Ode on Melancholy commentary

One characteristic embedded in the minds of almost all humans is that of succumbing in pursuit of one’s aspirations, especially with the approach of death. The fear and enigmatic mystery of death at the brink of this shortcoming may cause one who is near death to re-evaluate life as a wasted opportunity or a broken path of dreams because of the inability to find any type of success. The sonnets “Mezzo Cammin” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and “When I have Fears” by John Keats examine the thought processes of two people who submit to the struggles of life in a depressed way. While communicating a very similar foundational message and mood in a different way through diction and structure, the speakers in “Mezzo Cammin” and “When I Have Fears” identify their despair through likewise differing literary elements which complement and bring out the message intended by these troubled individuals.

The similarities between the poems lie in their abilities to utilize imagery as a means to enhance the concept of the fleeting nature that life ultimately has and to also help further elaborate the speaker’s opinion towards their own situation. In Keats’ poem, dark and imaginative images are used to help match with the speaker’s belief that both love and death arise from fate itself. Here, Keats describes the beauty and mystery of love with images of “shadows” and “huge cloudy symbols of a high romance” to illustrate his belief that love comes from fate, and that he is sad to miss out on such an opportunity when it comes time for his own death.

John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is written through the power of eternity, beauty and truth regardless of existence, as Wordsworth showed likewise. Keats illustrated his poem through love in its sublime. For example, in the first stanza he says, “What wild ecstasy?” (Keats 930). If ecstasy is a huge feeling of

In the year of 1819, John Keats, the last of the Romantic poets, was diagnosed with tuberculosis, which he contracted from attempting to nurse his brother back to heath. Alongside the knowledge that his death was surely upon him, Keats published his most distinguished works in that same year. “Ode to a Grecian Urn” was one of five Odes Keats wrote. In this poem, John Keats uses his theory of negative capability to embody his attitude towards the Grecian Urn, thus further explaining the poet’s universal explanation of how art should be interpreted and why.

In the early nineteenth century, John Keats and other lyricists entered an era of passionate speculation on the condition of man, art and nature. It is thus no surprise that Keats’ 1818 poem, “When I Have Fears,” is packed with fervent, emotional content. Like many of his poems, “When I Have Fears” has been understood to be about Keats’ justifiable doubts about mortality, having been born into a family beleaguered by terminal illness. This particular Shakespearean sonnet, however, stands out from the rest because it sketches a more nuanced depiction of death. Though death is indeed the root of his anxieties, this poem reveals that the speaker is ironically also able to achieve a kind of perspective on the world through the very nature of his own mortality. An acceptance and understanding of death’s perceived limitations seem to grant Keats an unconscious freedom that allows him to transcend, or overcome, his future uncertainties. Keats demonstrates this freedom in “When I Have Fears” by incorporating elegant paradoxes, imagery and naturalistic metaphors that accentuate the comfort and control that accepting fate can paradoxically provide during times of pain and death.

I have been seeing three new patients recently, all Romantic poets who appear to be suffering from various levels of melancholy. Although each one of these poets is highly successful and influential in the Romantic Movement, each has experienced bouts of dejection, loneliness, and disillusionment with reality. However, this melancholy seems different from cases I have encountered in the past. Strangely, none of these clients show symptoms of the excessive black bile that typically associated with melancholy such as apathy, lack of motivation, and hopelessness (Brady, Haapala). In fact, while all of these clients experience melancholic thoughts, these emotions appear to be more complex than depression as they allow the pleasures of deep reflection and often lead to feelings of sublime joy and inspiration. Instead of suffering from a clinical form of melancholy or depression, these clients appear to be experiencing a complex emotion of joypain which they believe has “the capacity to reveal the infinite powers of the self or the imagination” (Murray, 722). Yet, while all of these poets seem to believe in the importance of melancholy as inspiration for their work, each of these poets also seems to express this emotion in different ways. While one of these poets, Mr. William Wordsworth, often turns his negative ruminations into positive reflections on nature and memory, Mr. Coleridge instead experiences deeper melancholic moments that he cannot dispel quite so easily. Mr. John

In the context of John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” “The Wild Swans at Coole” by William Butler Yeats raises compelling dialogue with Keats’ piece, which suggests that Yeats, to some degree, draws inspiration from John Keats, in that his pose concerning the nightingale becomes a basis and “touchstone” for “The Wild Swans at Coole.” Aside from commonalities concerning avians, both poems share elements of Romanticism, melancholy, feelings of weariness, and other key ideas, images, and plots as “Ode to a Nightingale” and thus, “The Wild Swans at Coole” strengthens Keats’ initial ideas in a harmonic and resonant fashion using its own unique methods. As a response to Keatsian Romanticism, Yeats revises the ideas surrounding transcendence of

