Ode on Melancholy Flashcards
(17 cards)
1
Q
Context
A
“Ode on Melancholy” was written by the British Romantic poet John Keats. It is one of the five odes Keats composed in 1819, which are considered to be among his best work. Essentially the poem is about how to deal—and how not to deal—with deep sadness. The speaker comes across as a kind of advisor who warns against turning to intoxication or death for relief from melancholy. Instead, the speaker agues that melancholy should be embraced. The poem also establishes a link between the good things in life and melancholy. Because anything good is doomed to end, the poem suggests that all beauty is suffused with a kind of poignant sadness.
2
Q
Melancholy, beauty, and impermanence
A
- John Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy” is a rich and complex poem that offers a way of responding to deep despair. Put simply, it encourages people to embrace sadness, not by seeking to end or soften it, but by living within it—that is, by actively acknowledging its presence. People ought to embrace “melancholy” because, even though it brings “sorrow,” it’s also a fundamental part of beauty, joy, and pleasure. Furthermore, the poem argues, the highest forms of beauty are actually made beautiful by the fact that they cannot last—and it’s for this reason, the poem suggests, that melancholy, beauty, and time are so deeply intertwined.
- The poem is almost like an early precursor to self-help literature, suggesting what to do and not to do when someone is feeling really down. To that end, the first stanza acts as a kind of warning, outlining different ways that people might respond to melancholy. These include self-poisoning and drinking from the ancient river of Lethe (which causes the drinker to forget whatever is troubling them). If people try to numb or end their “anguish,” the poem argues, they won’t make the most of their melancholy—they won’t be able to see its close relationship with beauty at first hand. Instead, they just will be overwhelmed by their sadness.
- In the poem, beauty and melancholy are thus linked by their impermanence. “Beauty […] must die,” just as “Joy” is always bidding the joyful person “adieu” (goodbye). And though people can experience pleasure, it’s always metaphorically in the process of “turning to poison”—because time will eventually bring about its end. Inherent to beauty, the poem thus argues, is a sense of poignant sadness given the knowledge that beauty will one day be gone.
- For that reason, then, “Melancholy” is like a kind of goddess who rules over the “temple of Delight.” Zooming out on this idea, the poem is essentially saying that nothing good can last forever. This in turn makes anything good in life full of sadness before it’s even over—but the best response to this sad fact, agues the poem, is simply to embrace it. Indeed, that’s why the poem’s ending praises those people who “can burst Joy’s grape against [their] palate fine.” Someone like that accepts that beauty and melancholy “dwell” together, and “bursts” this metaphorical grape—a stand-in for all the good things in life—in full knowledge that doing so will eventually bring about a time when “Joy” will be gone. This is actually a pretty practical response in a world not built to last, and with a life that has death as its only real certainty.
- Ultimately, then, “Ode on Melancholy” uncovers an intimate connection between melancholy, beauty, and the passing of time. If beautiful things could last forever, the poem seems to say, then they wouldn’t be suffused with such sadness. But, of course, nothing can last—and thereby the more beautiful something is (and beauty can stand for joy, pleasure, and general happiness) the more that melancholy “dwells” within it.
3
Q
Intoxication v Nature
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- One way to interpret “Ode on Melancholy” is as a warning against a certain kind of self-destructive intoxication. Though it’s not overtly laid out as such, the poem implicitly argues that the natural world has more to offer people—even if they are melancholy—than does the world of drugs and alcohol. Indeed, it was around the time of this poem’s composition that Keats wrote in a letter that he hoped to maintain “a peaceable and healthy spirit”—and perhaps this is at the root of the poem’s apparent preference for the natural world over intoxication.
- The beauty of the language in this stanza seems to speak to the temptation of such substances, and how people can be seduced by the promised comfort of intoxication. In other words, it’s understandable that people react to melancholy through a kind of harmful self-medication—but that’s not the way the speaker thinks they should respond.
4
Q
No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
A
- The poem opens by giving its addressee various instructions about things not to do. And, right of the bat, the speaker is emphatic—repeating “no” twice (technically something called epizeuxis) followed by “go not,” just in case the listener isn’t sure how serious the speaker takes this!
- It’s worth noting early on that the addressee of the poem is never made clear. The poem originally had another stanza at the start, which focused on a hero-figure questing to find the goddess Melancholy—this may explain the starting point for this instructive tone. But, of course, that stanza was deleted, so the poem could be interpreted as addressed to some unknown recipient, to the reader, to anyone who has ever experienced melancholy—or to some combination of all of these.
