Keats's "Ode To Melancholy"

      John Keats knew too well that sickness and death made life painfully short.  His father fell from a horse and died when Keats was eight.  His mother died when he was fourteen.  His youngest brother Tom was eighteen when Keats nursed him through his final illness and death from tuberculosis, the same disease that killed Keats himself when he was twenty-five.  Such sorrow inspired him to write:

          Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

What thou among the leaves hast never known,

          The weariness, the fever, the fret 

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

          Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,

Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;

    Where to think is to be full of sorrow

If one were to read only these lines, and a stanza that follows them later in the poem, then it might appear that an essential thought within Keats’s poetry could be a yearning to escape the pain and suffering in life through self annihilation, death. 

          Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

          Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

To take into the air my quiet breath;

          Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

 But Keats was no Hamlet.  And his “Ode To Melancholy” defines Keats’s philosophy toward suffering and death his other odes only intimate.  

Ode On Melancholy

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist

  Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;

Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d

  By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;

Make not your rosary of yew-berries,

  Nor let the beetle, not the death-moth be

    Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl

A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;

  For shade to shade will come too drowsily,

    And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall

  Sudden from Heaven like a weeping cloud,

That foster the droop-headed flowers all,

  And hides the green hill in an April shroud;

Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,

  Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,

    Or on the wealth of globed peonies’

Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,

  Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave

    And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty - Beauty that must die;

  And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips

Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,

  Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:

Ay, in the very temple of Delight

  Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,

    Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue

Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;

  His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,

    And be among her cloudy trophies hung.  

After reading the poem, it should be clear how “Ode On Melancholy” differs from his other odes.  In those poems, one encounters speakers contemplating or meditating on the meaning of each subject, for example, a Nightingale in one and a Grecian urn in the other.  In “Ode On Melancholy,” the speaker structures an argument to persuade his auditor or perhaps the reader to heed his advice on how to respond to moods of sadness.  In stanza 1, he begins with an exhortation, in the style of Wordsworth’s “Expostulation and Reply,” urging one to resist certain impulses when the melancholy mood afflicts him.  Do not attempt to erase that emotion by drinking from the river of forgetfulness, nor dull it with “Wolf’s-bane, nor extinguish yourself and it by taking nightshade, nor brood on images of death and despair-the beetle, the death-moth, the downy owl,” since they only “drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.”  These three responses to melancholy only dull the mind.

     In stanza 2, the speaker proposes what should be done instead “when the melancholy fit shall fall/Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud.”  One should “glut thy sorrow on a “morning rose,” or on a “rainbow,” or on “the wealth of globed peonies.”  Feeding on nature’s delicate beauty may mitigate melancholy, but can it truly displace an “April shroud”?  Perhaps this somewhat Wordsworthian appeal to nature is too tenuous and so the speaker turns to his mistress and searches “deep upon her peerless eyes.”  At this point the poem turns away from Wordsworth toward the theme of so many Shakespeare sonnets: the mutability of existence.

     Now, Keats furnishes the logic underpinning his entire poem in the declarative mood of stanza’s 3’s first line: “She dwells with Beauty–Beauty that must die.”  Lines 2 and 3, echo “Nightingale” and “Grecian Urn”: “And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips/Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure night.”   And as if forging Shakespeare’s spirit into his own poetic creativity, Keats acknowledges that though death must devour beauty, and “Pleasure” must turn “to poison,” the poet who can “burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine” can “taste the sadness of her might” and compose poetry that will be “among her cloudy trophies hung.”  

Forst and Nature Poetry

      In one of his greatest poems, the English poet Wordsworth envisions nature overflowing with profound insights and transcendent wisdom.  He sees it as: 

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.

Tintern Abbey (1798)

This “presence” was nature’s gift to Wordsworth, and one that inspired his imagination to compose many extraordinary poems.  Those poems, in turn, have influenced many great poets who have come after him.  One such poet is the American poet, Robert Frost. (See Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1966, p. 662)   In fact, when Frost’s early poems were published, many readers saw an American version and poetic descendent of Wordsworth in Frost’s bucolic poems of woods, streams, snow, and farm life.  Poems such as “Birches,” “Mending Wall,” and “The Road Not Taken,” can often remind readers of Wordsworth’s poetry.  But many of his other poems are distinctly and profoundly different from the philosophy that fills Wordsworth’s work.  Frost’s poetry is never about nature; instead, it holds a mirror up to nature that reflects Frost’s vision of himself and his world.  Many of his poems reveal this dynamic, but two in particular which illustrate this point are “The Oven Bird,” and “Come In.”

