19 pages • 38 minutes read
Ode on Melancholy
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Themes
Accepting Melancholy
Centuries before the popular idea of “feel your feelings,” Keats’s speaker gives this psychological advice to the addressee of “Ode on Melancholy.” The best things in life—Beauty (Line 21), Joy (Line 22), and Pleasure (Line 23)—are not permanent. It is understandable to be sad when these experiences leave us, “bidding adieu” (Line 23). The speaker suggests that the way to handle this experience is to own your sadness as present and necessary.
The speaker’s first advice centers on not becoming so drugged by despair that you sublimate your feelings or give in to the desire to obliterate yourself. “Wakeful anguish” (Line 10) is better than either trying to forget the melancholy or poisoning yourself with “[w]olf’s-bane” (Line 2). Instead, the speaker suggests turning whole-heartedly into sensuous and aesthetic experience, feeling fully both ecstasy and pain. Even when sadness comes like a “shroud” (Line 14), the world remains beautiful, whether in rainbows, sand, or flowers—small, specific, individual natural phenomena are easier to discern as beautiful than large sweeping vistas like “the green hill” (Line 14). The brave man doesn’t hesitate to “burst Joy’s grape against his palate” (Line 28).
Plunging into experience like this does not prevent Melancholy, since once the “Joy’s grape” (Line 28) is eaten, behind it sits the shadow of sadness once more. But this reality is not something to avoid, because the exquisite vitality of beauty is heightened by its inevitable passing. The price for the experience of happiness is to know it is fleeting. Melancholy “dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die” (Line 21). In consequence, to deny Melancholy is to deny all the things that make life worth living. Without Melancholy’s taint, pleasure would dim, its sharpness no longer brought into relief by its opposite. Therefore, it is essential—and even desirable—to realize that being human entails allowing melancholy to make your soul “one of her cloudy trophies hung” (Line 30). In this way, it should not be avoided but embraced.
Compassion as Antidote
The speaker urges the man feeling melancholy to “feed deep, deep upon [the] peerless eyes” (Line 20) of his lover. While the appeal to the aesthetic surface here encourages the man to admire and appreciate her inherent beauty—similar to the “globed peonies” (Line 17) or the “rainbow of the salt sand-wave” (Line 16)—a call for the man to look outside his feelings of despair is also embedded in this image.
Rather than commune with “the death-moth [as] / [y]our mournful Psyche” (Lines 6-7), the speaker suggests the man turn outward and observe another soul grappling with a difficult emotion. When the “mistress [shows] some rich anger” (Line 18), the man’s reaction should not also be anger or resentment. Rather, the speaker proposes the man “glut thy sorrow” (Line 15) by feeding on the woman’s beauty rather than her anger. This suggestion does not mean ignoring the woman’s feelings in favor of her physical appearance; rather, it promotes the idea that her burst of feeling is beautiful, meaningful, and deserves compassion. The speaker even gives instruction to the man on how to act out communion in this moment: “Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave” (Line 19). Just as the man should not sublimate his own feelings into toxic behavior, so should he hear out the woman’s pain and rage.
A key component of managing feelings of deep sadness—which can be isolating—is to recognize every other human being must also navigate uncomfortable emotions. No one is alone under “a weeping cloud” (Line 12). In seeing his lover’s beauty, along with her anger, the man gains understanding of the intricate interplay between joyous attributes and “Veil’d Melancholy” (Line 26)—the paradox that makes up life and love.
The Journey Through Hell, Earth, and Heaven
“Ode on Melancholy” moves from a hellscape, to the pleasures of Earthly existence, to heavenly transcendence. In life, all must experience sorrow, one of the least desirable emotions. However, resisting its inevitability is nightmarish, whereas accepting it grants greater peace.
Keats’ speaker correlates opposition to accepting negative emotions, what he calls denying “wakeful anguish” (Line 10), to the Greco-Roman underworld—the land of the dead. Forgetting melancholy in the river “Lethe” (Line 1) is as toxic as the plants in Hades’ garden, where Proserpine, or Persephone, tends “wolf’s bane” (Line 2), “nightshade” (line 4), and “yew” (Line 5). This landscape of the afterlife is the domain of creatures associated with death and ill omens, such as the Death’s-head hawkmoth, or “death-moth” (Line 6), and the predatory “downy owl” (Line 7).
To counter these images, the speaker shows the addressee instead that the natural phenomena of Earth can offer a sanctuary of beauty. Earthly pleasures are just as specific and detail-rich as those the addressee has been focusing on in his obsession with death. Rather than dismiss broad generalizations of nature like “the green hill” (Line 14) for being covered in a “shroud” (Line 14), the man, should seek delights like the “morning rose” (Line 15) and the “rainbow of the salt sand-wave” (Line 16), like Proserpine, who is also the daughter of Ceres, the goddess of the harvest, does six months of the year. These simple pleasures are an integral part of daily life.
However, truly accepting that Melancholy is “with Pleasure nigh” (Line 23), and present in the “very temple of Delight” (Line 25) will enable the addressee to transcend earthly contentment and propel him to the experience of the sublime. Understanding that beauty and life are transitory allows the soul to become part of the “heaven” (Line 12) from which the “weeping cloud” (Line 12) descends. This then enables the “soul” (Line 29) to return there, to “be among the cloudy trophies hung” (Line 30) after fully ingesting “Joy’s grape” (Line 28). Thus will the addressee move from the waters of the “Lethe” (Line 1) through the earthly kingdom of “globed peonies” (Line 17) up to the monuments of gods and goddesses.
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By John Keats
