Ode On Melancholy Flashcards
What is this poem about
-how + not to deal with deep sadness
-speaker advisor who warns against turning to toxication or death for relief from melancholy + should embrace it instead
-poem est link good things in life + melancholy — anything good doomed end
-all beauty suffused with poignant sadness
-Keats addresses reader a sufferer of melancholy + tells not worry
-beauty + pain intertwined
What is the form + structure
-3 stanzas 10 lines each
-iambic pentameter — emph suddenness of melancholic mood as first syllable stressed + mimic heartbeat
What is the rhyme scheme
-alternating rhyme scheme
-ABAB CDE CDE — stanza 1 + 2 describing reactions to melancholy so rhyme uniform
-ABAB CDE DEE — stanza 3 more philosophical so own rhyme
-shift from initial advice given to conclusions drawn
Main themes?
-transience of joy + desire
-sadness is inevitable accompaniment of human passion + happiness
‘No, no, go not” S1
-desperation of speaker — trying stop reader going into despair
-immediate use imperative negatives — est melancholic mood throughout + drive advisory sense directly speaking to reader
-second ‘no’ stressed syllable emph urgency of speaker
“Wolfs-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine’ S1
-natural + gothic imagery juxtaposed
-nature beautiful + bright but also can bring death + harm
-reflects how life full of happiness + all of sudden tragic — like Keats’
-‘death-moth’ — macabre + natural imagery of death saying okay be in seasonal depression + seasonal joy
“From shade to shade will come too drowsily’ S1
-elongated vowels — drawn out drowsiness sense of own sadness coming through to impress upon reader how speaker empathises
‘But when melancholy fit shall fall//Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud’ S2
-Volta ‘but’ — speaker still acknowledges melancholy inevitable
-nature now symbolises the connection between beauty + melancholy
-simile — destined or part of life which is inevitably fated with joy + melancholy
-‘weeping cloud’ euphemism for rain + without rain we can’t have flowers + rainbows so without melancholy we can’t have beauty
-rain ‘fosters’ flowers — takes care of them + revives them + relieving sadness revives us
‘Or on the rainbow of the sand sand-wave,//Or on the wealth of globed peonies’
-repetition ‘or’ connects nature
-listing natural imagery — world full of life + magic that came from melancholy
-paradox begins speaker knows melancholy seems never ending but can’t have joy without it
‘Feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes’
-repetition ‘deep’ acts as reflection suggesting endlessness of her beauty + its ultimate decay
-emphatic repetition echoed next stanza
-imperative ‘feed’ — provides some solace, freedom beauty + nature offers us we should embrace it fully
‘She dwells with beauty - Beauty must die’
-‘beauty’ — beauty pinnacle of happiness
-‘must’ — fleeting, temp + transient life of some aspects of nature + human life like ‘rainbow’ S2
‘Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips’
-pleasure + pain inextricably linked
-beauty must die, joy is fleeting + flower of pleasure is forever
-a bittersweet experience
‘His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,//And be among her cloudy trophies hung’
-wonderful conclusion
-paradoxically cyclical structure as returned to start
-concepts in poem overwhelmingly linked
-those who fight against sorrow still experience sadness + simply because amongst melancholies ‘trophies’ as it can’t be overcome
