Ode On Melancholy - Themes and Critical Responses

Themes and Critical Responses

Personification is implemented with words such as 'Joy', 'Beauty', 'Delight', and 'Pleasure' allowing the poet to create characters out of ideals and emotions as he describes his thoughts and reactions to feelings of depression. The difference between the personification of these words and those in the other odes Keats wrote in 1819 comes from the fact that while the poet describes them as human, he declines to interact with them. Keats himself fails to appear in the poem, which creates what Andrew Bennett describes as a separation between the author, the poet, and the reader. In Reading Voices, Garrett Stewart reaffirms Bennett’s assertion that Keats’s voice never appears in the poem itself when he says, “For all the florid staginess of his conceits, there is, in short, no mention of writing, of the melancholic as a writer."

Negative capability appears subtly in "Ode on Melancholy" according to Harold Bloom, who describes the negatives in the poem as being the result of a carefully crafted ironies that first become truly evident as the poet describes the onset of melancholy through an allegorical image of April rains supplying life to flowers. The use of the “droop-headed flowers” (line 13) to describe the onset of an ill-temper, according to Bloom, represents a "passionate" attempt by the poet to describe the proper reaction to melancholy. In the original first stanza, the “Gothicizing” of the ideal of melancholy strikes Bloom as more ironical and humorous, but with the removal of that text, the image of the “droop-headed flowers” loses the irony it would otherwise contain, and in doing so subverts the negative capability seen in "Ode to a Nightingale", yet Bloom states that the true negativity becomes clear in the final stanza's discussion of Beauty. The final stanza begins:

She dwells with Beauty-- Beauty that must die (line 21)

which he suggests supplies the ultimate case of a negative relationship because it suggests that the only true beauty is one that will die. But Thomas McFarland, while acknowledging the importance of the original first stanza to Keats's endeavor, openly praises the removal of the lines as an act of what he calls "compression". McFarland believes that the poem's strength lies in its ability to avoid the "Seemingly endless wordage of "Endymion" and lets the final stanza push the main themes on its own. By removing unnecessary information such as the reason the poet suggests the trip to Lethe, Keats allows the reader to avoid the "fancy" aspects that would have appeared in the first line and were not sustained throughout the rest of the text.