Keats Essay Plan: 'Isolation' --> 'Drear Nighted December' + 'Ode to Melancholy'

Introduction

Introduction

• Within both ‘In drear nighted December’ and ‘Ode to Melancholy’ Keats holistically comments on how it is not necessary to escape isolation but to instead delve into a realm of introspection as a way of reconciling with one’s disheartened conscience. The romantic notion of the healing powers of nature is substantial within each poem, as the sublimely beautiful natural world is often a place in which Keats’ and the reader themselves can begin to self-reflect. Hence, Keats’ directly observes the need for our capacity as the reader to face isolating concepts such as the inevitability of the loss of human life in order to lead a fulfilling life, thus Keats’ original philosophical concept negative capability is explored respectively within each poem. Keats aimed to teach that instead of attempting to rationalize or explain away feelings of loneliness or desolation, the moral poet embraces these emotions and explores them deeply through poetic form or everyday contemplation.

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‘Drear Nighted December’

Theme: Keats uses vivid and evocative descriptions of the winter landscape to convey a sense of bleakness and isolation.

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• Keats uses vivid and evocative descriptions of the winter landscape to convey a sense of bleakness and isolation.

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• ‘Drear nighted’

  • The compound adjective ‘drear-nighted’ that is the title and begins the poem expresses what it describes. The letter ’d' has a heavy sound, and the long vowel in ‘drear’ stretches the word to slow the pace.

• ‘Nor frozen thawings glue them’

  • The ‘frozen thawings’ begin to melt and the tree will no longer be ‘glued’ to its winter state; a reference to the cyclical nature of human existence.

  • Hence, Keats’ paints in the reader’s imagination the inevitability of this depressive state and all encompassing sadness of this season, we are unable to escape the isolation it brings

• ‘Writhed not at passed joy?’

  • The verb perfects the portrayal of the transience of joy and grief in humans ‘girl and boy’. Sadness is therefore brought to us by happiness, making both emotions inevitably isolating hence Keats comments on how the human condition cannot escape isolation.

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• Sometimes, the speaker says, there is “none to heal it”: some wounds never close

• This appraisal of the constancy of the natural world could derive from Keats’ own experience with the impermanence and inevitability of the loss of human life

• Keats lost both his parents, grandparents and his younger brother before his own death at 25

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‘Drear Nighted December’

Theme: Amidst the isolation, there is a subtle yearning for connection and warmth as revealed through structure and repeating rhymes.

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• Amidst the isolation, there is a subtle yearning for connection and warmth.

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• Each stanza ends with ‘prime’ or ‘time’ or ‘rhyme’ creating a chime with each other that portrays unavoidable sadness yet within each stanza there are glimpses of what once was before this season

• ‘Apollo's summer look;’

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• The goddess of sun in Greek mythology, Keats’ revered their art and the past hence it would have been a time rich with art and a warm climate, relevant to mention them when reflecting upon previous seasons

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• ‘Too happy happy tree’ 1st stanza

• ‘Too happy happy brook’ 2nd stanza

  • The use of the adjective ‘happy’ is juxtaposed with its antithesis, ‘drear-nighted’, in the first line. There is an instant shift in tone and the repetition of ‘happy’ emphasises this.

  • The first two lines of the second stanza echo those of stanza one. The tree is now a ‘happy, happy brook’. The technique is known as syntactic parallelism, the repetition giving emphasis. The comments regarding the ‘too happy, happy tree’ apply to the brook.

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‘Drear Nighted December’

Theme: Keats uses introspective language to convey the speaker's sense of isolation. The speaker contemplates the passing of time and the transitory nature of life, reflecting on personal experiences of solitude and alienation.

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• The seasons pass and grow alongside all humans, Keats’ takes this pathetic fallacy as an opportunity to reflect on his own isolation as a young man during nature’s most exposed and bare season as it emulates his own condition.

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• Keats’ conveys how he wishes to become like nature if he is to cope with the unbearable sadness of notalgia and not being able to enter the past again

• Keats personified the tree in the second line ‘too happy happy tree’ in order to demonstrate through wishful anastrophe how the leafless tree is lucky to not remember a time where its condition was different and full of life

• There is an implied juxtaposition here, the speaker enjoys no such oblivion when they lose something. This is a poem not just about grief, but about the particular pain of having, losing, and remembering.

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• Keats had not yet developed his ideas on negative capability by the time he wrote this in 1817

• While he wrote a letter to his brothers in Dec 1817 around the same time this poem was written and this was the first mention from Keats’ of this concept

• Yet, the concept of negative capability became more elaborated in Keats's subsequent letters and poems, especially during his creative period leading up to his untimely death in 1821.

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‘Ode to Melancholy’

Theme: Isolation causes people to turn to escapism when really it is only connection with the natural world that can save us from melancholia

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• The first stanza reads like a list of self-destructive behaviors, all of which are ways that the poem presents as possible (but ill-advised) responses to melancholy, or a pervasive sense of deep sadness.

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• ‘poisonous wine’

• ‘nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;’

• ‘Make not your rosary of yew-berries’

  • The poem mentions “poisonous wine,” the deadly nightshade plant, and the tempting grapes of a goddess. But rather than combating sadness, the poem argues, alcohol and drugs accelerate it to a point of no return, “drowning]” people’s “soul[s].

  • The beauty of the language in this stanza seems to speak to the temptation of such substances, and how people can be seduced by the promised comfort of intoxication. In other words, it’s understandable that people react to melancholy through a kind of harmful self-medication—but that’s not the way the speaker thinks they should respond.

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‘Ode to Melancholy’

Theme: The poem suggests a willingness to embrace solitude giving instruction as to how the reader can embrace isolation means of deeper understanding and self-discovery.

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• The second stanza then offers the speaker’s alternative to intoxication: appreciation of the natural world.

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• The stanza is full of natural imagery, and instructs anyone feeling down to seek out roses, peony flowers, and rainbows. Together, these seem to offer an alternative to the list of intoxicants offered in the first stanza.

• ‘glut thy sorrow on a morning rose’

• ‘the rainbow of the salt sand-wave’

  • There is caesura after ‘shroud’, and the stanza moves on.

  • Having described the mood of melancholy, the speaker urges the listener to ‘glut’ himself on as many sensual experiences as he can.

  • All the senses are invoked, starting with a sweet-smelling rose, then a multi-coloured rainbow, shape and colour in the ‘globed peonies’, texture in the ‘salt-sand-wave’ and ‘soft hand’.

  • Three lines begin with ‘Or’, forming a refrain or anaphora, creating an effect of abundance of sensual experiences.

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• Unlike ‘drear nighted’ by this time Keats’ had developed ideas of negative capability

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‘Ode to Melancholy’

Theme: The speaker advises against engaging with the bright, cheerful aspects of life and instead advocates for a withdrawal into the realm of introspection and contemplation, which can be interpreted as a form of isolation from external stimuli.

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• There is a need for isolation to appreciate the beauty of love and connection with a female companion

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• ‘Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows

  emprison her soft hand, and let her rave

  And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes’

  • This last line concludes with the speaker addressing the listener once again. The pace slows dramatically with the assonant ‘ee’s in 'deep’, ‘feed’ and ‘peerless’ — inescapable urging by the speaker to relish the sensations.

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• Fanny Brawne

• Keats’ was forced into reconciliation with losing his lover forever by his departure to Rome and his untimely death

• This could explain why he welcomes such feelings of melancholy, to cope with his isolation from who he loves the most