“Ode on Melancholy”: Melancholy’s
Pleasure
Introduction
In
this paper I am going to analyze the poem “Ode on Melancholy” whose author was
John Keats. This poet belongs to the Romanticism, which is a movement that
appeared in the late eighteenth century, in which the feelings and the
individual are very important. I chose this author because I think he is very
representative of this movement.
As
follows I enclose the poem:
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,
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.
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;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her
rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
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:
Ay, in the very
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran
shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall
taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
Structure and analysis
This poem
is an ode, the characteristics of this kind of poems, according to
http://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/3577.html, are: serious tone, very precise
formal structure, very detailed language and dignified style to express lofty
emotions.
It has only three
stanzas and each one has ten verses. As I read in http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/keats/section5.rhtml,
the meter used by the poet is the iambic pentameter which is used in a more
or less precise way. The rhyme scheme of the first and the second stanza is
ABABCDECDE, while in the third stanza the scheme is a little different:
ABABCDEDCE. Its structure is argumentative because the author is giving reasons
to justify what he is saying. According
to the information I found in http://www.123helpme.com/assets/13765.html
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” is considered to be confusing because of the subject,
due to the ideas he is using through the poem which have relation between them:
delight and sadness. The main idea
is that we, as human being, cannot escape from the pain, always understood in
this poem as psychological suffering not physical, but what we can do is to try
to enjoy this kind of suffering he is talking about: the Melancholy.
Besides,
basing myself on http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/melancholy.html, its structure is progressive. The
author begins the poem with many negative particles, in the first verse of the
first stanza he says: No, no, go not to
Lethe, neither twist because in the introduction he is showing his
rejection to those who look for something to calm his pain, also the verses
three and six begin with the word Nor,
the poet get reinforce his ideas using this words. The poet is warning about
what we should not do to avoid the pain: use poisonous wine neither go to Lethe,
which is a river of Hades and who drank from it will forgive everything, so the
poet is saying that we don’t have to forget the sadness; Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd By
nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine; in other words, commit suicide, the
author makes reference to Proserpine who, in Greek mythology, was the
underworld’s queen.
In the
second stanza the author is saying what to do if the Melancholy arrives using
the metaphor of a weeping cloud to
express the effect of the melancholy on the human beings. If the melancholy
traps you, says the author, then to fight against the sadness you have to
console yourself with the Beauty: the beauty of the rainbow, the beauty of the
flowers (peonies and morning roses) and the beauty of your beloved’s eyes. It
is paradoxical the way he uses negative symbols like weeping cloud and positive symbols like morning rose, rainbow and peonies, but what he is showing is that
these beautiful things need the help of these negative things, the weeping
cloud, so the negative becomes positive, the flower needs the water of the rain
to grow. Also this contrast between positive and negative things is useful for
the author to show that we need these negative aspects to appreciate profoundly
the positive aspects. It is also interesting that the author is talking about
things which are both fleeting and beautiful: the rainbow of the wave, the
morning-rose… So, summarizing John Keats
in this stanza is that we should enjoy the beauty that surrounds us because it
will eventually end.
In the
third stanza the author starts saying: She
dwells with Beauty - Beauty that must die. In my opinion this statement is
very important because John Keats was very concerned with beauty, and he is
again saying that this Beauty is ephemeral. The poet uses the pronoun She to refer to the mistress of the
anterior stanza but also to refer to Melancholy because the Melancholy is
beautiful for the author. In this stanza
we can see again the paradox Ay, in the
very temple of Delight Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine, The Melancholy has his shrine in the
temple of Delight, but it is veil’d because when we
are happy, when we are not melancholic we can’t see it and we think we will be
happy forever. In this stanza the author uses two figures of speech, firstly
when he says aching Pleasure, he is
using an oxymoron, in other words, he is combining two opposite concepts in an
only expression, and the other is a synaesthesia when
he says His soul shall taste the sadness
of her might.
So, in
conclusion, in accordance with the information I have studied and what I
understand when I read this poem, the author is putting on the same level the
sadness and the joy, saying that they are inseparable, and we should not avoid
pain but find the intermediate point where we can enjoy both.
Context and
importance of the poem
He
wrote this poem during the spring and summer of 1819, when the author was 24
years old, this period is considered to be one of his most productive periods and
when he produced one of his finest poetry, Keats scholars call it the Great
Year and the Living Year. There are several events that should have influenced
this amount of production, one of the events is the death of one of his
brothers called Tom, another is his meeting of Fanny Brawne,
a young girl with whom John Keats fell passionately in love, and another event
is the critical reviews on his work Edimon.
