40 Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.
5
O Attic5 shape! Fair attitude!6 with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought,7 With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought 45 As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'8?that is all 50 Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
1819 1820
ode on Melancholy This is Keats's best-known statement of his recurrent
theme of the mingled contrarieties of life. The remarkable last stanza, in which Mel
ancholy becomes a veiled goddess worshiped in secret religious rites, implies that it
is 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.
Melancholy?a synonym for depression, involving a paralyzing self-consciousness
engendered by an excess of thought?is a highly literary and even bookish ailment,
as Keats knew. Shakespeare's Hamlet and Milton's speaker in 'II Penseroso' are the
5. Greek. Attica was the region of Greece in which Keats's friends. This discrepancy has multiplied Athens was located. the diversity of critical interpretations of the last 6. Probably used in its early, technical sense: the two lines. Critics disagree whether the whole of pose struck by a figure in statuary or painting. these lines is said by the urn, or 'Beauty is truth, 7. Ornamented ail over ('overwrought') with an truth beauty' by the urn and the rest by the lyric interwoven pattern ('brede'). The adjective 'over-speaker; whether the 'ye' in the last line is wrought' might also modify 'maidens' and even addressed to the lyric speaker, to the readers, to 'men' and so hint at the emotional anguish of the the urn, or to the figures on the urn; whether 'all figures portrayed on the urn. ye know' is that beauty is truth, or this plus the 8. The quotation marks around this phrase are statement in lines 46^*8; and whether 'beauty is found in the volume of poems Keats published in truth' is a profound metaphysical proposition, an 1820, but there are no quotation marks in the ver-overstatement representing the limited point of sion printed in Annals of the Fine Arts that same view of the urn, or simply nonsensical. year or in the transcripts of the poem made by
.
ODE ON MELANCHOLY / 90 7
disorder's most famous sufferers. Keats was also an admirer of Robert Burton's encyclopedic Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). The poem once had the following initial stanza, which Keats canceled in manuscript:
Though you should build a bark of dead men's bones,
And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast,
Stitch creeds together for a sail, with groans
To fill it out, bloodstained and aghast;
Although your rudder be a Dragon's tail,
Long sever'd, yet still hard with agony,
Your cordage large uprootings from the skull
Of bald Medusa: certes you would fail
To find the Melancholy, whether she
Dreameth in any isle of Lethe dull.
Ode on Melancholy
No, no, go not to Lethe,1 neither twist
Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;2
5 Make not your rosary of yew-berries,3
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche,4 nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;'
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
10 And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.6
2
But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