                                                            The Oven Bird

There is a singer everyone has heard,

Loud, mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,

Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

He says that leaves are old and that for flowers

Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

He says the early petal-fall is past

When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers

On sunny days a moment overcast;

And comes that other fall we name the fall.

He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birds

But that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

     The poem opens with the speaker, whom we can take to be Frost himself, announcing “There is a singer everyone has heard,/Loud, mid-summer and mid-wood bird.”  The language in these two lines depict one image, that of the oven bird, but projects (rather than reflects) a second image, of Frost the poet.  The bird/bard duality, and the singer as poet/bard should be easily recognized by the reader.  But a third figure can also be heard in these lines.  The words, “mid-summer,” and “mid-wood,” echo, though perhaps slightly, the beginning of Dante’s Inferno: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita/mi ritrovai per selva oscura.”  (“Midway upon the journey of our life/Ifound myself within a dark wood.”)  

     Like the great Italian bard, Frost was at a “midpoint” in life.  He was approaching forty at the time he wrote “The Oven Bird,” which was published in 1916.  Unlike Dante, who incorporates himself as the narrator in his poem, Frost acts as a listener who reports what he hears through the bird’s singing.  Rather than introduce himself as a first person speaker, Frost has chosen the unseen bird to say for him what he can only report to us.  First, he states that “everyone has heard” the “Loud” singing of this bird and that the bird “makes the solid tree trunks sound again.”  By doing so, Frost expands the bird’s voice to resonate beyond the singleness of an individual, first-person speaker to that of a universal voice communicating to all human beings.  Each year, the bird's song will “sound” the same song about the constant flow of time.  The months will pass, and spring "leaves" and "flowers" will always grow old and fall, darkening the sky with “a moment of overcast” that forebodes the coming of fall, and the fragile brevity of life.  This unchanging reality of change is mimicked by the reverberating parallel syntax of “He says…” “He says…” “He says…”   

     The immediate moment after the “moment of overcast” comes the statement upon which the entire poem is composed: “And comes that other fall we name the fall.”  Frost the listener, and the reader, are confronted by two falls, the seasonal one and the biblical Fall of Adam and Eve, the fall that brought death into the world.  Since that death is ubiquitous as the “highway dust [that] is over all,” the bird “knows in singing not to sing”; he knows that though there is joy in the beauty in nature, it is ephemeral and will always be moving toward death.  The poem then ends as it only can, with the bird singing eternally that question beyond human language and understanding, “The question that he frames in all but words/Is what to make of a diminished thing.”  That question discerns the mutable nature of human flesh that Frost hears in nature.

     Frost’ “The Oven Bird” typifies his unsentimental vision of nature.  He sees, or in this case hears, the limits of knowledge and mortality.  Nowhere in his vision is there the slightest flicker of the sublime or transcendent and that is what makes him so different from Wordsworth.  Though Wordsworth also felt the weight of the human condition, as he acknowledges in “Tintern Abbey,” he finds a way to receive the transcendent spirit of nature; but by transcending humanity, Wordsworth also tries to transcend reality.  Frost, on the other hand, is a realist.  Beauty may come through the song of a bird, a tree, a snowfall, but for Frost reality always permeates nature and his imagination.  

     Another Frost poem that contrasts starkly with the transcendence Wordsworth envisions is “Come In.”  In the poem, Frost encounters once again bird song:

Come In

As I came to the edge of the woods,

Thrush music–hark!

Now if it was dusk outside,

Inside it was dark.

Too dark in the woods for a bird

To better its perch for the night,

Though it still could sing.

The last of the light of the sun

That had died in the west

Still lied for one song more

In a thrush’s breast.

Far in the pillared dark

Thrush music went–

Almost like a call to come in

To the dark and lament.

But no, I was out for stars:

I would not come in.

I meant not even if asked,

And I hadn’t been.