In
this period wrote some famous odes: “Ode to Psyche”, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode
on Melancholy and To Autumn. As I read on the webpage http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/keats/section5.rhtml, the Ode I am working with is
different from the rest because of its style and because it is not written in
first person. The author uses the imperative mode to give advice to those who
suffer of melancholy. I read that the language used by the poet is a synthesis
of the language of his preceding odes.
In the
other odes John Keats’s attitude is contemplative, as we can see for example in
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” where he is gazing at an urn and his attitude is
absolutely passive, he is only asking questions about it and describing what he
sees. In “Ode on Melancholy” the poem’s creator is encouraging the reader to
react against the Melancholy and he tells what is advisable to do and what is
not.
What all his odes
have in common, in accordance with http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761567089/Keats_John.html,
is the beginning where the author focus his attention on an specific subject,
in the ode I am analysing is the Melancholy, in Ode on a Grecian Urn it is the
Urn, in Ode to a Nightingale is a nightingale, etc. Also this ode has special
similarity with “To Autumn” because it seems that in these two odes is
noticeable that there is a change in the author ideas about life and art. These
odes are different as well, according to http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0827261.html, each one differs from the other in “dignity, melody, and
richness of sensuous imagery.” But “all of his poetry is filled with a
mysterious and elevating sense of beauty and joy.”
In order
to finish this topic I would like to say that I think that this poem is very
important for this author but also for all the Romantic artists because it
talks about the pleasure that people can find in this psychological pain. The
reason why I’m saying this is because the romantic artists are characterized by
their state of constant suffering, in fact many romantics needed to be
melancholic or sad to get inspired, when they are gloomy is when they get
exalted.
Another
reason why I think this poem is so important and so representative of the
Romanticism generally, and for John Keats specifically, is the mention of
nature, beauty and the ephemeral. They were very concerned with nature, as
something which is very dangerous but that captivate them because of its
beauty, the beauty of the nature, which is different from the beauty of the
human beings, this beauty is so insignificant in relation with the beauty of
the nature, because the nature will last forever, is the eternity, while the
beauty of a man or a woman will die She
dwells with Beauty - Beauty that must die. Besides, nature can change
depending on the mood of the author, it can be cloudy and stormy, or it can be
calm and melancholic, etc
In
addition there is another characteristic of the Romanticism; it is the mention
of mythological concepts. The romantic scholars became interested in the myths,
that is why we can find so much allusions in Romantic poetry to mythological
concepts. In this poem we can find: Lethe,
Proserpine, Pshyche.
Importance of the poem nowadays
The Melancholy is a topic very important nowadays, there are a lot of
music, films, novels… dealing whit it, and this is in this way because we are
still influenced by the romantics. I think that there are many people who enjoy
this state of melancholy as well as the romantics.
When I first read this poem and thought about it I remembered a quote
which says: Don't cry when the sun is gone because the tears won't let you see the
stars, I think this quote
belong to an Indian writer called Rabindranath Tagore. I find it interesting that, although it was written
some years ago, many people likes this quote very much, and in my opinion the
topic is the same of “Ode on Melancholy”. This quote is saying that you should
not cry, you should not let the sadness win, because you will waste a lot of
time and a lot of beautiful things if you don’t know how to enjoy the sadness.
These are the reasons why I think this poem is
very representative of its time but, at the same time, it is very representative
of our time, I’m sure that is this author were more popular he would have many
more followers because nowadays people can identify themselves with him.
Webgraphy:
Ode on Melancholy 15 Nov 2007<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/melancholy.html>
Keat’s Odes 16 Nov 2007 < http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/keats/section5.rhtml
>
Ode on Melancholy 15 Nov 2007 < http://englishhistory.net/keats/poetry/odeonmelancholy.html
>
Literature Annotations 15 Nov 2007 < http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/Annotation?action=view&annid=270
>
A STUDY OF JOHN KEATS'S ODES
16 Nov 2007<http://www.cc.mie-u.ac.jp/~lq20106/eg5000/master2006-5.html
>
Free Essays brought to you by 123HelpMe.com 15 Nov 2007 <http://www.123helpme.com/assets/13765.html>
"John
Keats," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia
2007. http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2007 Microsoft
Corporation. All Rights Reserved < http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761567089/Keats_John.html
>
The
Members of Ms. Watterson's Section Discussion Questions about the Poetry of Keats and Shelley 15 Nov 2007
< http://victorian.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/victorianweb/previctorian/keats/lqcw.html
>
C. D. Merriman John Keats 17 Nov 2007 < http://www.online-literature.com/keats/ >