"Ode on Melancholy" - John Keats

"Ode on Melancholy"

1.NO, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolfs-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,	5
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.	10
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;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,	15
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.	20
3.She dwells with Beauty—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:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight	25
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.	30

 

John Keats (1795-1821) - the London-born son of a prosperous livery-stable manager -- was a pugnacious, ardent, generous, and high-spirited youth who cared little for books, at least in his early schooldays. A classmate later reminisced that he was possessed of an absolute "penchant" for fighting, that thrashing friends, brothers -- anyone -- was "meat & drink" to him. But by age 14, Keats's passion was literature, which "he devoured rather than read." Orphaned in 1810 when his mother died, probably of tuberculosis, he was apprenticed to an apothecary. He later trained -- halfheartedly -- in surgery, often penning doggerel instead of taking proper notes during anatomy lectures. In December 1816, Keats finally abandoned medicine for poetry, flabbergasting his guardian, who called him a "Silly Boy."

Keats's second book, the woefully ambitious Endymion (1818), was savaged by the Tory press. Blackwood's sneered: "It is a better and wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John." Undeterred, Keats entered a period of rapid intellectual and poetic development, beautifully charted in his remarkable and moving letters. With astonishing speed, supreme confidence, and the greatest artistic mastery, Keats wrote virtually all his major poetry between January and September of 1819. This amazing creative flowering could not last.

On February 3, 1820, Keats coughed blood for the first time ("That drop of blood is my death warrant. I must die."). Here began the final phase of an excruciating danse macabre with the disease that had claimed not only his mother, but -- little more than a year before - his beloved younger brother, Tom. He traveled to Italy in a desperate effort to regain his health, but died there on February 23, 1821, directing that the epitaph for his Roman grave be inscribed "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

Oscar Wilde on John Keats:

... who but the supreme and perfect artist could have got from a mere colour a motive so full of marvel: and now I am half enamoured of the paper that touched his hand, and the ink that did his bidding, grown fond of the sweet comeliness of his charactery, for since my childhood I have loved none better than your marvellous kinsman, that godlike boy, the real Adonis of our age.... In my heaven he walks eternally with Shakespeare and the Greeks....

Oscar Wilde, letter to Emma Speed (née Keats), the poet's niece, in March 1882, thanking her for the gift of the original manuscript of Keats's "Sonnet on Blue," after he lectured in her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky

Joseph Severn. Portrait of John Keats. Engraving, after the 1819 miniature by the artist. Inscribed, at the bottom of the print, "3rd proof Jan 1883." NYPL/Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle.

The artist Joseph Severn sailed to Italy with Keats in September 1820 and attended him in his final illness. He wrote that Keats struck one immediately by "a peculiarly dauntless expression, such as may be seen in the face of some seamen" and that he was graced with "hazel eyes of a wild gipsy-maid in colour, set in the face of a young god." Almost all of Severn's numerous portraits of Keats (except the well-known 1819 miniature, on which this 1883 engraving is based, and the haunting sketch of Keats on his deathbed) are posthumous and are, undoubtedly, rather idealized representations of the poet.

A work of beautifully modulated despair and supremely controlled utterance, Keats's "Ode on Melancholy" explores the poet's painful sense that joy is inseparable from sorrow, that beauty is always transitory. This manuscript -- a draft of the poem's third and final stanza -- was originally attached to another sheet on which Keats had drafted the poem's first two stanzas. That sheet -- brought to America by the poet's brother George in 1820, and later given by him to John Howard Payne, the actor, playwright, and lyricist of "Home Sweet Home" -- eventually found its way to the Princeton University Library. The present manuscript was once owned by Charles Brown, a businessman with a toe-hold in London's literary circles, who was one of the poet's closest friends. His pencil sketch of Keats, which is now in the National Portrait Gallery in London, is perhaps the best portrait we have of the poet.

Fuente: http://web.nypl.org/admin/pbl/nyplpub/keats.html
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