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‘To the Moon’.

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth, And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?

We think this little poem is a homage to, or recasting of, a sonnet by the Elizabethan poet Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86), who wrote a famous poem addressed to the moon. In Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, Sidney’s alter ego asks the moon if it has such a pale appearance because it is sick with unrequited love. It takes the form of a fragment, in which Shelley addresses or apostrophises the moon and asks why it is so pale (much as Sidney does in his poem).

10. ‘Adonaïs’.

I weep for Adonais—he is dead!

Oh, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head! And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years
To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers, 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!’

Shelley wrote this poem in 1821 as an elegy on the death of his friend and fellow Romantic poet, John Keats, who had died in Rome of tuberculosis, aged just 25. The poem is a pastoral elegy in the vein of John Milton’s Lycidas, and uses the nine-line stanza form known as the Spenserian stanza, borrowed from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Just over a year later, Shelley himself would be dead – when he drowned, he had a volume of Keats’s poems with him⁹.

⁹ The Oxford Companion to English Literature. (1996), p. 781..