil is itself like a visual incarnation of Schlegelian irony in its translucent blend of obscurity and openness. At first blush, irony might seem anathema to mourning, and this may in fact be the case when by "mourning" we mean a personal, internal, psychological state. But regarding mourning as a cultural display, my analysis seeks to show, to the contrary, that irony is the homeland of mourning. As I have argued previously, the great mistake of Freudian analyses of the elegy has consisted precisely in failing to make this distinction, and in expecting from the genre a kind of direct, naïve consciousness—a representation of which it is incapable and which, even in its most ancient examples, it never intended to render. Peter Sacks commits precisely this error when he characterizes Adonais’s poetic "movement" as a structure analogous to the recovery process of a grieving consciousness:

I want to make this argument about the relationship between Adonais’s irony and the homosocial problematic of Keats’s death in three parts. First, I will attempt to read the whole question of genre-as-irony by considering the elegy’s significance as a larger historical and political "event" in the reception of both Keats and Shelley. In this section I will pay close attention to Shelley’s correspondence as an indication of the ways in which the very writing of a pastoral (regardless of its content) can be understood as ironic. Second, I will focus on the question of Adonais’s internal ironies: its structures, images, and themes. Most important here will be to see how the cultural symbol of the veil is incorporated in the elegy’s verbal strategy, and comes to be transferred from a pastoral to an apocalyptic valence. Third, I will apply these first two readings of the poem’s irony to an understanding of how Urania, the mother muse, transforms in the final third of the elegy into Shelley’s speaker. By examining the transition from Urania to Shelley’s elegiac speaker, I seek to clarify the relationship between irony and Adonais’s homoerotics. In this three-part movement, I will contend that Adonais is a kind of "double flute," an instrument that can only be played ironically, that is, with opposites held in tension, and that Shelley’s "motherhood" of Keats becomes the inevitable product of his irony.

Through a reading of Shelley’s correspondence I want, in this first section, to examine the poem’s generic irony, an irony produced by the historical act of participating in the genre of elegy, as distinguished from the production of any specific generic content. At this level, the very writing of a pastoral elegy constitutes an act of political irony: by engaging in a highly traditional and conventional, but "unpopular," genre, Shelley attempts to identify himself with Keats’s Cockney politics while at the same time displaying a class-specific, rarified "taste" that is supposed to supercede and preempt any practical criticism. Pastoral allows Shelley to operate under the dual regime of martyr (he suffers from critical disdain, which links him to Keats) and connoisseur (he can appreciate a rare and refined poetic, which elevates him above Keats).

Almost without fail, critics of Adonais cite the single most famous pronouncement Shelley made about his elegy: "It is a highly wrought piece of art, perhaps better in point of composition than any thing I have written." This citation is usually offered as evidence of Shelley’s self-conscious and serious participation in genre, as an acknowledgement that the pastoral elegy since Milton had been not just a "wrought" genre but, by definition, an overwrought one. Shelley is therefore recruited as the first participant in his own straight-faced reception, as a poet enthusiastically participating in a genre which seems, for him, strangely conservative. Occasionally, Shelley’s self-judgment is used to imply that, although Adonais may be admirable "in point of composition," it is sorely lacking in other respects— that, in other words, it is a technical tour de force but an aesthetic failure. Seldom, however, do those who quote this well-known sentence from Shelley’s correspondence comment on the context in which it arises. It appears in a letter to John and Maria Gisborne, friends whose arrival in Pisa Shelley was "anxiously expect[ing]" when the letter was written on 5 June 1821. The Gisbornes did not arrive until 26 July. The first thing to note, therefore, about Shelley’s assertion of his own poem’s artistic merit is that it is framed within the larger context of disappointed anticipation. Historically, the motivation to describe his work as "highly wrought" has as much to do with the invitation of company as with participation in genre. This is important since it reveals how, from the beginning, Shelley’s elegy was instrumentalized as social performance.

