Ode to Melancholy Flashcards
KEY CONCEPTS
- brings together feelings of pleasure and the way they are intermingled with pain and sorrow
- Keats valued intensity of emotion, fulfillment comes from living and thinking passionately
- doesn’t shrink from the implication that feeling intensely means that grief or depression may well cause anguish and torment
STRUCTURE
-logical structure progression:
-stanza 1
don’t escape pain
-stanza 2
what to do = embrace transient beauty and joy of nature
stanza 3
to experience joy, must experience melancholy
Ours is a world of change, of flux. Unless we immerse ourselves in the process of flux and change, our sensitivity to life and our ability to experience life fully will be deadened
-iambic pentameter
repeated stressed-unstressed rhythm = journeying or questing to find happiness
‘No, no go not to Lethe’
- Demand, exhortation
- River of forgetfulness, deadens memories
- Negative grammar = drives message further- melancholy and bad temperament
- Negative grammar = reinforce idea melancholy is part of life, inescapable even through praying for oblivion
Enjambment
Dreamy invocations = bring to the forefront infamous dreamworld (myth and legend)
Lack of structure, consequences of altering melancholy
‘ruby grape’
Splash of color = ironically bring poem to life- joy and melancholy must live simultaneously
‘rosary of yew berries’
Used by Catholics to count their prayers
Toxic red berry, Keats antagonistic, don’t pray away
Red again, this time negatively, joy and melancholy together
stanza 2 analysis
Modern audience = depression
However, become aware of beauty of this imagery
Beauty inherent in melancholy, Keats attributes preciousness to sadness, helps appreciate life further
Last 3 lines emphasize sensual desire and love that can arise from intimate passion – out of melancholy comes a unique opportunity to experience soul
contradicting imagery
Its impossible to live with only half emotions
‘Beauty must die’
Peculiar climax, sensual and tragic, beautiful but demanding sacrifice
