Shelley's "Dome of Many-Coloured Glass"

Abstract

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity ..." Of these lines in Shelley's Adonais W. M. Rossetti wrote in 1891: "Perhaps a more daring metaphorical symbol than this has never been employed by any poet, nor one that has a deeper and more spacious meaning." More recent scholars have explored the imagery of the poem, overturning the earlier opinion of the poem as "altogether unconnected, interjectional and nonsensical" and observing instead how suggestively integrated this striking image and other passages are-in fact, how they often echo and develop themes present throughout Shelley's work. Our purpose is to suggest that the above lines have a further meaning and significance that have not been noted before.