Ode to Melancholy

• Themes

  • Melancholy
  • Beauty
  • Impermanence
  • Intoxication v nature
• Structure


  • written in a very regular form that matches its logical, argumentative thematic structure. Each stanza is ten lines long and metered in a relatively precise iambic pentameter.
  • The first two stanzas, offering advice to the sufferer, follow the same rhyme scheme, ABABCDECDE; the third, which explains the advice, varies the ending slightly, following a scheme of ABABCDEDCE, so that the rhymes of the eighth and ninth lines are reversed in order from the previous two stanzas.
• "A partner in your sorrow's mysteries; For shade to shade will come too drowsily And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul"


  • reveals what will make the anguished soul drowsy. The sufferer should do everything he can to remain alert to the depths of his grief.
  • The word ‘mysteries’ is key here. The source of melancholy, as a sickness, is complex, and the medical science was only just developing at the time.
  • "shade to shade" - ghosts will come and make you drowsy - Keats is saying that you should hold on to your vulnerability and not give into drugs/alcohol
• "That fosters the droop-headed flowers all And hides the green hill in an April shroud;"


  • ‘Droop-headed flowers’ imitate the posture of humans when sad.
  • ‘April shroud’ is apt, in that April is a rainy month, and a ‘shroud’ is not only the masking effect of the rain, but an echo of the references to death
  • contradiction - April is the month associated with Spring + growth.
  • Two sections: ABAB rhyme to CDE rhymes - change of mood.
• "Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave Or on the wealth of globèd peonies;"


  • caesura after ‘shroud’, - stanza moves on.
  • the speaker urges the listener to ‘glut’ himself on as many sensual experiences as he can. All the senses are invoked, starting with a sweet-smelling rose, then a multi-coloured rainbow, shape and colour in the ‘globed peonies’, texture in the ‘salt-sand-wave’ and ‘soft hand’.
  • Three lines begin with ‘Or’, forming a refrain or anaphora, creating an effect of abundance of sensual experiences.
• "Beauty that must die; And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:"

  • The speaker explains these injunctions, saying that pleasure and pain are inextricably linked - melancholy’s companions are all defined by transience
  • Joy and melancholy are personified
  • 'aching pleasure high' turns into poison
  • “negative capability” whereby he believed that there is always conflict between feelings and ideas and that the ambiguity of such conflict should be accepted.
• "His soul shall taste the sadness of her might And be among her cloudy trophies hung"


  • Melancholy's trophies are 'cloudy' - temporary - links back to shroud
  • Keats could be suggesting the feeling of melancholy does not last forever, her hold comes and goes as it does with all emotions