One of the ways Shelley codes elegy as instrument is to extol the physically recuperative effects of authorship. Those who have reveled in the prophetic and eerily accurate concluding stanza, preferring to read Adonais as Shelley’s epitaph rather than Keats’s elegy, often ignore how frequently Shelley figures the poem as medicinal. When he mentions the elegy in his correspondence, Shelley’s health rather than his death is commonly at stake. Just prior to the famous "highly wrought" passage, Shelley issues the following complaint to the Gisbornes: "My health does not permit me to spend many hours from home. I have been engaged these last days in composing a poem on the death of Keats, which will shortly be finished; and I anticipate the pleasure of reading it to you, as some of the very few persons who will be interested in it and understand it." A few days later, writing to Claire Clairmont, Shelley makes the connection between Keats’s death and his own health even more explicit:

In this rhetorical situation, the terms "highly wrought" and "worthy" must be brought to bear on a second kind of instrumentalization: the elegy’s political implications. Of all the things Shelley tells his prospective readers about Adonais, one of the things he insists on most fervently is its unpopularity, its incompatibility with the general taste. (This makes Eliot’s characterization of him as a blackguard all the more interesting.) "It is little adapted for popularity," he writes to Charles Ollier on June 11 1821. To Thomas Love Peacock on 10 August, he apologizes, "I have sent you by the Gisbornes a copy of the Elegy on Keats. The subject, I know, will not please you; but the composition of the poetry, and the taste in which it is written, I do not think bad." Nonetheless, at the same time that he writes to some friends predicting the poem’s future unpopularity, he writes to others expressing his fervent hopes for its success. After submitting printed copies of the elegy to Ollier for publication (who never acted on the request, much to Shelley’s consternation) Shelley inquired anxiously about its chances: "pray tell me if Ollier has published Hellas and what effect was produced by Adonais. My faculties are shaken to atoms & torpid. I can write nothing, & if Adonais had no success & excited no interest what incentive can I have to write?" We note here again the pointedly physical link Shelley asserts between his poetry and his bodily health: if the composition of poetry can heal, its failure can infect. And yet through all this, he maintains a putative nonchalance about the reviews Adonais received, a constructed invulnerability of ego which, although it protests too much, nevertheless shows him to be one of Byron’s "gladiators in the arena" rather than the sacrificial Christian he had made Keats out to be: "You know I don’t think much about Rev[iews] nor of the fame they give nor of that th[ey] take away—It is absurd in any review to criticize Adonais, & still more to pretend that the verses are bad. Prometheus was never intended for more than 5 or 6 persons." It is absurd to review Adonais, Shelley maintains, because sublime poetry does not bother about critical opinion, any more than a lord bothers about his servants. It is politically important for Adonais to be received as unpopular, because this status places it beyond the jurisdiction of the same reviewers who had "killed" Keats and Endymion. And yet, even as the composition of the pastoral identifies Shelley with Keats as a brotherly martyr, it simultaneously distances him by placing Keats under the name of bad taste: "Have you seen a poem I wrote on the death of Keats, a young writer of bad taste, but wonderful powers & promise. It is called Adonais—when you pass Ollier’s you may tell him I desired you to call for one. It is perhaps the least imperfect of my pieces." Here thinly veiled false modesty blends both aspects of Shelley’s irony. In the same breath, he is Keats’s political ally and artistic superior. And yet, as late as 29 November, in a letter to Joseph Severn, Shelley is still identifying himself with Keats on the same grounds of "unpopularity":

Susan J. Wolfson has written convincingly about Shelley’s employment of unpopularity as a political tactic in the elegy, and has analyzed the complicity of Keats’s feminization with the coy courting of fame. According to Wolfson,

