In three to four pages, discuss religion in five of the following poems: Prometheus, All Is Vanity, Saieth the Preacher, Ode on a Grecian Urn, The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone!, To A Skylark, Adonais.

John Keats died at twenty five, which is older than most people live to be. Even mundanes, in his time period. When people say he died young they mostly mean that he created works that would remind people of his existence, and then died; if you die before you make such works, then the fact you died young is notable to no one but your parents. If you live a long time then people figure they got most of the value out of you. John Keats lived long enough for people to know what they missed, and then he died. He reportedly wanted it written on his tombstone ' Here lies One / Whose Name was writ in Water'. It's a reference to Catullus, which for obvious reasons I haven't read in the original but the student I solicited a translation from gave it as 'what a woman says to a lover should be written in the wind and the running water'. In other words, it's nothing; you can't rely on it; it's not there. Almost every name is more written in water than John Keats's, but most people aren't poets, and can't think of saying that about it. 

We are supposed to analyze the poems, not the people, but Adonais is a poem about the death of John Keats. And anyway, I don't see how you can say anything about religion in poetry without knowing what the poet thought would happen to you when you die. It would be like analyzing the story of Icarus without knowing about gravity. You have to know that it was notable that Icarus flew, and not notable at all that he eventually crashed to the ground. I don't think John Keats thought he was going to an afterlife. The references in his poems are to the mythology of Greece, which people of his time period did not believe were true, and not to the mythology of Christianity, which many of them did believe. 

Percy Bysshe Shelley, who wrote Adonais, was an atheist even though this was illegal, there's a note about it in the textbook. You would have to feel incredibly strongly about being an atheist to be one when it was literally against the law, and could ruin your life, which, being an atheist, you are pretty sure is the only one you get. There are a lot of religious references in Adonais but this context seems fairly important to interpreting them. 

"

With me 

       Died Adonais; till the Future dares 

       Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be 

An echo and a light unto eternity!", ends the poem's first verse, and that's approximately its thesis statement: the dead live on only in the sense that, if they happen to be John Keats, and have written a lot of really beautiful poetry, then people will remember them.