ADONAIS by Shelley)The Ode to the West Wind\nHe was a morning star amongst the living;\nNow that his spirit is fled;\nHe shines in the heavens \nlike the evening star\nHe gives new splendour to the dead.\n\nHe hath awakened from the dream of life\nHe hath outsoared the shadow of our night;\nThe soul of Adonais, burning likea star\nBeacons from the abode where the eternal are.\n\n(The spring does not rebel against the winter - it succeeds it;\nThe dawn does not rebel against the night - it disperses it.)\n\nThe One remains, the many change and pass\nLife, like a dome of many coloured glass,\nStains the white radiance of Eternity.\n\nO wind if winter comes can spring be far behind?\nCan Spring be far behind?\nO wind if winter comes can spring be far behind?\nCan Spring be far behind? \nO wind if winter comes can spring be far behind?\nCan Spring be far behind?\n\nThis song may be the first time that Plato (in verse 1) has ever been put to a backbeat ! It\'s sung by Ruth Murray, representing Mary Shelley paying tribute to her lost husband.\n\nTwo epigrams of Plato survive, evidence perhaps of an early desire to be a poet/playwright. His evident failure to succeed may have been why, in book 10 of The Republic, he proposed banishing poets from his ideal state ! His epigram is a soulful tribute to a lost friend, Stella, who \'gives new splendour to the dead\'.\n\nThe second verse, from Adonais, plays on the old philosophical notion that perhaps this life is nothing but a dream. The opening lines of Stanza 40 of Adonais are followed by the two final lines of the poem. Adonais often comes to mind when the young and gifted suffer an untimely death; examples could include Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones (Mick Jagger read pieces from Adonais at the concert in Hyde Park), River Phoenix, Kirsty MacColl, Stephen Lawrence, or JohnLennon. You could see Lennon in Shelleyan terms as an \'unacknowledged legislator\' who now \'shines in the heavens like the evening star\'. \n\nIn his poem A Terre (Being the Philosophy of many soldiers) Wilfred Owen referred to Adonais (see stanza 42):\n\n\'I shall be one with nature, herb and stone\', Shelley would tell me. Shelley would be stunned: The dullest Tommy hugs that fancy now. \'Pushing up the daisies is their creed, you know\'.\n\nSo Shelley\'s lyrics on death match today\'s largely agnostic attitudes on the existence of the afterlife. What can continue after death though is inspiration and strength for those who remain.\n\nThe spoken fragment comes from Shelley\'s notebook from Lerici, and is significant in that it repeats the central idea from the Ode to the West Wind. In other words the grim vision from The Triumph of Life, written at the same time as the fragment, is not (as some say) afinal descent into pessimism on Shelley\'s part, but part of a longer work in which sources for hope in a secular world would have been explored.\n\nThe third verse is a reprise of the platonic verse from Paradise of exiles, and the final chorus is from the last line of the Ode to the West wind. It brings out the link between the Ode to the West Wind and Adonais: at the beginning of the final stanza Shelley wrote \'The breath whose might I have invoked in song/ Descends on me ....\'\n-- a reference back to the west wind in Florence.\n\nShelley called death \'the great mystery\' and once apparently, suggested to Jane Williams, when they were in a little dinghy off the beach in Lerici, that they \'solve the great mystery together\'. She replied \'no thank you I\'d like my dinner first\'! adonai, BEAT, BRIAN, CLUB, FUNERAL, hide, hyde, JONES, park, poem, ROLLING, shelley, STONES