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Ode on Melancholy Study Notes

Ode on Melancholy: Historical Context

  • Historically, melancholy was considered an illness.
  • Ancient Greece: Imbalance of four basic bodily fluids (humors) caused disease.
    • Melancholy was due to too much black bile, leading to:
      • Ill temperament
      • Mood swings
      • Anger
      • Brooding disposition

Renaissance Perspective

  • Melancholy transformed into a fashionable, cultivated sadness.
  • Linked to sensitivity and creativity.
  • Concept of "sensibility" emerged: refined emotion, delicacy of perception.
  • Synonymous with social refinement and good breeding.
  • Recognition of fine line between delicate feeling and mental disarrangement.

Romanticism and Melancholy

  • Emphasis on sentiment led to reflection on tragic aspects of life.
  • Prolonged awareness could result in gloom and depression.
  • Melancholic individuals seen as:
    • Brooding
    • Restless
    • Viewing life as hollow and devoid of purpose.
  • Constant longing for something inexpressible and unattainable.
  • Seen as the seed of the creative journey for great artists.
  • Quote: "A in the very temple of delight, veiled melancholy has her sovereign shrine."

Keats and Romantic Melancholy

  • Became an almost inevitable byproduct of the romantic outlook due to emphasis on extremes of emotion.
  • Sublime in landscape connected to dangerous places (mountains, gorges) or solitude.
  • Romantic love tied to pains of rejection or loss.
  • High sensitivity results in negative emotions.
  • Romantics: Idealists/visionaries often at odds with the world and society.
  • Death seen as a release from sorrow and loss.
  • Stemmed from finding correspondence between reality and idealized life.
  • Joy felt in fleeting moments when their vision seemed within reach.
  • Despondency and despair when the vision's impossibility was realized.
  • Radical political beliefs and turbulent characters caused conflict with societal norms.
  • Expressed feelings of frustration through melancholy.

Historical and Literary Allusions

  • John Milton:
    • El Pironso and Comus: "How thou goddess, sage and holy, how divinest melancholy…I began wrapped in a pleasing fit of melancholy to mediate my rural minstrelsy."
  • Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621):
    • Encyclopedic investigation of causes, symptoms, and cures for melancholy.
    • Encouraged readers to use melancholy.
    • Keats was familiar with this and treatments for melancholy due to his medical training.

Letter to George and Georgina, March 1819

  • Life means limited pleasure.
  • Circumstances are continually gathering and bursting (like clouds).
  • Even when laughing, trouble is being planted.
  • Trouble sprouts, grows, and bears poison fruit.
  • Misfortunes of friends can be reasoned about, but our own misfortunes are too overwhelming for words.
  • Writing at random, straining at particles of light in darkness.
  • Superior beings may be amused by instinctive attitudes of mind.

Definitions

  • Dialectical: Concerned with or acting through opposing forces.
  • Classical Odes:
    • Pindaric odes (ancient Greece):
      • Strophe
      • Antistrophe
      • Oppode
    • Sections made of stanzas with same rhythm/meter and rhyme pattern.

Overview of the Poem

  • Expresses Keats' dialectical expression of pleasure/pain, joy/sorrow.
  • Warns against viewing melancholy as despair, defeatism, horror.
  • The soul's anguish must be experienced.
  • Connects to Keats' letters about strong feeling or purpose having beauty.
  • The reader should seek beauty and joy despite sorrow.
  • We should indulge in sorrow rather than avoid it to fully embrace life.
  • Uses motifs of taste, devouring, oral sensuality (grape, glutting, sipping, taking, kissing).
  • Keats distances himself from dark, languorous, death-obsessed romantic melancholy.
  • Melancholy as a place for artistic creation and encountering life.
  • The keenest experience of melancholy from contemplating beautiful objects because they are fated to die.

Original Stanza (discarded)

  • Build a bark of dead men's bones, phantom gibbet for a mast.
  • Stitch creeds for a sail (groans to fill it), bloodstained in aghast.
  • Rudder is a dragon's tail, severed but hard with agony.
  • Cordage from uprooting skull of Bald Medusa.
  • You would fail to find melancholy in an isle of leafy doll.

Vocabulary and Allusions: Stanza One

  • Line 1: Lethe
    • River in the underworld (Hades).
    • Souls bathe to forget the past before rebirth.
    • River of forgetfulness.
  • Line 2: Wolf's Bane
    • Poison.
  • Line 4: Nightshade
    • Poison.
  • Proserpine
    • Queen of the underworld.
    • Kidnapped by Pluto (Hades).
    • Mother: Dementor (fertility/grain).
    • Dementor's grief caused earth to become sterile.
    • Proserpine returned to mother for six months each year, resulting in fertility and crops.
    • Connection to seasons is appropriate for the poem.
  • Line 5: Yew berries
    • Symbol of mourning.
    • Yew associated with mourning.
    • Rosary: Prayer beads.
  • Line 6: Beetle
    • Egyptians: sacred, symbol of resurrection.
    • Jewel beetle/scarab in tombs.
  • Death moth
    • Death's head moth (markings resemble skull).
  • Line 7: Psyche
    • Greek: soul/mind; butterfly.
    • Used as an emblem.
  • Line 8: Mysteries
    • Secret rites.

Vocabulary and Allusions: Stanza Three

  • Line 8: Palate
    • Roof of the mouth, sense of taste.
    • Intellectual or aesthetic taste.
    • Fine: refined, sensitive.

Core Themes and Interpretations

  • Keats presents emotional pain as integral to the human condition.
  • Inextricably linked to the transience of beauty and the mortal world.
  • Emotional pain is not a reason for suicide.
  • Ode to a Nightingale:
    • Immortal aesthetic beauty reminds Keats of mortality, causing pain.
    • Art/poetry as means of escaping emotional pain associated with mortality.
  • Ode on Melancholy:
    • More instructional.
    • Advocates embracing emotional pain.
    • Understanding all joyful experiences must die.
    • Linking emotional pain and happiness.

Poem's Argument

  • Instructional: advocating embracing emotional pain, not succumbing to it.
  • Acknowledges temptation of suicide.
  • Commands reader not to suffer the kiss of nightshade (personification of poisonous flower).
  • The enjambment creates lingering over the possibility of escape.
  • Deals with emotional pain when melancholy fit falls.
  • Fricative alliteration (f sound) reflects suddenness of emotional pain.
  • Pathetic fallacy creates sense of all-encompassing sadness (simile of cloud).
  • Advocates "glut[ting] their sorrow on a morning rose."
  • Lose oneself in transient natural beauty.
  • Embrace pain and joy of human existence.

Escapism in Ode to a Nightingale

  • Exemplifies romantic appreciation of nature and beauty.
  • Focus on aesthetic beauty.
  • Art to escape mortality.
  • Desire for escape expressed not to be charioted by Bacchus but on the viewless winds of poetry.
    • Bacchus: God of wine, thus representing a high feeling of extasis.
  • Connection to the classical world.
  • Sublime power of natural world and aesthetic beauty.

Escapism in Ode on Melancholy

  • Undesirable; instead, one should embrace sadness as part of human existence.
  • Gustatory image of "glutting" reflects indulging in sadness.