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.