Ode on Melancholy Flashcards
Summary
The three stanzas of the “Ode on Melancholy” address the subject of how to cope with sadness. The first stanza tells what not to do: The sufferer should not “go to Lethe,” or forget their sadness (Lethe is the river of forgetfulness in Greek mythology); should not commit suicide (nightshade, “the ruby grape of Prosperpine,” is a poison; Prosperpine is the mythological queen of the underworld); and should not become obsessed with objects of death and misery (the beetle, the death-moth, and the owl). For, the speaker says, that will make the anguish of the soul drowsy, and the sufferer should do everything he can to remain aware of and alert to the depths of his suffering.
In the second stanza, the speaker tells the sufferer what to do in place of the things he forbade in the first stanza. When afflicted with “the melancholy fit,” the sufferer should instead overwhelm his sorrow with natural beauty, glutting it on the morning rose, “on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,” or in the eyes of his beloved. In the third stanza, the speaker explains these injunctions, saying that pleasure and pain are inextricably linked: Beauty must die, joy is fleeting, and the flower of pleasure is forever “turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips.” The speaker says that the shrine of melancholy is inside the “temple of Delight,” but that it is only visible if one can overwhelm oneself with joy until it reveals its centre of sadness, by “burst[ing] Joy’s grape against his palate fine.” The man who can do this shall “taste the sadness” of melancholy’s might and “be among her cloudy trophies hung.”
Form
“Ode on Melancholy,” the shortest of Keats’s odes, is written in a very regular form that matches its logical, argumentative thematic structure. Each stanza is ten lines long and metered in a relatively precise iambic pentameter. The first two stanzas, offering advice to the sufferer, follow the same rhyme scheme, ABABCDECDE; the third, which explains the advice, varies the ending slightly, following a scheme of ABABCDEDCE, so that the rhymes of the eighth and ninth lines are reversed in order from the previous two stanzas. As in some other odes (especially “Autumn” and “Grecian Urn”), the two-part rhyme scheme of each stanza (one group of AB rhymes, one of CDE rhymes) creates the sense of a two-part thematic structure as well, in which the first four lines of each stanza define the stanza’s subject, and the latter six develop it. (This is true especially of the second two stanzas.)
Melancholy
Melancholy is the greatest of all emotions or the most powerful “Can burst joys grape … and be among her cloudy trophies hung”.
To avoid melancholy is to “drown the wakeful anguish of the soul”. The correct response is not to avoid it, but to “glut” it.
Melancholy may be linked to sadness and death by the simile in stanza 2, which identifies it as a “weeping cloud”, but melancholy is also nourishing.
The Other Emotions
Beauty must die; joy is forever leaving, pleasure constantly turning into poison. Affirms the complex intertwining of the feelings of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow.
Remedy for Melancholy
Second stanza suggests a remedy would be to surrender completely to the sensuous aspects of the experience, to feel the melancholy “glut” the sorrow. Third stanza considers the complex and ambiguous nature of melancholy, by presenting a melancholy as a goddess.
