Shelley wrote this elegy for John Keats, who died in Rome at twenty-five, and the poem is both mourning and defiance, declaring Keats immortal among the stars. The Spenserian stanzas build toward transcendence: the One remains, the many change and pass. Shelley was thirty, he would drown the following year, and the poem prefigures his own death. The attack on the critics who, Shelley believed, killed Keats with their reviews is savage. The beauty is unearthly. He is made one with Nature: the line has comforted mourners for two centuries. The grief is real. The consolation may be.