- The poem’s first instruction, then, is that this melancholic person should not go “to Lethe.” This is an allusion to a river in the mythological Greek underworld. According to myth, drinking from this river will cause someone to forget everything and enter a kind of state of oblivion. The speaker, then, is cautioning against reckless, self-destructive oblivion. Though the point is not made till later in the stanza, this is because the speaker views the melancholic state—the “wakeful anguish of the soul”—as something to be embraced, rather than drunk or drugged away.
5
Q
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.
A
- Firstly, and most generally, they are all winged creatures. To put it metaphorically, the poem argues that a melancholic person should remain grounded in their melancholic world—they should embrace their feelings and, as stanza two suggests, pursue the earthly beauties of the natural world—rather than take intoxicants in order to escape—to fly away from—their melancholic feeling. The beetle has also long been associated with death, even as far back as the Ancient Egyptians (who considered scarabs, or dung beetles, sacred). The death-moth is a moth with a skull pattern on its back, and the “downy owl” carries with it connotations of midnight and the supernatural. Basically, then, the speaker is urging the listener no to focus on or wallow in symbols of death.
- These three lines are full of beautiful sounds, however, which is part of the way that the first stanza builds a picture of the seduction of intoxication and/or the overindulgence of melancholy (there is a key difference in the poem between embracing melancholy and people letting it get the better of them). The sounds are luxurious, enticing, and, in their own way, indulgent:
- The allusion to Psyche is important here. Psyche has two meanings, one more familiar to contemporary readers than the other. Keats is, in part, talking about psychology, warning the addressee of the poem not to wed themselves—psychologically speaking—with the “death-moth,” which is a kind of stand-in for the desire for death and self-destruction. But Psyche is also a figure from Greek mythology associated with love and beauty (in fact, she is the lover of Cupid—who in myth is the son of the goddess Venus, not a cherubic, arrow-toting baby). Psyche is often depicted as having butterfly wings, hence the association with the moth here
6
Q
But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
A
- If the first stanza read as a list of ways not to respond to melancholy, the second stanza starts to offer more active suggestions of what people should do. But before it does so, the first four lines build a picture of the arrival of a melancholic mood. This is characterized as a “fit,” a kind of mood that overpowers an individual. Melancholy is presented as something external to an individual that imposes itself upon that individual, and in this case it is likened through simile to a falling rain.
- This starts to build an association between melancholy, nature, and beauty. “Heaven” here doesn’t just mean the sky, but also carries with it positive connotations, as if this melancholy rain is a blessing sent from heaven. It’s worth noting how enjambment creates a little “fall” between the two lines, the reader’s eyes having to fall to the next line in order to complete the sense of the phrase.
- Personification here characterizes rainwater as a kind of caring, motherly figure “foster[ing} the droop-headed flowers.” Just as rain keeps the beautiful flowers alive, so too does melancholy keep beauty alive.
- April is also personified. Its “shroud” can be interpreted as both a mournful garment and as a kind of protection, suggesting there’s a beneficial side to melancholy. These first four lines, then, start to build a positive case for melancholy, the speaker attempting to show both how and why people should embrace this kind of mood.
7
Q
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
A
The melancholic person should “glut” their “sorrow on a morning rose.” “[M]orning” here implies the rose’s beauty cannot last, that it will have withered by evening (with a possible pun on mourning as well). “Glut” is an interesting verb here (it means it “to consume in excess”), and applies to the rose and to the natural imagery of the following two lines. In other words, melancholy feeds on beauty, like a feast. The speaker urges the reader to deliberately indulge in beauty—particularly natural beauty—as a way of embracing melancholy. Indeed, because natural beauty can’t last forever (since everything eventually dies), that beauty itself is a kind of melancholy.
8
Q
She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
A
- The third and final stanza aims to bring the previous two together, balancing the melancholic pleasures of the second stanza with the first’s focus on poison, intoxication, and impermanence.
- The combination of caesura and epizeuxis in this line (“Beauty” is repeated on either side of the em-dash) is deliberately abrupt, interrupting the pretty first half of the line with the stark fact that beauty “must die.”
- More specifically, the speaker says that Melancholy “dwells with” three things: “Beauty that must die”; “Joy” that is always saying goodbye because it cannot last; and “Pleasure,” which is a kind of “poison” because, again, it’s only temporary. These three traits—Beauty, Joy, and Pleasure—are also personified, most prominently in the figure of Joy “whose hand is ever at his lips,” wishing farewell to those that experience that joy.
- Essentially, the speaker argues that the most melancholic experiences are those that, on the surface, seem the most desirable and positive. Yet, beginning in the second stanza, the speaker suggests that a melancholic person should actively pursue such experiences as a way of embracing, rather than defeating, melancholy. All good things, in other words, are sad because they cannot last—yet that impermanence gives them a beauty that is worth pursuing.