     In the poem, the speaker comes to “the edge of the woods,” hears “Thrush music,” and immediately exclaims “Hark!”  The speaker seems aroused by the bird’s voice, and about to hear the sublime music of nature.  That possibility diminishes almost immediately as he shifts his attention from what he can hear to what he cannot see:  “Now if it was dusk outside,/Inside it was dark.”  The moment a transcendent insight might seem accessible, an impenetrable “dark” circumscribes his vision.   No matter how hard he peers into the woods, he hears but never sees.  So as he listens to the thrush’s music, he deduces that the bird also cannot see, and therefore cannot “better its perch.”   He further concludes that since “The last of the light of the sun/That had died in the west” the thrush has one song left to sing.   

     By stanza 4, it is clear that nature is no realm for experiencing transcendence.  The speaker searches “Far in the pillared dark” after the song of the thrush, but the music recedes: “Thrush music went,” and the song he now hears is “Almost like a call to come in/To the dark and lament.”  This “dark” lamentation, though, isn’t emanating from the thrush, but rather from the darkness his imagination envisions.  The thrush’s music, which would in Wordsworth kindle light and lightness, in Frost becomes the penetrating realism that can be seen in his poetry.   He redirects his gaze and ours: “But no I was out for stars:/I would not come in.”  The last two lines of the poem pronounce further the difference between these two poets: “I meant not even if asked,/And I hadn’t been.”  The song of the bird calls to him, but he is not willing to follow it beyond the boundaries physical life encompasses.  As in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Frost lingers on the periphery of mystical or transcendent experience, but always decides to remain earthbound where his sensibility captures a truth no less worthy than Wordsworth's.

Yeats-"Among School Children

      In the winter of 1926, William Butler Yeats visited a convent school in his official capacity as an Irish senator.  During the visit, a nun guided him through a classroom of young students.  The result of the visit produced a great philosophical poem, “Among School Children.”  In this poignant, beautiful, and also difficult poem, Yeats acknowledges all the heartache, and the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to,” but also ultimately envisions a means to counter this life’s vicissitudes.

Among School Children

        I

I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;

A kind old nun in a white hood replies;

The children learn to cipher and to sing,

To study reading-books and history.

To cut and sew, be neat in everything

In the best modern way–the children’s eyes

In momentary wonder stare upon

A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

        II

I dream of a Ledaean body, bent

Above a sinking fire, a tale that she

Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event

That changed some childish day to tragedy–

Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent

Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,

Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,

Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

        III

And thinking of that fit of grief or rage

I look upon one child or t’other there

And wonder if she stood so at that age–

For even daughters of the swan can share

Something of every paddler’s heritage–

And had that colour upon cheek or hair,

And thereupon my heart is driven wild:

She stands before me as a living child.

        IV

Her present image floats into the mind–

Did  Quattrocento finger fashion it 

Hollow of cheek as though it drank the the wind

And took a mess of shadows for its meat?

And I though never of Ledaean kind

Had pretty plumage once–enough of that,

Better to smile on all that smile, and show

There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

        V

What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap

Honey of generation had betrayed,

And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape

As recollection or the drug decide,

Would think her son, did she but see that shape

With sixty or more winters on its head,

A compensation for the pang of his birth,

Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

          VI

Plato thought nature by a spume that plays

Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;

Soldier Aristotle played the taws

Upon the bottom of a king of kings;

World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras

Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings

What a star sang and careless Muses heard:

Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

          VII

Both nuns and mothers worship images,

But those the candles light are not as those

That animate a mother’s reveries,

But keep a marble or a bronze repose.

And yet they too break hearts–O Presences

That passion, piety, or affection knows,

And that all heaven glory symbolize –

O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;

          VIII

Labor is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

O chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom,or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

     Yeats begins his poem by describing his visit to a classroom of young children in stanza I.  As he strolls among the students he is told by the nun accompanying him that the children are learning to do math, to sing, to read and to study history.  The children are curious and “stare upon” him, and it is here that Yeats introduces a contrast between youth and old age, a central theme in the poem.  In stanza II, this direct contrast spurs his imagination to remember a specific conversation he had years ago with Maud Gonne, (Yeats’s unrequited love who became his poetic muse from the time they met.)  Yeats’s thoughts flow into a romantic reverie where he dreams of Gonne's youthful beauty, “a Ledaean body,” comparing her to Helen of Troy, and of an “event” that caused her pain–“a harsh reproof, or trivial event/That changed some childish day to tragedy.”  The sympathy he felt for her in that moment moved Yeats to envision them as two beings  blended into one: “our two natures blent/ Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,/Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,/Into the yolk and white of the one shell.”  