More importantly, however, this letter calls into question the very notion of "consumption." It is not that the elegy begins with a real Keats and then subsumes him into an ideal Adonais. Keats is never "there" to begin with, and must not appear. His real arrival on the scene would limit the potential of Shelley’s self-promotion: thus the poem never presents us with a Keats to be consumed. The result of this is a professionalized idealism which challenges aspects of both the Wolfson and Heffernan accounts of Adonais’s entry into history. Romantic irony therefore provides a conceptual framework for understanding how such a skeptical treatment of an elegiac subject could at the same time achieve such rhetorical success as an idealized apotheosis. Serious jokes and the transcendental mundane—such are the contradictions in which irony makes its abode. For this reason, critics who wish to read in Adonais a kind of dualism, platonic or otherwise, will always be disappointed, for the skepticism and idealism of the text are not binary opposites seeking synthesis, but rather a fragmentary dual-aspect monism. They are not opposed forces but two aspects of the same force. There is no need for a union, because there was never a difference. When a critic like Milton Wilson, therefore, claims that "all critics have observed [that] the transcendental side of Shelley’s Platonic dualism suddenly takes over the direction of the poem in stanza thirty-eight and remains dominant until the end," he is reproducing and disseminating the very critical problem (the problem of the elegy’s fragmentary structure and apparent lack of unity) that he purportedly wants to solve. The poem’s larger structural movements, far from being "stages" in a Hegelian synthesis, are simply alterations in aspects of its irony. Shelley’s irony, then, is not a simple ruse, not a easy confidence game in which a skeptical poet constructs an idealistic elegiac speaker. Romantic irony is not a lack of seriousness but a willful overindulgence in it. This is what makes it so patently unreadable, so impossible to identify conclusively as irony. It is represented by the rare ability self-consciously and cynically to instrumentalize Keats and at the same time to hold out a genuine faith in transcendental idealism. And, indeed, only the integrity of that exalted faith could guarantee the success of base professionalism. True believers are the only infallible con men.

Adonais’s generic irony, like that of the nineteenth-century widow’s black veil, lies in its internally projected purposes (mourning, dread, apocalypse) being so very far removed from its personal, political, and historical purposes (restoration of health, praise of a sympathetic audience, potential publication, raging against unkind reviewers). Regarding this generic irony, however, we need hardly be surprised for, as we have seen, it is endemic to pastoral elegies, which have always functioned as evasive occasions even in their classical incarnations. Let us turn then to the specific ways in which Adonais employs Romantic irony as a formal poetic device. In order to do this, I will read three exemplary ironic tendencies of the elegy: its imperative reversals, its obsession with veils and veil imagery, and the infamous religious heteronomy of stanza thirty-four. Where Adonais writ large may be said to fall under the dual regimes of professional advancement and idealistic apotheosis, so each one of these exemplars can be understood as "serious jokes," as simultaneously obeying two masters.

My first exemplar, Adonais’s constant imperative reversals, demonstrate the poem’s irony on a performative and starkly verbal level. In fact, it is difficult to justify this sort of irony as "Romantic," except as it shows the elegiac speaker’s willingness to reverse himself without the need for rational explanation. It is a means of enacting, in a much more literal display than that of Lycidas, Milton’s opening gambit, his directive to mourn always "yet once more." Repetition is a structure fundamental both to pastoral and to irony, and in self-conscious bondage to this convention the first nine stanzas of Adonais do little else but rehearse the related imperatives of weeping/calming and sleeping/waking. These contradictory imperatives are "ironic" on the most basic verbal level, by proposing A and then immediately proposing not-A. Commands to weep are blended indiscriminately with their own cancellations: "O, weep for Adonais!" (1.2); "O, weep for Adonais" (3.19); "Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed / Thy fiery tears . . ." (3.21-22); "weep again!" (4.28); "weep anew!" (5.37); "weep anew!" (6.50); "O, weep for Adonais!" (9.73). A similar indecisiveness is constructed around the issue of waking and sleeping, for both Urania and Adonais: "Wake, melancholy Mother, wake and weep!" (3.20); "let thy loud heart keep / Like his, a mute and uncomplaining sleep" (3.22-23); "Awake him not!" (7.62); "He will wake no more, oh, never more!" (8.64). Is this, by any stretch of the critical imagination, emotionally or psychologically satisfactory poetry? From the point of view of strict pragmatism, would it work as therapy or even mild consolation for someone who had actually suffered a recent loss? No, pointedly not. The stilted verbal drama of conflicting imperatives, the commands to weep and to dry tears, to wake and then to sleep, seem poised to annoy more than to "overpower with sentiment." This is the essence of Adonais’s "highly wrought" aesthetic. The elegy is not intended, at least in its opening moves, to inflame readers’ melancholy but to appeal to a taste refined to the point of linguistic luxury. Thus Shelley’s insistence that the poem would remain, like Keats, unpopular and misunderstood—beyond the grasp and above the heads of those who had committed the initial outrage of killing a promising young poet. The verbal irony of the early stanzas therefore initiates the opening salvo of a rhetorical attack with deeply political implications.