- It’s also interesting to note that the word “adieu”—a French word for goodbye—appears in all but one of Keats’s six odes, including this one. To say goodbye, of course, is to signal an ending of sorts, and this shows how intently Keats focuses on time and impermanence throughout these poems. Anything good, for Keats, is always tempered by the inevitability of its ending.
9
Q
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
A
- Beginning with the affirmative “Ay,” lines 25 and 26 explain that “Veil’d Melancholy” (again personified) lives in the “very temple of Delight.” Delight here can be taken as a kind of catch-all term for anything good about life, encompassing beauty, joy, and pleasure. The “temple” implies that Delight deserves worship, almost like a god. Not only does Melancholy live in this temple, but she actually rules over it too. Melancholy is like a kind of Queen, the “sovran” (sovereign) of all life’s beauty, pleasure, and joy—she rules over these because they cannot last and so are cast in sadness. The enjambment between the two lines creates a short moment of dramatic tension, as the reader waits to find out just who or what resides in the “temple of Delight.”
- Lines 27 and 28 make a complicated but important point that expands on the relationship between “Delight” and melancholy. “Veil’d Melancholy,” whose veil suggests a kind of hiddenness, can only be seen by a particular type of melancholic person (here portrayed as male, though there is no real reason why). Only those who “burst Joy’s grape” against the roof of their mouth can see (or “taste”) the melancholy that is at the heart of all beauty and joy. For it is in bursting the “grape” that the eater brings about its end. In doing so, these people know beauty more intimately and, crucially, embrace their melancholy more fully.
10
Q
Intoxicants and poison
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- In “Ode on Melancholy,” poisons and intoxicants—things like alcohol and drugs—symbolize an attempt to escape melancholy by dulling the mind and giving up on life. The first five lines of the poem present different substances that melancholic people might be drawn towards. These intoxicants are: the waters of Lethe (a mythical Greek river which causes the drinker to forget), wolf’s-bane (poisonous), nightshade (also poisonous), Proserpine’s wine (the wine of the underworld), and yew-berries (again poisonous). Though ingesting these, the poem argues, melancholic people think they might find some relief from their despair.
- But these substances, for the speaker, represent the wrong way to respond to melancholy, because they bring “shade to shade” (line 9)—they make life darker. Instead, paradoxically, the melancholic individual should aim to see melancholy more clearly. All of these intoxicants are tempting, and the poem uses beautifully constructed phrases to signal their allure. Ultimately, though, the speaker cautions against them all strongly. Of course, the speaker isn’t warning against these things specifically, but against the general principle of responding to melancholy through intoxication or suicide. Instead, the speaker wants to remain in “wakeful anguish.”
11
Q
Insects and animals
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- In lines 6-8, the speaker implores the reader not to partner up with beetles, death-moths, or downy owls. These animals symbolize death, or an unhelpful preoccupation with death. Each of these creatures has close ties with death, and accordingly the speaker is attempting to say that death is not a good response to melancholy (though it might be tempting).
- The beetle most likely relates to ancient Egyptian mythology. A type of beetle called a scarab was a popular symbol in ancient Egypt, particularly in the form of amulets. European poets often associated ancient Egypt with death and the afterlife, due to the Egyptian practice of mummification and related beliefs about the afterlife. So, the beetle here can be interpreted as symbolizing death, particularly with mythological overtones.
- The death-moth is probably based on the death’s-head hawkmoth, a large moth which has a skull-like figure on its back. Similarly, the owl is associated with the nocturnal and supernatural world. Taken all together, these animals become somewhat supernatural symbols of death. The speaker warns not to let these animals become one’s “Psyche”—not to let a desire for death to define one’s inner self.
12
Q
Nature
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- In the second stanza, nature symbolizes the connection between beauty and melancholy. Though the first stanza does discuss nature, it specifically focuses on intoxicants and death. The second stanza presents nature in a different way, looking at how it can help people who are very sad. Indeed, this stanza sees nature as somewhat representative of melancholy itself, in the sense that nature’s beauty is inseparable from a cycle of life and death.
- In other words, the beauty of nature is impermanent—it doesn’t last forever, which imbues it with a sense of melancholy; at the same time, though, this impermanence is part of what makes nature so lovely in the first place, part of what encourages people’s appreciation of it.