Keats, on the other hand, uses the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” to express his perspective on art by examining the characters on the urn from either an ideal or realistic perspective. In the beginning, Keats asks questions regarding the “mad pursuit” (9, p.1847) of the people on the Grecian urn. As the Grecian urn exists outside of time, Keats creates a paradox for the human figures on the urn because they do not confront aging but neither experience time; Keats then further discusses the paradox in the preceding stanzas of the poem. In the second and third stanza, Keats examines the picture of the piper playing to his lover “beneath the trees” (15, p.1847) and expresses that their love is “far above” (28, p.1848) all human passion. Even though

The burdens and assiduous transgressions of humanity often prove to be an unbearable reality for many. However, under no different circumstances and in the midst of death, poet, John Keats, composes some of his most powerful literature. In his “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, the persistent mention of immortality demonstrates his struggle with tuberculosis. Keats declares within both poems his desire to escape mortal oppression and illustrates his longing for immortal sanctuary; however, the two explore contrasting means to such an end. “Ode to a Nightingale” expresses longing to escape into the melodious world of a nightingale by utilizing numerous allusions to greek mythology, several metaphorical techniques, and sensory-laden

In the second stanza, the speaker beholds a piper joyfully playing under the tress for his lover to find him with song. “Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared. The use of imagery of the senses is effective here. For I consider poetry to be more musical in nature than literary text. The speaker claims to be hearing melodies emanating from the urn, which for me the sound transmission from the urn correlates to the finite aspects of fleeting love. While the nature of art of the urn seems to me to represent the exquisiteness and infinity of the universe. Indeed, the sounds of silence from art is akin to vastness of space and time. “She cannot fade, though, thou hast not thy bliss,” (line19). Keats is asking the readers to not grieve for him. Because, her beauty will not diminish over time it is everlasting.

The poem’s focus is put especially on the sky, and is heightened through significant religious imagery. Keats uses “open face of heaven,” and “blue firmament” as metaphors to establish the sky as being heaven itself, ultimately establishing its holy, above-human (both literally and spiritually) nature. Furthermore, this heavenly sky is personified with, “open face,” and it is depicted as smiling. This ultimately makes the sky appear to be a kind entity (especially when much literature takes a perspective on heaven as a ruthless entity) and this personification of the sky and heaven make the closeness between the speaker and nature more evident, as they are brought on a closer level. This helps evoke the feeling of full-immersion into nature as a means of escape.

In the description of historiographies and social theories in the longer poems of John Keats, Kathleen Béres Rogers argues in “John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment” that the "sociological drive of [Keats's] poetry is an inheritance from the Enlightenment” (Rogers, 2012, p. 163). Here Fermanis tried to trace Keats's working both with and against of Enlightenment legacy and in particular of its progressive, linear model of history. Keats's narrative provoked from a savage, feudal society to an emphasis on sensation and feeling. Endymion was indebted much to the Enlightenment and he used his sensitivity in order to sympathize with human suffering. He found his true love, Diana, only after he used this sympathy in order to love a real

In From Sleep and Poetry [ 0 for ten years], Keats begins the poem with a hubris tone in which he states how he will “choose each pleasure that my fancy sees”. One would get the impression that Keats will take whatever he wants when he wants. In between the lines that talk of catching women, he produces a scene of imaginative nature where he states that he is “smiling upon the flowers”. The overall poem produces the themes of self-importance as well as an important spiritual description of the flowers and trees. Keats makes it prominent that nature itself needs to be written in high regard as well as human needs.

Both the poets believe that it is only art which can give solace and contentment in life. The impermanence of all the earthly and living things has been contrasted with the permanence which art bestows on them. According to Keats, the work of art is more vivid than the actual life as it has its own life; Keats touches on this in the third stanza of the poem. Like Yeats, Keats in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” also talks about imagination and music:

Five months before his first book, “Poems”, was published, Keats was introduced to one of Byron and Shelley’s friends, Hunt, who helped him advance in his writing. His first book was not received to well by the public, neither was the rest of his work. In his lifetime, Keats’ work copped more hate than any other poet of his time. But by the end of the 19th century he was one of the most beloved poets studied. Actually Meg, on his gravestone Keats wanted to write “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” He knew he wasn’t appreciated in his time, and he would be washed away by those who read his name, yet he prophesised he would be appreciated in the years that followed.