The second exemplar is figurative rather than simply verbal, and depends on a metaphorical relationship to irony rather than a performative one. As I have already argued, the widow’s mourning veil represents visual irony by creating a space for cultural power under the guise of cultural obedience; within the text of Adonais there are numerous explicit connections to the ironies of the veil. Indeed, the elegy seems obsessed with images of veiling, covering, and masking. This obsession indicates a shared heritage with the traditional conventions of pastoral—think, for instance of the "false surmise" of Milton’s swain—and yet it also serves an internal teleology which is not generic but unique to Adonais. The veils are no simple announcement of pastoral’s artificiality, but taken sequentially, maintain a narrative thread from Urania’s blindness to Shelley’s vision, and finally to an ideal apocalypse, the generically uncharacteristic bursting of boundaries with which the elegy concludes. This "path of veils" guides the reader from figures of female inadequacy to male adequacy; ironically, though, concealed under the sign of the male adequacy (what is behind "his" veil) we find only another heteronomy, a veil behind a veil. The veiling tactics of the poetry are then also closely related to the elegy’s political goals. While the whole train of mourners (including Urania) leading up to the appearance of the speaker’s "one frail Form" in stanza 31 is no doubt intended as a collective shadow of the one efficacious and legitimate mourner (Shelley), there is also a sense in which that legitimacy is withdrawn in the same moment it is proffered. The veil giveth and taketh away.

The path of veils begins early in the poem, as a description of Urania’s eyes, blurry from lethargy:

When Urania finally awakens to Adonais’s demise and speeds "out of her secret Paradise" (24.208), she performs a song of lamentation spanning four stanzas which concludes with the praise of Adonais as a kind of veil-master. The concluding stanza of the song, by explicitly comparing Adonais with the sun in an elaborate conceit, characterizes him as a source of intellectual light whose position determines the permeability of veils for lesser poetic beings:

The figure of Shelley himself, or his elegiac speaker, (it is difficult but necessary to distinguish the two) appears midway between the extremes of Urania and Adonais. The "one Frail form," who arrives as the penultimate mourner, just as Urania’s song fades into silence. He does not, like Urania, suffer a lack of vision, but neither is he, like Adonais, a master of veils: "he, as I guess, / Had gazed on Nature’s naked loveliness" (31.274-75) and yet at the same time he is described as "A Love in desolation masked;--a Power / Girt round with weakness . . ." (32.281-82). It is important to note that this is precisely the condition of the ironic widow, a voyeur capable of viewing the other’s nakedness, and whose apparent weakness actually functions as a marker of concealed strength.

Stanza 34, with its famous juxtaposition of Cain and Christ, constitutes the climax of this drama of veils, and it takes us also to the final exemplar: Shelley’s religious hegemony. This final exemplar continues to reconnect Adonais to the political concerns of generic irony; it is the tendency throughout the poem to blend religious opposites, a move which Shelley must have known would scandalize the Tory reviewers responsible for Keats’s "murder" and for mocking Adonais’s heretical author: "He is the only verseman of the day, who has dared, in a Christian country, to work out for himself the character of direct ATHEISM!" It is a stanza in which the moment of unveiling only inaugurates an even more profound mystification:

In this concluding section, I want to apply the already established understanding of Shelley’s irony to a particular problem the elegy constantly works to solve, namely, the difficulty of establishing "brotherly" homosocial relations with an elegiac object who has already been feminized to the point of sisterhood by the elegist himself. We have already discussed at length Shelley’s potential motives for gendering Keats as female; in this respect Heffernan’s account is wonderfully decisive. In the anxiety of influence which all elegies confront, Shelley needed a damsel to solidify his own male chivalric efficacy. But this in turn leaves him with a very serious problem: how should Shelley figure himself so as not to be colonized and consumed by the very feminization he originally directs at Keats/Adonais?