- Note how rain nourishes flowers in the way that melancholy nourishes beauty. The nourishing rain cloud is described as “weeping.” Tears, after all, can be a response both to sadness and to something beautiful. In this way, “weeping” and beauty can help make sense of melancholy (or, at least, make it feel less painful). Roses, rainbows, and peonies are all presented as natural beauties that can aid the melancholic individual in embracing—and making the most of—their mood. Flowers wilt, rainbows fade; built into their beauty is a sense of sadness at their inevitable departure. In a sense, then, nature is a reminder that without melancholy, beauty would not exist.
13
Q
Form
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- In its original form, the ode was often celebratory; this ode is markedly different in tone, however. Likewise, Keats’s poem does not fit into the more traditional formats originally established for odes (associated with the ancient poets Homer and Pindar). Keats developed his ode form because he felt that the other established forms did not quite fit what he wanted his poems to do.
- The poem has a fairly clear progression from start to finish. The first stanza outlines things that the melancholic individual should not do as a response to their state of mind (e.g. intoxication and death). The second offers more positive advice as to what can be done: embrace melancholy by perceiving it in the beauty of nature and life. The third stanza strives to make sense of the previous two, arguing that all that’s best about life is suffused with melancholy precisely because it cannot last.
14
Q
Meter
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As with Keats’s other odes, “Ode on Melancholy” is written in iambic pentameter. This is a line with five poetic feet, each comprised of a da DUM (unstressed-stressed) syllabic pattern. A good example of this would be line 15:
Then glut | thy sor- | row on | a mor- | ning rose,
There are numerous variations to this metrical scheme spread throughout the poem, some more significant than others. The first two lines, for example, are actually quite irregular, starting the poem on a tense footing (no pun intended):
No, no, | go not | to Leth- | e, nei- | ther twist
Wolf’s-bane, | tight-root- | ed, for | its poi- | sonous wine;
The lines have a kind of gnarled and difficult quality to them, suggesting the troubles of a melancholic mind. As is often the case with Keats’s verse, this is not the only way of scanning these lines, though it is perhaps the most intuitive.
15
Q
Rhyme Scheme
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“Ode on Melancholy” is a formally organized poem that uses metrical and rhyming patterns. The first stanza is rhymed:
ABABCDEDCE
Generally speaking, the elaborateness of the rhyming pattern helps make the poem sound beautiful. This isn’t just done for the sake of sounding nice, however—beauty is at the heart of the poem’s subject matter, particularly in the relationship between beauty and melancholy. In the first stanza, the rhymes are part of the sound of intoxication—which the speaker warns against. In the second, they are part of the overall picture of nature’s beauty. And in the third, they help demonstrate the close relationship between the two.
16
Q
Literary context
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- “Ode on Melancholy” has a couple of specific literary influences to consider. The first of these was one of Keats’s favorite and most reread books: Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. This was first published in 1621 and was marketed as a kind of medical textbook on the subject of melancholy (which is a kind of catch-all term for different types of sadness and negative feeling). Burton himself had a wide-ranging definition of melancholy:
we call [those people] melancholy, that [are] dull, sad, sour, lumpish, ill-disposed, solitary, any way moved, or displeased.
- According to Burton, no one alive was immune to such feelings. Crucially, he linked these feelings to mortality—and this relationship between melancholy and impermanence is key to Keats’s poem.
- Classical mythology is also an important part of the literary context of this poem. The first stanza makes three allusions to Greek/Roman myth: Lethe, Proserpine, and Psyche. This helps ground the poem in a kind of timelessness, as if Keats’s argument applies to all of human history, not just to Keats’s time period. Mythology also informs the personifications in the final stanza—of Beauty, Joy, Pleasure, Delight, and, most importantly, Melancholy. These figures are depicted almost like gods. Indeed, Melancholy even has a shrine in the “Temple of Delight.”
17
Q
Historical context
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- Keats wrote this poem not long after the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution in 1789, which facilitated Napoleon’s rise to power. The early 19th century can be considered a period during which people rethought the way that individuals relate to society. The influential poet/critic William Wordsworth was particularly interested in the idea of civil liberties, though he became more conservative as he grew older.
- Keats certainly had more than his fair share of bad luck during his lifetime, partly informing his focus on melancholy and—in particular—the impermanence of life and beauty. He had already lost both parents and an infant brother, and would himself be dead from tuberculosis within a couple of years of writing this poem. He also struggled financially throughout his life, and was frequently the subject of scorn from the literary establishment.
- Indeed, the odes were written during a period when Keats thought he would soon be ceasing his writing life. Having borrowed money from his brother, George, and now unable to return the favor, Keats intended to get more financially stable work and give up poetry—but not before writing a few more poems, which turned out to be some of the best written in the English language.
