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.”