Let us begin to analyze this problem, and the solution Romantic irony offers to it, by recalling Celeste Schenck’s important insight about the marginalization of the feminine in the homosocial drama of male elegy: "the genre itself excludes the feminine from its perimeter except as muse, principle or attendant nymph." At first glance, nothing could seem more apropos to Shelley’s "highly wrought" pastoral elegy, for here Urania acts as all three. But the part of the problematic not considered by Schenck is the extent to which Urania must play these roles precisely because the feminine has already invaded the elegy much too dangerously. In other words, the feminine is excluded so rigorously not because the male elegist is anxious to prevent it from entering the perimeter, but because it has already been too precariously identified with the center. This complication suggests, I would argue, a crucial reason for Shelley to alter the Adonis myth upon which Adonais is based. As has been well established, Shelley modifies the original myth by casting Urania—the muse of astronomy, also understood to be a name for the goddess Venus—as a mother rather than a lover. As Carlos Baker suggests, the potential allegorical similarities between Keats’s "murder" and Adonis’s having been killed by a boar were apparently too enticing to ignore:

The answer begins to emerge, I think, in a letter written earlier the same year, on 15 February 1821, in which he announces his "greatest possible desire" to answer Peacock’s Four Ages of Poetry with his own Defense of Poetry "in honour of my mistress Urania." The double valence of "mistress"—both poetic inspiration (Shelley saw Urania not just as Keats’s muse, but as his own) and unsanctioned sexual partner—is, needless to say, both suggestive and disconcerting. If, as early as 15 February (eight days before Keats’s death in Rome), Shelley already saw himself as Adonis, had already incorporated himself into the myth in the position of the goddesses’ lover, then it is little wonder he posits Keats as a son when he comes to write the elegy. What is far more interesting, however, is that if we follow the logic of family relations within this myth, Keats is likely to be not just Urania’s son, but Shelley’s also. On this reading, the death of Adonais appears not as the result of a murderous critical attack, but rather as Shelley’s preemptive Oedipal retaliation against his own illegitimate offspring.

There are therefore at least two competing erotic economies represented in Adonais: fraternity and maternity. The first of these requires that Shelley represent himself as a fellow martyr, the second as uneasy progenitor. Romantic irony, as I have previously characterized it, stands as a solution to both problematics—not as a way to resolve or unify them, or even to balance them, but rather systematically to assert them without having to account for them as contradictory regimes. The feminization of "poor" Keats is evaded by Shelley in the final third of the elegy by the means of a maternal displacement and then, finally, by a suicidal homoerotic "marriage." The way for Shelley to maintain "manly" relations with a feminized brother is to displace Urania’s incestuous parental role onto himself, a role which he will conveniently fulfill much more successfully than did Urania herself. Through the multiplicity of irony, Shelley at once rids himself of a mistress and a sibling rival. The final third of the poem, then, which is usually taken to be an outright fracture and rejection of the pastoral conventions should instead be understood as a tactical remapping of them. Shelley is not bursting generic boundaries altogether but redrawing them to suit his peculiar need, which is always to retain primacy in both mythic economies.

The feminization of Keats/Adonais is widely acknowledged, and is easily demonstrated by referencing a few of the early stanzas. In stanza 6, for instance, Adonais is surrounded almost exclusively by female-gendered markers of loss:

In order to restore the symbolic value to Adonais which has been forfeited by his feminization, Shelley’s elegiac speaker first appropriates Urania’s parental role, dismissing her from the elegy, and then in the final stanzas of the elegy attempts to eliminate gender entirely from the symbolic economy. When the "pardlike Spirit," Shelley’s narcissistic self-portrait, first appears, it is almost immediately presented in the guise of Actaeon who, in another example of mythmaking, becomes refigured as a tortured father:

From this point, the father exacts the revenge that the mother could not (stanzas 36-38) and initiates the consolation that was beyond maternal power: "Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep— / He hath awakened from the dream of life—" (39.343-44). The feminization of the son is thus effaced by the replacement of the mother. In the closing stanzas, Shelley reinforces this regime of paternity by alluding to his real-life son, buried in the same Protestant Cemetery where Keats was laid to rest: