Using personification, the poem creates characters out of Joy, Pleasure, Delight, and Beauty, and allows them to interact with two other characters which take the shape of a male and his female mistress mentioned (line 17). Keats uses personification in this poem. "Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud." And, "Veiled melancholy has her sovran shrine." These two examples use personification to exaggerate the feelings being expressed and to help explain Keats’ thoughts. To help explain joys and melancholy's interactions Keats personifies joy to be a male and melancholy to be female. This helps the reader understand how joy and melancholy are contributing factors to each other. Weeping cloud is also a hyperbole showing how painful melancholy really is.
The second stanza is filled with juxtapositions, oxymoron’s and paradox’s so as to give both sides of the feeling of melancholy. Heaven is a positive word, associated with where melancholy comes from in the poem. This juxtaposition of positive and negative images also helps to enforce the point that melancholy and joy are connected. Further evidence of this is the term “weeping cloud” that implies rain, which is usually associated with dreariness, but in truth it also nourishes – it “fosters the droop-headed flowers”. The mention of the “droop-headed” flowers is sad, but the nurturing of them is happy. The mention of the word “rainbow” in line six of the second stanza adds even more reinforcement to this idea. The word “rain” has a high frequency sound – a happier sound, whereas the word “bow” has a lower frequency sound – a gloomier sound. On top of this, a rainbow requires both sun and rain to occur. The phrase “April shroud” also contains contrasts. “April” implies spring, life and happiness, whereas “shroud” implies death. Positive images that flood the senses are featured on lines five to seven. These counterbalance the negative images featured in the first stanza. There is a pun on the word “morning” in the seventh line – it could also be taken as “mourning” which is a contrasting word to “morning”.
Keats like in so many of his other poems employs many allusions to Greek mythology so the reader can easily relate to the emptions of the speaker. There is an allusion to Lethe, the River of Forgetfulness in the underworld. Keats uses this not in the conventional way as he is saying NOT to go to this river. He he reiterating the fact that he doesn’t want the speaker toforget the feeling of Melancholy otherwise he can never experience the full feeling of joy and happiness. Other allusions to Greek mythology are Proserpine or Persephone, goddess of the underworld and Psyche who is commonly associated with the soul. The reference to Persephone reflects how Keats feels about melancholy. Like Persephone’s obligation to spend half the year in the underworld and the other on the face of the earth, melancholy can be seen as partly bad but partly good as well, since without knowing how melancholy feels, one would not know how joy feels. Poisonous plants like wolf’s-bane, nightshade and yew-berries are mentioned – linked to melancholy. At the end of the first stanza, there are low frequency sounds on the words “anguish of the soul”. This draws out the line and puts emphasis on its meaning.
Keats’ approach to tackle melancholy is not predictable. Keats urges his reader to not think about suicide when melancholy is about. He warns them not to take poisons such as Wolf’s-bane, nightshade, and yew berries. He believes that such things will ameliorate melancholy, and melancholy is not an emotion that should be ameliorated. Instead, when one is melancholic one should “glut thy sorrow” on the beauty of a rose or the rainbow of salt and sea. It is interesting that Keats uses these objects to represent beauty, for they are short-lived. Roses are beautiful for only a short period of time, and then they wilt or fade away. When one thinks about the rainbow of salt and sea, they envision a beach were the tide brings in what appears to be oil stained water, wherein, a rainbow appears, but then is swept away again by the receding tide. The rainbow, like the rose, holds only temporary beauty. By using these images, Keats is implying that what makes these things all the more beautiful is that man cannot grasp their beauty for long. An ode is a poem of celebration or praise. That is why this poem is ironic as Keats is praising melancholy instead of viewing it as a burden. In this poem, Keats uses contrast as the key to pleasure. Melancholy is not the moment for death, but an opportunity for a new experience. It is the fine balance between pain and pleasure that is ideal. The final stanza emphasizes this idea: Beauty is always ephemeral; joy is always about to leave, but these are man’s most intense moments. With the realization that beauty is indeed fleeting comes intense melancholy, which Keats defines as the “wakeful anguish of the soul.”
