Adonais Quotes

“No more let life divide what death can join together.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais

“The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais

“The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.—Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled!—Rome’s azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words are weak
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais

“And in a mad trance
Strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings
We decay
Like corpses in a charnel
Fear & Grief
Convulse is & consume us
Day by day
And cold hopes swarm
Like worms within
Our living clay”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais

“And others came... Desires and Adorations,
Winged Persuasions and veil'd Destinies,
Splendours, and Glooms, and glimmering Incarnations
Of hopes and fears, and twilight Phantasies;
And Sorrow, with her family of Sighs,
And Pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam
Of her own dying smile instead of eyes,
Came in slow pomp; the moving pomp might seem
Like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais

“Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass
Stains the white radiance of Eternity”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais

“I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais

“All he had loved, and moulded into thought,
From shape, and hue, and odour, and sweet sound,
Lamented Adonais. Morning sought
Her eastern watch-tower, and her hair unbound,
Wet with the tears which should adorn the ground,
Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day;
Afar the melancholy thunder moaned,
Pale Ocean in unquiet slumber lay,
And the wild winds flew round, sobbing in their dismay.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais

“Oh, weep for Adonais—he is dead!
Wake, melancholy Mother, wake and weep!
Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed
Thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep
Like his, a mute and uncomplaining sleep;
For he is gone, where all things wise and fair
Descend—oh, dream not that the amorous Deep
Will yet restore him to the vital air;
Death feeds on his mute voice, and laughs at our despair.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais

“Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais

“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;”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais

“The leprous corpse, touch’d by this spirit tender,
Exhales itself in flowers of gentle breath;
Like incarnations of the stars, when splendour
Is chang’d to fragrance, they illumine death
And mock the merry worm that wakes beneath;
Nought we know, dies. Shall that alone which knows
Be as a sword consum’d before the sheath
By sightless lightning?—the intense atom glows
A moment, then is quench’d in a most cold repose.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais

“Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may last! ― Percy Bysshe Shelley, from “Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats,” Adonaïs: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion, etc. (1821)”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais

“Siamo noi che,
perduti in tempestose visioni,
conduciamo una vana lotta contro gli spettri,
e in una folle trance con il coltello dello spirito
colpiamo, invulnerabili, nulla.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais