The Individualistic Melancholy of Keats

Keats’s melancholy, as subject for “Ode on Melancholy,” is one that seems constant. From first stanza to third, even when not explicitly addressed, melancholy lurks in the background of the poem sparking (illuminating) paradoxes that the reader must struggle with. The poem’s movement, as well as its content, thus creates a vision of melancholy which grows stronger as the speaker continues to contemplate it.

The first stanza (not including the additional one added in The Norton) begins with a hint of anxiety and rolls into Keats’s warnings against succumbing to melancholy. The poem begins with “No, no, go not to Lethe,” the opening repetition reading like an anxious stutter or desperate plea to begin the contemplation on death. And the deaths that Keats enumerates are not only concerned with the body, but with faith, “make not your rosary of yew-berries” (5), and with the soul, “Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be/ Your mournful Psyche,” (6-7), so as to show how melancholy affects the ailed mind wholly. Yet the consequence that Keats postulates coming from these poisons seems to disregard their lethality. Instead of death coming, Keats says, “For shade to shade will come to drowsily,/ And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul” (9-10), which hints not at an ultimate demise, but a loss of vigor in the “anguish of the soul.” This is the first paradox of the poem, and possibly the most difficult to understand. The Norton’s footnote regarding these last two lines states that they show “sorrow needs contrast to sustain its intensity,” which makes sense, but then how are the poisons related? Why must Keats lessen sorrow with death and not just further sorrow? I suppose I’m confused as to why he doesn't address the literal ends to the means he has described.

Following this vague end to the stanza, Keats introduces melancholy outright and as something unavoidably, saying, “But when the melancholy fit shall fall/ Sudden from heaven” (11-12). What’s interesting about these opening lines is how Keats characterizes melancholy’s coming into being, it being portrayed as something coming from the exterior rather than the interior where emotion is usually thought to come from. Not only that, but the melancholy comes from heaven, which suggests Keats finds something redeeming about it, possibly even something holy. After introducing melancholy, Keats describes it through the simile of a “weeping cloud” (12), which obscures spring (14) and also brings about life (13), thus at once spotlighting and hiding beauty and creating another paradox. This one, though, feels easier to grapple with because melancholy creates a new perspective and can force a subject to observe things differently via its veil. We've all seen works of art both depressing and beautiful and felt worthwhile activities dimmed by an unattributable sadness.

The final paradox comes in the last stanza and is almost a rehash of that in the last stanza. Here Keats moves melancholy from hypothetically existing within the addressee and characterized by the natural, to the realm of the metaphysical where “She dwells with Beauty” (21), “And Joy” (22), “and aching Pleasure nigh” (23). Thus melancholy becomes the bedfellow of its opposites and seems to contaminate them in some way, forcing them to die (21), leave (22), or become their host’s demise (24). Keats even goes so far as to write, “Ay, in the very temple of Delight/ Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine” (25-6), suggesting that melancholy not only exists with delight but is worshipped alongside it. And thus the paradox of melancholy finding hold “in the very temple of Delight,” through mutual strength. Just as delight can inspire good will, melancholy can inspire a person to be insular and brooding. Delight can also lead to melancholy through disappointment of expectations, such as that of Wordsworth crossing the alps in “The Prelude.” Yet if The Norton is true in surmising this poem as describing “the tragic human destiny that beauty, joy, and life itself owe not only their quality but their value to the fact that they are transitory and turn into their opposites,” shouldn't there be some attention to the lifting of melancholy? Just as joy and beauty can be transitory, so can melancholy and depression, but this idea seems to be missing from the piece.

Not only that, but melancholy grows stronger throughout the poem, progressing from not being mentioned in the first, to “melancholy” (11) in the second, and finally “She” (21) or “Melancholy” (26) in the third. And in the sensation’s final, personified form there remains a permanence that seems irreconcilable; its “sovran shrine” denoting authority and stability. And so in Keats melancholy seems inexorable, which could give reason to the recurrence of death in his works. Still though, this melancholy becomes something deeply personal and ingrained in the speaker, leaving the universal tone of the piece less than desired.