He has outsoared the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight
Can touch him not and torture not again;
From the contagion of the world’s slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain.

These lines come from Shelley’s elegy “Adonais” (1821), written in Italy in response to the death of the poet John Keats in February 1821. Shelley, who admired Keats’s talent and felt outraged by what he believed were hostile critical attacks on him, casts Keats under the pastoral-heroic name “Adonais” and stages a public lament that becomes a meditation on fame, suffering, and the soul’s release from mortal life. The quoted stanza occurs in the poem’s movement from grief toward consolation, where death is reimagined not as defeat but as escape from the world’s corrosions and the pains of consciousness.

Shelley portrays the dead poet as having risen beyond the “shadow” of earthly existence—beyond envy, slander, hatred, physical pain, and even the restless pursuit of pleasures that people mistakenly call “delight.” The passage reframes death as a kind of invulnerability: the departed is no longer subject to the world’s “slow stain,” the gradual moral and emotional wearing-down that turns hearts cold and hair gray “in vain.” In the elegy’s larger argument, this is not mere consolation but a Romantic metaphysics: the spirit, freed from social malice and bodily decay, enters a purer realm where the world’s injuries cannot reach it.