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
center 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.)
Themes
If the “Ode to Psyche” is different from the other odes
primarily because of its form, the “Ode on Melancholy” is different
primarily because of its style. The only ode not to be written in
the first person, “Melancholy” finds the speaker admonishing or
advising sufferers of melancholy in the imperative mode; presumably
his advice is the result of his own hard-won experience. In many
ways, “Melancholy” seeks to synthesize the language of all the previous
odes—the Greek mythology of “Indolence” and “Urn,” the beautiful
descriptions of nature in “Psyche” and “Nightingale,” the passion
of “Nightingale,” and the philosophy of “Urn,” all find expression
in its three stanzas—but “Melancholy” is more than simply an amalgam
of the previous poems. In it, the speaker at last explores the nature
of transience and the connection of pleasure and pain in a way that
lets him move beyond the insufficient aesthetic understanding of
“Urn” and achieve the deeper understanding of “To Autumn.”
For the first time in the odes, the speaker in “Melancholy”
urges action rather than passive contemplation. Rejecting both the
eagerly embraced drowsiness of “Indolence” and the rapturous “drowsy
numbness” of “Nightingale,” the speaker declares that he must remain
alert and open to “wakeful anguish,” and rather than flee from sadness,
he will instead glut it on the pleasures of beauty. Instead of numbing
himself to the knowledge that his mistress will grow old and die
(that “Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,” as he said in “Nightingale”),
he uses that knowledge to feel her beauty even more acutely. Because
she dwells with “beauty that must die,” he will “feed deep, deep
upon her peerless eyes.”
In the third stanza, the speaker offers his most convincing
synthesis of melancholy and joy, in a way that takes in the tragic
mortality of life but lets him remain connected to his own experience.
It is precisely the fact that joy will come to an end that makes
the experience of joy such a ravishing one; the fact that beauty
dies makes the experience of beauty sharper and more thrilling.
The key, he writes, is to see the kernel of sadness that lies at
the heart of all pleasure—to “burst joy’s grape” and gain admission
to the inner temple of melancholy. Though the “Ode on Melancholy”
is not explicitly about art, it is clear that this synthetic understanding of
joy and suffering is what has been missing from the speaker’s earlier
attempts to experience art.