     In stanza III, his attention returns briefly to the classroom, but again an image of Gonne, this time as a young child, possesses Yeats’s mind.  As he moves to stanza IV, he imagines her as she was at this stage of their lives, her face now timeworn, “Hollow of cheek as though it [she] drank the wind.”  He recollects how he too once was youthfully handsome, “pretty plumage once,” though like Maude he has aged well past youth perceiving himself in the image of an “old scarecrow.”  The depictions of beauty “Ledaean kind,” youth, the five repetitions in some form of the word children, and old age, “Hollow of cheek,” “old scarecrow,” remain discreet and, most importantly, irreconcilable elements existing as they do in the arc of Time in this half of the poem.  Though Yeats seems undisturbed by his present physical state of life at the end of stanza IV, “comfortable old scarecrow,” he proceeds in the second half of the poem to wonder how the effect of time invariably bears on the human spirit and how humans respond to it.

     The contrasting images between youth and his old age kindle the philosophical musings that occupy the rest of the poem.  In stanza V, he wonders whether a young mother would “think” the pain of childbirth worth it if she could see her son old, “With sixty or more winter on its head,” Of course, Yeats sees himself in this image.  Also within this stanza is Plato’s theory that before birth the soul exists in a prefect “Platonic” realm.  Upon birth, the soul, unless it drinks the “drug” of forgetfulness, immediately yearns to return to that spiritual world where it is not fastened to the human body and therefore not subject to all the suffering physical existence entails.  

     In stanza VI, Yeats cites three “great philosophers,” Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras, but concludes that their “knowledge” is but “Old clothes upon a stick to scare a bird.”  This image of a scarecrow echoes, but also contrasts with, the last line in stanza IV.  Yeats is the “comfortable…old scarecrow” in that line; the three philosophers are “Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.”  Why has Yeats reduced these foundational philosophers, and their ideas, to trivial uselessness?  Why does he ridicule them?

     In Stanza VII he observes that both nuns and mothers worship images.  The images nuns adore are cast in marble or bronze; mothers cherish memories of their children.  Though marble and bronze seem to “repose” beyond the touch of time, continuing to be worshiped after the nuns are gone, Yeats concludes that “they too break hearts,” and that they are illusions produced by “man’s enterprise” and worthy of little more than mockery.  Why can’t the solidity of religious “marble” and “bronze” statues solace the ache time and mortality impose?

     What should be clear by this point in the poem is Yeats’s images and allusions are his attempt to find the balance between the painful dissonance between youth and age.  Until now, Yeats uncovers only irreconcilable dichotomies.  Finally, in stanza VIII, he stops looking and instead creates an aesthetic salvation.   First, he firmly rejects religion, love, and philosophy as means to transcend the inevitability of aging:  “Labor is blossoming or dancing where/The body is bruised to pleasure soul,/Nor beauty born out of its own despair./Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.”  None of these three can enable him to serenely endure the momentum of time.  Unable to provide answers to the endless question “Why,” Yeats instead offers the “How” through three beautifully framed rhetorical questions:

O chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom,or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

The image of the chestnut tree with its “leaf,” “blossom,” or “bole,” conveys a unity of being.  For Yeats, it is the realization that life is simultaneously what one is at present and all the accumulated experiences leading to each moment in time.  Nothing less can measure adequately the nature of one’s being.  Moreover, the value or meaning of life is determined by how one lives life.  One cannot control the “music,” but one can choose how one dances to it and thus become the “dancer” who creates the choreography of the “dance.”

     It is rather extraordinary the way Yeats takes a simple official visit to a school and transforms it into a profound and poetic meditation on youth, age, and mortality.  In each stanza, one can feel the despair creeping into Yeats’s mind and observe each move and countermove he attempts to avert his gaze from that painful sight.  The reader too must feel in the pit of the stomach that gnawing angst the shadow of the scarecrow throws across the page.  Fortunately, relief arrives in the final stanza and a sense of tranquility settles into the mind.